I'm not a teacher. Thank goodness - I know my limitations. However, I watched, nudged, worried for and applauded my two children as they found their way through from primary school to degree and I've a surprising number of friends, both in and recently retired from, the teaching profession to have arrived at some conclusions about the furore around the proposed increase in university tuition fees.
Yesterday there were more student demonstrations against an increase in university fees in London and Manchester and apparently without any major incidents of violence or destruction this time. Possibly a result of police identification of the worst trouble-makers, or the use of a new phone app that gives updates on kettling locations, the weather, inertia from some of the original protestors now the bill has passed its first hurdle in the House of Commons 'so what's the point' ..... or a combination of some of the above.
Don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with protesting. I've been on a few marches, including the one protesting against the invasion of Iraq, but I do feel it's unfortunate that the participants seem unable to see the irony of throwing missiles at and damaging the property of the very people that they would expect to pay for their degrees if they don't themselves.
This isn't intended either as a rant against whether the fees increase is fair or not, nor do I think that kids aren't as clever as they used to be. I do think they've been short-changed by the people in charge, who seem to have been far more interested in manipulating facts about standards, rather than giving them the chance to learn things. The thing is, there's just a chance that the whole thing - the increase in tuition fees and the resulting protests - has been completely unnecessary.
Thankfully, my kids are past that stage, so don't need to take on such large debts, but it's frustrating to think that just maybe, this doesn't need to be happening to anybody.
We fell on our feet with education almost from the start, despite our domestic implosion ... and I mean fell. It was luck, largely down to where we were living, in a village in Somerset.
After a brief foray into a private primary school, I took my son out when it became obvious that one of the staff had close to psychotic tendencies (well, certainly the woman was a bully - responsible in less than a year for crushing the bubbling enthusiasm he'd started out with) and lucky us, there was a brilliant village primary about 300 yards from our front gate. The school had two perfect Heads in succession - the sort of vocational teachers who 'got' the kids and had their respect, while having fun too - who between them managed to restore a large proportion of the son's confidence, stayed long enough for my two to get through and were skillful enough to manipulate the increasingly bizarre curriculum so son and daughter came tumbling out the other end having enjoyed themselves, made lots of friends close by and learned something. Triple bonus. As I say, lucky us.
We were also lucky that the next town has three very good senior schools and though neither child was exceptional, they're bright and both were lucky enough to be accepted to private school .... despite our dire financial state with the soon to be HsW nowhere to be seen, no house of our own and no parent with a sensible income. Call me unrealistic to spend what we had on school, when there were alternatives - or snobbish, or narrow-minded, or any of the other derogatory terms you like - but it was what I knew best and as a newly single parent my instinct was that, in the light of our changed circumstances, they needed to be safe and secure and with the best facilities I could get for them. I never regretted it for a second and I'm still really chuffed that we achieved it between us.
How did we do it? God bless whoever thought up Assisted Places. My daughter squeaked in, two years after her brother, in the last year before the Labour government, with apalling lack of insight into who would be affected by abolishing it, did just that, as one of their first actions. [Thinks .... perhaps that was why my enthusiasm for what promised to be a fresh start for the country, crashed and burned - the realisation that all the old blinkered class war stuff was still alive and well, despite TB's efforts to bury it]. Yes, I know, they had the philosophical cleft stick of an instinctive loathing of private education, whilst knowing that if it was done away with, the state system would fall over under the strain of those extra kids, but....
We still had to pay, but a fraction of the cost and the three of us were living with my mother by this time, the HtW having climbed into a bottle. The aunts, single and with no children of their own and another good friend helped and we managed.... though it was a weird time for secondary education: League tables, course work that could be re-done with teacher input, emphasis on analysis with fewer and fewer facts to analyse and rampant grade inflation to disguise what was going on.
I'm not sure which came first, though it seems likely that both came at once. At the same time our blessed leader, T Blair, was preaching that 50% of the kids in the country had the right and should go to university, the Labour party introduced the first chunk of means tested fees. No thought was given to what would happen to all those underqualified graduates in the work place.
There was a lot of justification - how kids from poorer backgrounds were being deprived of their God-given right to further education and the old bollocks about how posh kids, yet again, were getting all the breaks and sauntering into the top universities in disproportionate numbers ... which seemed odd even then, if you think of the people who'd succeeded through their own endeavours and good brains .... Melvyn Bragg for one, but a quick search of the Internet will unearth hundreds of others.
Not only odd, but aggravating in the extreme when the change was passed into law with the help of Scottish MPs, who'd previously refused to instigate a similar system in their own patch, by the same people who'd benefitted not only by having free tuition themselves but, in many cases, being given grants as well.
So, posh-ish but impoverished (and please note, there's a huge difference between posh and rich, though obviously some people manage to pull off the double), I saw it from both sides. I had the university discussion with my kids. We had the conversations about finances. I explained that we just didn't have the money, but if they wanted it enough, got jobs to help with living expenses and faced that they'd come out with debts, then OK.
What interested me at the time was that the Government seemed to have no idea what they were about, but with hindsight, it was one of the first acts of what came to be recognised as spin (or fraud, in old money). It was all about being seen as the government to promote 'Education, Education, Education' (TB) but they had a problem. Increasing numbers of kids were coming out of the school system with higher exam marks, but less and less actual learning. The problem was that at that time universities were more autonomous and slower to react to change and they were knocking back applicants with no real ability to qualify for the next stage. So thousands of kids with 'good' A level results were applying enthusiastically for universities that had no intention of offering them a place. Hence TB's decree that more kids should be able to go to university.
The solution? Well, you have to admit that it was quite clever: encourage the universities (were they were bribed with massive funding?) to add new courses such as media studies, gymnastics and nursing, to give the less able student a chance to qualify for entry. ... And bingo, numbers rose. Unfortunately the original plan proved to be more successful than anyone's wildest dreams and finances began to creak under the strain long ago.
At the end of the nineties did more than half my kids' school mates want to go? No chance! .... and whilst having to pay was a further drawback (so much for making it more inclusive), many of them had had quite different plans anyway. Some carried on as they'd originally intended - setting up their own businesses, going onto the farm, going into local industry, or the local authority, whatever, but many of the others found themselves being swept along in the slipstream of the genuinely bright and the thing took on a momentum of it's own. University was the thing to do and became more so as the ubiquitous youth drinking culture combined with readily available social media to boast about it on.
So here we are with overstretched universities needing more and more money to try to keep on top of things ..... and something has to give. In the short term, the people who want to go, have to pay.
At least perhaps some sort of natural justice might take place now, in that, hopefully, kids who'd previously thought they needed a degree to work in the local sports centre will do the maths (if they've managed somehow to acquire the skills) and work out that starting on a minimum wage, with very little prospect of earning decent money in the foreseeable future, hardly seems worth the 3 years of partying they'd been looking forward to while they accrued massive, unserviceable debts and decide, after all, not to go.
The question is, if it happens at all, how long will it take for reality to hit, for the universities to start noticing the drop in numbers on peripheral courses, reinstate 'hard' degrees in the sciences and language studies and get themselves back into a viable financial state, turning out well-rounded, well-educated assets to the community and - dare I say it - future government?
The added bonus of this could be that funding might then be available for setting up credible apprenticeship schemes for those vital, unacademic but practical people who'd rather be doing, than filling their heads with facts that they'll never need again. Most of us recognise that a lack of apptitude in one area is nearly always compensated for by a superior skill in creative, athletic or hands-on ability, but it's odd how the balance between the complimentary skills still remains unacknowledged by the powers that be.
Will the elephant currently stalking the classroom ever be acknowledged, or is the question simply too naive to bother answering?
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