The biggest scandal? Our school system

I WANT to spit whenever I hear anyone saying that such and such a scandal of incompetence must ‘never be allowed to happen again’. Because I know that within a year or two I will read of just such a scandal – not identical, but similar.

Sometimes it is needless deaths, sometimes foul people left to do terrible things for years, sometimes horrible injustice, colossal fraud, vast delays and cost overruns. The NHS (last week), the police, the Armed Forces, the Post Office, the banks, the railways, whoever it is, you keep wondering as you read of these events why we still claim to be an advanced country. Almost always you find that honourable, brave people tried to draw attention to the problem, perhaps for years, and the system treated them with obdurate contempt.

So why is this? I have just finished writing a book on the unhinged destruction of the grammar schools (and their Scottish equivalents) by politicians of both parties in the 1960s and 1970s. And I am quite sure that the fundamental problem is in our education system. It simply is less and less good at teaching people to be competent and responsible.

This week’s English Education White Paper reveals that in 2019 ‘65 per cent of Key Stage 2 pupils reached the expected standard in all of reading, writing and maths’. This means that an appalling 35 per cent did not even attain this not-very-high level. The blowback of shutting the grammar schools was that primary schools became less rigorous, too. It is now several generations since this happened, so the teachers have often been badly taught. As for the universities, scandalous grade inflation and commercial greed are tearing them to bits. But any attempt at reform is always denounced as a cruel attack on pupils and students, and so nothing ever happens. So be ready for the next scandal.