The Guardian view on educational priorities: arts not grammars | Editorial

The UK government’s education policies are damaging and benefiting the few. It’s time for a rethink

Would you want the government to build a hospital for the healthy? It would produce great results: low mortality rates, successful cancer outcomes, no doubt very high patient satisfaction ratings. It would also be government money for people who don’t need it. The same thinking applies to grammar schools which herd bright children into well-stocked classrooms when they would have achieved good results almost anywhere they went. Yet the government persists in this form of a nostalgic sop, offering £50m to bolster a discredited system. There are better things to spend money on when class sizes are rising and teacher numbers shrinking.

Ministers could also make some cash available to make a flagship policy work. By 2025 nine-tenths of students are meant to be entered for an “English baccalaureate”. Pupils are to be steered towards subjects judged to be crucial to a child’s education. However, when overlaid on schools’ budgets shrinking in real terms, the policy narrows an education rather than broadening it. Incessant budget cuts to state schools mean they are being obliged to offer fewer options, consolidating teaching around the designated core subjects: English literature, English language, maths, two or three sciences, history or geography, and a foreign language. There’s no money for anything else.

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from Children | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2rBOI8T