Dance of the Apprentices

All pupils taking Higher English will have to learn at least one Scottish text under a new requirement by the Holyrood Government to ensure future generations of Scottish young people grow up with an understanding of their culture and literary heritage.

This blogger for Socialist Courier recommends that school students read "Dance of the Apprentices" - a socialist classic some say.

The novel gives a vivid account of the struggles of a Glasgow family from the first World War and into the Depression are at the end of the twenties. It is a story of Glasgow apprentices, their lives dignified with a desire for art and learning and with the ideal of reforming the world. The book follows the fortunes of one particular family - the Macdonnels. The mother dreams of success, struggling to raise her family and her ambitious husband out of slum life. A social critique of Glasgow.

Written by Edward Gaitens (1897 – 1966) who was born in the Gorbals of Glasgow. Leaving school at fourteen, he undertook a variety of casual jobs to support himself over the years. When the First World War broke out he became a conscientious objector and was imprisoned for two years in Wormwood Scrubs.

Feel free to share your own Scottish reading-list suggestions in comments.

poor education

15 year-old children at the bottom of the class are so far behind they are performing “as if they were 10 years old”, a report handed to MSPs has claimed. The paper, written by local government experts, concluded that Scotland has the highest gap between top and bottom in schools of anywhere in western Europe.

It confirms previous studies by international bodies which have also claimed that low achievers from poor families are “slipping through the net” in the classroom.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/education/brightest_pupils_5_years_ahead_of_poorest_1_2064261

Fact for the Day

Three-quarters of prisoners in Scotland cannot functionally read, write or count, according to a study.

Class in the class room

In 1999, just over 83% of pupils at independent schools went to university, while only 31% of children in the state sector made the same choice. Between 1999 and 2010, the number of state school pupils who attended university increased from 31% to 35.7%, an average rise of around 1% for every three years of devolution. But a new comparison of school-leaver destinations has revealed the goal of overhauling university access in the poorest areas has failed in many cases.

Only 5% of pupils from Govan High School went on to higher education in 1999. In 2010, the figure was 5.1%. At Drumchapel High 9% of school leavers attended university last year, up just 3% on 1999. A pupil leaving Drumchapel High is three times more likely to be unemployed than at university. By contrast, the university entrance rate for Jordanhill – a seven-minute car ride from Govan High – is 82.4%. Only 1% of pupils at Drumchapel High achieved five or more Highers in S5 in 2009, compared with 39% at Jordanhill. At the High School of Glasgow a private school is only a few minutes’ drive from Govan High 98% of its pupils end up in higher education.

In Edinburgh the Wester Hailes Education Centre, which serves one of the most deprived areas in the city, 8.4% of pupils left for university in 2010. This was up from a maximum of 5% 11 years preciously. At Firhill High in the adjacent catchment area, the figure is 49.5%. Only 8% of pupils entered higher education last year after attending Craigroyston Community High. But at the nearby Royal High, it was 46.8%. Edinburgh’s fee-paying Fettes College is just two miles from the state school at Craigroyston the figure for Fettes is 97%.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/what-determines-whether-you-kid-goes-to-university-their-postcode-1.1130731

PEOPLE in Glasgow have the poorest levels of education anywhere in the UK, according to new figures which show that four of the UK’s worst performing areas are in the city and its surrounding region.

Glasgow North East – which takes in Sighthill, Possilpark, Milton and Springburn – came bottom of the league table of 632 constituencies, with 35.5% of its inhabitants possessing no qualifications of any kind. The area is rated among the most deprived 10% in the country in terms of access to decent housing, employment and income levels by the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. Glasgow East, comprising Shettleston and Baillieston, was third in the table – ranked from worst to best – with 29% of people having no educational qualifications. The other two Scottish areas in the bottom 10 were Glasgow South West, and Motherwell and Wishaw

University and College Union general secretary Sally Hunt said: “There is a danger children growing up in places where it is not unheard of to have no qualifications will have their ambition blunted and never realise their full potential.”

schooling

Save the Children's head of Scotland, said: "Poverty kills childhood and severely affects life chances. Too many children in Scotland are not reaching their potential at school simply because they are poor. Poverty continues to be a key determining factor in how well a child will do at school and this is absolutely scandalous.Many of Scotland's poorest children live in sub-standard housing, have fewer books and educational games at home, lower aspirations and less confidence in their own ability to achieve their dreams.At every stage of school, children from poorer backgrounds do far worse than their better-off classmates..."

Children from wealthier homes in Scotland perform around 60% better in exams on average than those from poorer backgrounds who get free school meals.

Lazy greedy workers ??

Teachers are working an extra 10 weeks a year without pay, according to new research by a major teaching union.A workload survey carried out by the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association has revealed that nearly 54% of teachers work 400 extra hours for their employers each year. The union uncovered that one in 10 teachers works more than 55 hours a week.Two out of every five secondary teachers said they were stressed during the working week.

Collected during December, February and March, the workload survey revealed that more than a quarter of teachers worked between 45 and 50 hours a week, 16% worked between 50 and 55 hours, and 10% regularly worked in excess of 55 hours.

The union also overwhelmingly voted to oppose the establishment of trust schools, which would see schools run by communities at arms-length from local authorities.The SSTA said trust schools are “about saving money, not about improving education”.

we don't need no edookashun

The report confirmed what official statistics already indicate: that children from deprived backgrounds tend to do worse at school .

By analysing a long-term study of 14,000 young people in England, it found that youngsters in certain neighbourhoods were less likely to stay on in full time education after the age of 16.
The areas with the lowest educational aspirations, termed "low horizons" by the researchers, were characterised as deprived, close-knit cohesive communities with high levels of social housing and a history of economic decline.
The areas pinpointed by researchers were mainly those formerly dominated by heavy industry, often in the north of England. However there were also clusters of neighbourhoods in isolated rural areas of East Anglia and the west country.

An analysis of the 2008 GCSE results showed that only one in six white boys who are entitled to free school meals obtained the government's benchmark of five good GCSEs.

Marketing kids and education

David Buckingham, a professor at the Institute of Education, University of London and a leading authority on children and the media, said that the "privatisation" of schools could be affecting children's education...The involvement of commercial companies in the running of schools - that's something which potentially has implications for children's wellbeing," he said.
"From my point of view commercial resources in classrooms - Shell's introduction to the oil industry, Coke machines in schools - there's a continuum from there to commercial companies that provide school meals, to commercial companies being involved in education on all sorts of levels including management...Carphone Warehouse, Microsoft, Dixons and Granada Learning are all running academies. The schools minister, Lord Adonis, has said that every school should be in partnership with a business, and the government is promoting trust schools, which see businesses helping to run and advise schools.
Buckingham said the links went further than academies. Firms were increasingly sponsoring school sport, music classes and homework clubs, in what amounted to "privatising" state schools, he said...Buckingham said there was convincing evidence that the amount of marketing to children was intensifying and it was happening at a younger age.

Child soldiers

Plans for pupils in comprehensive schools to sign up for military drills and weapons training are being backed by Gordon Brown in an attempt to improve the relationship between the public and the armed forces. A major review of the military's role in British society says that encouraging more state secondary school pupils to join the cadet corps would improve discipline among teenagers while helping to improve the public perception of the army, navy and air force.

The government-commissioned review of civil and military relations, led by Quentin Davies wants secondary school pupils to receive basic military training as a means of developing greater affiliation with the armed forces. Davies, who was a Tory MP before defecting to Labour last year, said his proposals to expand the cadet structure throughout the comprehensive system were firmly backed by the Prime Minister, the Children's Secretary Ed Balls and defence ministers. Under the new government proposals, state schools who do not set up a cadet system will encourage pupils to attend a community cadet force instead. One of the core elements of the cadets' training is mastering shooting skills and military drill.

An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 children are serving as soldiers in current armed conflicts. These young combatants participate in all aspects of contemporary warfare. They wield AK-47s and M-16s on the front lines of combat, serve as human mine detectors, participate in suicide missions, carry supplies, and act as spies, messengers or lookouts. In 2000, the United Nations adopted an Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict. The protocol prohibits the forced recruitment of children under the age of 18 or their use in hostilities. To date, it has been ratified by more than 110 countries.
The ILO Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labor prohibits the forced or compulsory recruitment of children under the age of 18 for use in armed conflict. It has been ratified by over 150 countries.

Kiddie cannon fodder by the back door is now what New Labour have lowered themselves to .

Edukashun

Fewer pupils from deprived backgrounds are going to university in Scotland despite a raft of initiatives to widen participation, according to a new report.

In 2006-07, just 14% of school-leavers from secondaries in the lowest participation areas for higher education went to university compared to 19% in 2002-03. Over the same period, the proportion of pupils from the schools which enjoy the highest rates of progression to higher education has fallen only slightly, from 31% to 29%.

One of the aspirations of the government expansion of higher education in the mid-1980s, and then again in 1992, was to allow wider participation, but the main beneficiaries have been the "middle" classes.

John McClelland, chairman of the Scottish Funding Council said more should be done to address inequalities of opportunity.

A Scottish Government spokesman said: "It is unacceptable that an educational gap between advantaged and disadvantaged people opens up early in a child's life and continues throughout."

Yet another failure of well-meaning palliatives .

Socialist Courier also wonders if the UK will follow the growing trend in the American student loan market where banks including HSBC, have pulled out . In the US, many undergraduates take out a federal guaranteed loan and top up their financial needs with a private loan from lenders such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citi-group. In the academic year 2005-06, $17 billion in private student loans was used to finance higher education. Banks have become reluctant to offer private student loans because worsening credit conditions have meant that they cannot package up the loans and sell them on. The brightest students who win places at America’s rich Ivy League universities will be affected less because of generous bursaries - which do not have to be repaid – less able students applying to other institutions are expected to face difficulty in securing private loans to fund their study. At one end of the field is Harvard University, with $34 billion of endowments, and at the other are many community colleges and low-tier universities with limited resources.
"...those students with poor credit scores or without the rich uncle co-signers [loan guarantor] may have real problems funding themselves.” The Consumer Bankers’ Association, said

spoiled kids or a spoiled world

The media will no doubt concentrate the headlines on over-indulgent parents , the liberal minded permissive mum and dad who won't instill a sense of discipline in their kids but for those of us who seek deeper understanding other parts of the report come to our attention . The problem lay with parents who were struggling with little or no help to bring up their children in a heavily commercialised world.

The report urged the government to tackle the commercialisation of culture head-on.

Research author Maurice Galeton said: "It is particularly acute where people are living in violent neighbourhoods. ..Very young parents in violent and deprived neighbourhoods without the network of support that others get ... have a huge level of stress in their lives."

Schools indeed reflect society in general .

Teaching War

This Saturday members of Glasgow and Edinburgh branches will be in attendnce at stop the war demonstration in Glasgow leafletting and selling the Socialist Standard . It is now a cliche to say that the first casuality of war is truth but the statement remains accurate .

Ministry of Defence teaching materials that give an unbalanced view of the Iraq war are being used in schools, teachers' leaders have said. He warned that some of its assertions, presented as facts, would be disputed by most teachers. There were no estimates of the numbers of people killed, wounded or made homeless by the military action, he said. The material therefore risked breaching the part of the 1996 Education Act concerned with balanced teaching of political issues .

He told reporters: "When you are dealing with something as controversial as Iraq and the different events that led up to the invasion, teachers are under a duty to present material that is balanced. The MoD material does not live up to that high standard..."

Mr Sinnott also criticised Army recruitment methods which he said did not present a balanced view of what joining the armed forces entailed. He said "unethical practices" had been unearthed in recent research by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. He claimed that youngsters from deprived backgrounds were being targeted by Army recruiters. Mr Sinnott said the recruiters engaged in "very dubious practices", targeting youngsters from poorer backgrounds.
"Youngsters from the most disadvantaged backgrounds have more limited opportunities in life than youngsters from better off backgrounds. It's simply a fact. I am not saying that youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot get something from a career in the military.The Army has created a better life for some youngsters, but there are other youngsters who join up because they have little or no choice."

The teaching union will debate a motion at its upcoming conference which argues: "Military intervention in schools customarily presents a partisan view of war, largely by ignoring its fatal realities in favour of promises of travel, skill training and further or higher education course sponsorships otherwise often unavailable to young people, especially in area of high unemployment."

School exam cheats

Soicialist Courier has previously drawn attention to the inequities of the education system that provided for the more privileged sections rather than the poorer students . We now discover that built into the school examination system was a system of appeals procedure against low grades that favoured those who attended larger independents and comprehensives in wealthy suburbs, as opposed to those in deprived or sparsely populated areas.

Thousands of pupils from leading state and independent schools across Scotland were apparently given artificially inflated exam qualifications through a controversial computerised appeal system. Under the scheme, which was scrapped last year, Standard Grade and Higher exam results at certain schools were automatically upgraded without being separately checked by officials at the Scottish Qualifications Authority. New SQA figures reveal that in 2007, when these exam appeals were manually checked for the first time in 15 years, a large proportion were rejected demonstrating that a sizeable number of previous upgrades were questionable. Schools with small class sizes or those where only a handful of pupils were predicted A passes were not eligible. Therefore, bright pupils who just fail to meet their predicted grades from these schools would not be automatically uplifted. Five out of the 10 schools with the most derived grades were private, with George Watson's College in Edinburgh topping the list and Hutchesons' Grammar in Glasgow coming second. Two comprehensive schools from East Renfrewshire, Williamwood High School in Clarkston and St Ninian's in Giffnock, also had a high number of derived grades.

Christina McKelvie, SNP MSP and a member of the Scottish Parliament's education committee, said: "This change in the appeal rate shows the SNP was right to demand the end of the derived grades system which was seen to clearly favour pupils in better-off areas or in private education..."

John Milligan, a science teacher from Sutherland who was responsible for starting a campaign to end derived grades, said the figures vindicated his position. "It was was already hard enough for pupils from poorer areas to overcome hurdles in their path and this system supported that..."

education , once more

Even the Tories are saying it . Children from the most deprived areas of England are falling further behind in school compared to more affluent pupils .

Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove highlighted figures showing a widening of the social gap in achievement. The figures show a 43.1% gap between the proportions of wealthy and deprived pupils achieving five good GCSEs including English and maths in 2007. In 2006, this gap in GCSEs, in favour of the wealthiest, had been 28.4%. The figures are based on comparisons of the GCSE results of pupils from the ten percent most affluent areas and the ten percent most deprived. These figures reflect the attainment gap using another poverty indicator - free-school meals.

This social divide in exam results shows "the education system is letting down the poorest," says Mr Gove

The government figures show how the link between home background and achievement stubbornly persists throughout children's years in school. When the school population is divided into 10 bands of affluence and deprivation, the level of achievement rises in precise step with increased wealth in every subject and at every level.

No matter what the palliatives that will be promised to address the problems , the cause is capitalism and poverty and those will not be challenged in any meaningful manner and inequalities of opportunity shall continue .

A lesson that goes unlearned

Socialist Courier has often reported on the inequality of opportunity in education and our stance is that it is not accidental or a result of mistaken policy but integral to the class divide of society .

Yet again the media carries the same old story , privilege over poverty in education . Clever children from poor families face being overtaken by less bright children from affluent homes . The findings are part of a study for the Sutton Trust which says UK social mobility has not improved since 1970.

"It's a terrible thing that children from poor backgrounds, who are bright, end up actually not getting a very good start in life. They end up in schools that aren't very good and end up poor as adults and that's a terrible waste of talent and it's also basically wrong, it's just unfair." trust chairman Sir Peter Lampl said.

The trust's study by the London School of Economics and the University of Surrey concludes that the UK remains very low on the international rankings of social mobility.

Children from the poorest fifth of households who score some of the best results in tests aged three have fallen behind by the age of five. The report said that children in the poorest fifth of households but in the brightest group drop from the 88th percentile on cognitive tests at age three to the 65th percentile at age five . Meanwhile those from the richest households who are least able at age three move up from the 15th percentile to the 45th percentile by age five. The report authors conclude: "If this trend were to continue, the children from affluent backgrounds would be likely to overtake the poorer children in test scores by age seven".

They also said while 44% of young people from the richest 20% of households were awarded degrees in 2002, only 10% from the poorest 20% did so.

The report concludes: "Parental background continues to exert a significant influence on the academic progress of recent generations of children. Stark inequalities are emerging for today's children in early cognitive test scores - mirroring the gaps that existed and widened with age for children born 30 years previously."

It has also been reported on the BBC The children who could benefit most from out of school clubs are least likely to have access to them . Young people on free school meals were less likely to participate in after school activities than those from more affluent homes, research suggested. This was because rich parents were able to buy their children access to such clubs, while poorer parents could not.

"It's probably the kids who don't get much support at home who need activity programmes the most. Yet struggling schools in disadvantaged areas often lack the resources to offer them."

And in Scotland , the BBC reports , it is children from deprived areas of Scotland that are more likely to truant or be absent from school than other pupils . Latest attendance figures showed pupils registered for free school meals were away for an average of 10 days more than those who do not receive them .

The unfairness of schooling

England's grammar schools are "ghettos for the advantaged", doing little to alleviate poverty.

Research showed just 2% of pupils in grammars received free school meals, compared with 13% nationally. And in some grammars more than one third of pupils had come from fee-paying schools .

Professor Jesson said: "Far from providing 'ladders of opportunity' for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, grammar schools are more like 'ghettos of the advantaged'.
Grammar schools do not offer a ladder of opportunity to any but a very small number of disadvantaged pupils. In fact, their recruitment policies tend to favour pupils from more prosperous communities where eligibility for free school meals and other measures of deprivation are at very low levels. Parents who can afford to send their children to private fee-paying schools have a distinct advantage in securing places at local grammar schools over pupils from state junior schools who are similarly able."

Other research on grammar schools from Northern Ireland concluded "that the effect of attending grammar school is similar for those from higher and lower income groups". But access to grammar schools was very unequal .

Fear of the Future

Primary school children are suffering from "deep anxiety" about modern life, according to a study of education in England.

Many expressed concern about climate change, global warming and pollution, the gulf between rich and poor, and terrorism.

The report concluded that prospects for the society and world that young children would inherit looked "increasingly perilous".

The research team had found "unease about the present and pessimism about the future".

What a society we are bequeathing our next generation .

The poor and education

Socialist Courier has directed readers towards findings that have indicated a link between class and educational achievement here and here and the Herald reports further connections between poverty and educational success .

Figures from the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) show that Glasgow, Dundee, North Ayrshire and West Dunbartonshire are among the councils with the lowest attainment rates at Standard Grade and Higher - all are regions which have a much higher proportion of pupils on free school meals than the national average of 14.6% - a key indicator of deprivation. Glasgow , for instance , has 32% of pupils are on free meals .

The best performing councils, including East Renfrewshire, East Dunbartonshire, Stirling and the Western Isles all have much lower proportions of pupils on free school meals. In East Renfrewshire, the figure is 8.3%.

The latest figures to highlight the gulf in exam attainment between rich and poor will spark renewed concerns that not enough is being done to address the problem. Last year, HM Inspectorate of Education found the gap between the best and worst-performing pupils in Scotland was growing wider, despite a raft of government initiatives and £19 billion spent on education since devolution.
Isabel Hutton, education spokeswoman for Cosla, which represents local authorities, called for the "inequalities arising from deprivation" to be removed.
A Scottish Government spokesman said the focus by ministers of early intervention, cutting class sizes in deprived areas and ensuring teachers were retained in nurseries would all help to raise attainment across the board.

Socialist Courier doubts if such palliative will address the situation . After all , it has been an objective of all governments , of all shades of the political spectrum , to foster an educated work-force and here we are still facing the same problem .

The Old School Tie

The school that a pupil attended remains a bigger factor in whether they get into a top university than having good A-level grades, research suggests.

The Sutton Trust charity, which analysed admissions from 2002-06, says state school youngsters are losing out. The trust found the number of pupils at the top 30 comprehensives who went to Oxbridge was just a third of what might be expected if based on ability. But at the top 30 independent schools, more than expected got Oxbridge places.

The trust says the findings cannot be attributed to A-level results alone.

Sutton Trust chairman Sir Peter Lampl said :-

"We have a class structure, that is the very simple answer. We actually do have a class structure and that gets in the way of trying to do something about this."