Shame on the Girls’ Day School Trust

On 29 October in Credit crunch: When they can’t afford the school fees any longer, I addressed the issue of children being withdrawn mid-year from their fee-paying schools due to the credit crunch.  Canvassing the press, I see that in the past three months, this precise subject has become a rather hot topic for the media and a rather pressing issue for more and more families.  The credit crunch has adversely affected all of us in some way or another, and not everyone finds themselves in a crunch because of negligence of the type witnessed by the banks of Wall Street and Canary Wharf.  Some people are just experiencing tough luck — flotsam in the bigger, choppier seas of the current economy.   The ensuing sharp practice of some mortgage lenders when dealing with mortgagees facing challenges as a result of these difficult times has been highlighted by the press and chastised by political and community leaders.  But sharp practice by school bursars?

The very institutions which are entrusted with the education of future citizens and leaders in a full array of subjects, including moral education and citizenship, should be leading the way in helping parents in financial difficulty to find a way to keep their children in school while allowing them to rearrange their finances.  Goodness knows, many schools are doing just this: fee arrangements are being agreed and bursaries are being granted by many schools to allow children in critical phases such as GCSEs and A levels to complete those courses or others to finish off their school year so as to minimise disruption to their lives.  This is all very laudable.  So what kind of example could the Girls’ Day School Trust (which owns several dozen schools in the UK and is estimated to educate ten percent of all privately educated girls in this country) have possibly been trying to set in terms of moral education and citizenship when it allegedly* rudely excluded a Year 7 Streatham and Clapham High School pupil mid-way through morning classes in front of all of the pupil’s classmates?  The pupil was allegedly* escorted to reception where she was allegedly* left unattended for several hours until her mother could be contacted to collect her.  The girl’s only crime was that her school fees were allegedly* £5,100 (the equivalent of less than two terms) in arrears. She was humiliated in a way that a Texan or Californian court would probably be happy to award damages for.

The girl’s family had been particularly hard hit by the credit crunch: the unexpected arrival of a new baby and the demise of a business whose client base was heavily weighted with estate agencies coupled with an ex-husband with court-ordered responsibility for school fees and child support who had not been able to meet those obligations had all meant arrears of school fees had accumulated.  The mother offered to assume the fees going forward to see her daughter through the year but was unable to assume the arrears incurred by her ex-husband.  This was, apparently, unacceptable to the school.  The mother had anticipated that the cash flows would not be available going forward on a long term basis and had secured a place for her daughter at a local secondary school for September but no one could take her before.  It would have been easy for the school to allow the mother to assume the fees for the remaining two terms and to pursue the father for the arrears separately. The girl would have been spared the humiliation she suffered and the trauma of being left without a school mid-year.  One also has to wonder whether the school can, in this economy, fill the girl’s place mid-year. If not, what is the opportunity cost of allowing the girl to continue at the school….especially if her mother could borrow the money to keep her in school until the end of the year?

Schools may be businesses, but they are also human businesses which touch on human dignity in a similar vein to hospitals.  In my mind, they have a greater duty to their clients than businesses in less “human” industries.  Moreover those schools that are charities (as the Girls’ Day School Trust is) arguably have an ever greater duty as a charity.  The GDST’s alleged* treatment of its pupil on the first day back at school in January was the antithesis of all things charitable.

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* I know the girl in question and heard her account firsthand but feel compelled, given the increasing litigiousness of fee-paying schools, to caveat this posting appropriately.

The 3Rs…or chocolate? The Rose Report says you can have your cake and eat it too!

I haven’t posted in a while. Christmas in Canada followed by weekly trips since then to Abu Dhabi (from where I post this today) are offered as excuses.  I was going to write something about the state of primary education in Abu Dhabi, but thought I’d share my thoughts with you on the latest government report on primary education instead. 

Last month, Sir Jim Rose, the former Ofsted chief inspector, tabled his interim report on the primary curriculum.  I honestly didn’t read the report because, frankly, I’ve been jaded by educational officialdom which usually has a lot to do with jobsworthing and political point-scoring and rather little to do with education.  Working groups, papers, policies, and strategies (God, I hate that last one more than anything) with titles such as Every Child Matters, the Children’s Plan, Time to Talk, EYFS, the National Literacy Strategy and the National Numeracy Strategy  rather bore me with their vapidness.  There is almost never anything cutting edge about them.  If there were, they’d be research papers in peer-reviewed journals, not dust collectors on civil servant desks.  However, sitting at a dinner party in Ottawa over Christmas, something happened which compelled me to download the full Rose Report.  And read it.

My host, a retired senior Canadian diplomat, mentioned that he had read in the Economist that we in England were no longer going to teach proper subjects in primary school, but rather topics or themes as had been done in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s (ie until the last report on the curriculum by Rose and two others, known as the “Three Wise Men”, advocated a shift to individual subjects in their 1992 report.)  He was appalled.  So were the other guests. What kind of educational backwater was I living in, they wondered. (I didn’t want to dig my adopted country further into the ground by telling them we’d only officially returned to phonics teaching two years earlier.)

I had seen some of the attention-grabbing headlines when the Rose Report was released on December 8^th.  The Telegraph shouted “History and geography lessons in primary schools should be scrapped, says report” while Melanie Philips at the Daily Mail condemned the report’s return to topics.  The Times did likewise, saying that topics such as “chocolate” would purport to replace maths, English, science and goodness knows what other of the currently prescribed 14 topics of the primary curriculum.  The chocolate analogy was all over the radio talk shows.  I hadn’t read the Economist article cited by my host so pulled it up.  Lo and behold, it had interpreted the Rose Report in the same way but seemed to applaud the report’s embrace of topics again.

But guess what?  I have now read the report and can only conclude that the reporters for the attention-grabbing headlined articles did not read it because Sir Jim does not advocate doing away with history and geography in favour of chocolate.  I actually think his report makes a lot of sense.  It advocates paring down the prescriptiveness of the current 14 topics to six areas which quite sensibly include all the necessary basics: English, communications and languages; art and design; maths; science and technology; human society and environment; and physical education and wellbeing.  My reading of the report is that individual subjects are to be taught, with cross-curricular comparisons made where possible. This covers the basics while still allowing passionate teachers to go beyond and to make linkages with other subjects. I still remember the sense of excitement I felt when studying the Tudors in history and simultaneously with another teacher studying contemporaneous Shakespeare in English or when seeing the overlap between physics and chemistry when studying them separately.  Studying Latin a year after studying ancient history also connected some dots for me.  Struggling with the concept of significant figures in physics one year made one topic less for me to grapple with in chemistry and maths.  Field trips to the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City at once brought together the geography of Canada I’d learned in Grades 4 through 6 and the history of Canada I’d also been taught.  Geography and history are often, as Sir Jim points out in his addendum following the misinterpration of his report, intimately connected.  In my mind, this balance of subject teaching with cross-curricular connections made where apposite is what an education is all about.

The problem with Sir Jim’s report lies not with the balance he strikes, which is, I think, the right one. Rather, it is with the implementation, and I’m not sure a report alone can do much to improve that. An abundance of interested, intelligent and inspiring teachers could, without further prescription, take care of this.  More of these are what we need more of in our primary schools, not government reports.