Education

When I was 16 I failed all my O-levels, bar a grade C in English Literature, and concluded I wasn’t academically bright. Instead of retaking my O–levels, doing some A-levels and trying to get a place at university, I decided to pursue a career as a tradesman and enrolled on a residential work experience course. It was a bit like a boarding school, except it offered students a technical and vocational education rather than an academic one. It was a miserable period of my life. The stench of failure hung over the institution like a toxic cloud and my fellow students and I were treated as if we were semi-delinquents

Those dread words ‘Grammar schools’ are back in the news again. The education secretary, Damian Hinds, has today announced a new fund that will allow established academically selective schools, i.e. the 163 grammars clustered around the country, to found new ‘satellite’ schools. The proposal could increase pupil numbers at grammar schools by 16,000 over the next four years. The news has been met with the typical mixture of surprise and outrage; amidst the tried-and-tested to-and-fro, it is hard to find much reasoned and sustained argument. Everyone, it seems, knows where they – and everyone else – stand. But, dig a little deeper into the issues at stake, and Hinds is

Towards the end of 2009, shortly after I announced my intention to set up England’s first free school, I debated with Fiona Millar on Newsnight about the pros and cons of allowing parents to set up schools. Fiona had been having this debate, or ones very like it, for at least 20 years and it soon became apparent that I was outmatched. I felt like an amateur who’d stepped into the ring with Mike Tyson. After five minutes, as I lay bleeding at her feet, she turned to Jeremy Paxman and said: ‘I don’t even know why we’re bothering to have this debate. Toby’s not actually going to do this.

Monday was ‘national offer day’, which means that more than half a million parents across England were notified about which primary school their child got into. For most, the news was good, with nine in ten parents securing a place at one of their top three choices. But for some — particularly in London — the offer letters brought disappointment. In Kensington and Chelsea, for instance, just 68.3 per cent got their first choice of school. Not surprising, then, that parents have been resorting to fraud. In some cases, desperate parents end up spending so much money to game the system it would be cheaper to go private. Mumsnet commissioned

I was sorry to read about the difficulties facing the Open University today. The Mail splashed on the story, while the Times and the Sun have followed up. This is a story close to my heart because my father Michael Young was one of the founders of the OU. I told the story of how he came up with the idea for a ‘university of the air’ in an article for this magazine last year: In 1961, shortly after getting a job as a lecturer at Cambridge, my father had an idea. The faculty buildings, he discovered, were largely unused for six months of the year. The colleges, too, were

Every now and again my Tube ride to work on the District line is enlivened by children on a school outing. Presumably they are heading for the Science Museum or possibly the National Gallery. Often, they have different coloured badges stuck to their jumpers. As far as I can work out, if, for example, you are a red, then you’re meant to sit with other reds, and sometimes the teacher barks instructions such as: ‘Could the reds try to be a little quieter please?’, or asks: ‘Blues, how many more stops until we get there?’ This last question gives rise to a piercing shriek as a dozen or so blues