School failure - a generation betrayed

12 April 2012

New Labour's promise of "education, education, education" should, according to a devastating report by Ofsted's Chief Inspector Christine Gilbert, be rewritten to read "education, acceptable education, mediocrity".

A third of Britain's state schools offer learning that is no more than mediocre, she concludes.

And their verdict coincides with criticisms from the outgoing chairman of Marks and Spencer, Sir Stuart Rose, who finds many would-be employees can barely read, write or add up.

Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco, was even harsher in his condemnation of the failings of 11 years of compulsory schooling.

As for school leavers going on to higher education, universities find themselves needing to lay on remedial classes in many subjects, while being told to accept low-income children with poor grades in order to compensate for the failings of their schools.

Around half of all 16-year-olds still fail to achieve five good GCSEs including English and Maths.

Employers cope somehow: we revealed yesterday that at the Ocado warehouse, among the most sophisticated in the world, 60 per cent of staff are Polish.

But the poor performance of the education system, besides short-changing a generation of young people who deserve better, will have a devastating effect on Britain's competitiveness if it is not addressed.

Chinese and Indian universities are turning out well-educated graduates in their millions, while youth unemployment here is rising fast.

It is no good pretending, as the Schools minister Iain Wright has done, that things can only get better.

The Teach First programme was a successful innovation but touches only a few; meanwhile many of the vastly expensive new academies are struggling to show better results than the schools they replaced.

Heads need more power to sidestep the union stranglehold over teachers' pay and terms. Setting up schools should be easier.

For those who voted Labour in 1997, particularly in London, failure in education has been the biggest betrayal.

Iraq inquiry Mk Three

The Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war opens today - but the Prime Minister is not expected to give evidence to it before the general election.

We learn now that the inquiry will not blame individuals.

Meanwhile, according to a recent Cabinet Office document, few of the recommendations of the previous Butler inquiry into Iraq intelligence failures have been implemented.

Gordon Brown accepted the internal intelligence review that followed Butler, but few of Butler's recommendations have been put in place.

The Defence Intelligence Staff, which sounded alarm bells over the Iraq war case, has had its budget cut and been exiled from Whitehall.

None of this augurs well for the Chilcot inquiry. The Iraq war left hundreds of British servicemen dead and created an insurgency that has only just begun to come under control.

This expensive new inquiry has little chance of finding answers to what went wrong where the previous two failed.

Find us a boffin, Boris

This newspaper has always supported plans for a London version of the Paris Vélib scheme, which provides easy-to-hire bicycles to help cut congestion and emissions.

However, replacing the many stolen or damaged machines is costly.

Now, surely, is the moment for British engineering wizardry to come up with better anti-theft measures, perhaps making use of the extensive central London CCTV network. Boris, find us a boffin.

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