Oh dear ...
June 15 2007
Thought I'd stick this up here to irritate the maximum number of people. It was in this week's Venue and seems to have gotten a lot of goats. If people are going to call you "clueless", "idiotic" or "taken in by Blair's spin" they really ought to get a grown-up to check their spelling and punctuation. Especially when they happen to be teachers ...

As a local hack and author, you often get invited into schools to give talks or run workshops. Soon, however, I shall probably have to give it up on medical advice, due to the seething. And the ranting. And the impotent rage.

Some of the kids stick in your mind. Like the morbidly obese boy who turned up with two paving slabs of Dairy Milk and a two-litre bottle of pop that was fluorescent blue. Yet he turned in a story of huge generosity of spirit fit to drive you to tears. Or the girl who wrote a tale aching for love; she was 15, overweight and dressed to leave nothing to the imagination except the bet on how soon she'd be up the duff by some drongo who'd dump her before she'd come to term. Or the small, funny, mousy girl who slogged for two days solid with the ferocious concentration of a cat at a mousehole to write a science fiction story of breathtaking complexity and beauty. With rich parents she'd be headed for Oxbridge, but as it is she thinks she'll be a hairdresser.

Bristol's state secondary schools mostly achieve godawful results. The worst are in schools serving the city's outlying estates where the populations are overwhelmingly white. Somewhere along the line, these became the people that the middle classes fear the most.

To Guardian readers they're ignorant borderline racists with laughable taste. To Daily Mail readers they're chavs whose feckless criminality keeps taxes too high. Neither liberal nor conservative middle classes allow their children to go to school with the white working class if they can possibly avoid it.

Sure, a tiny minority of these kids are horrible little cousin-fucking savages who need to be sterilised asap, but there plenty of middle class psychopaths, too. The overwhelming majority are nice kids who are just as intelligent as the intake of any private school. Yet year after year Bristol turns out hundreds with few qualifications or none at all. Even if you don't give a shit about the sheer injustice, care about the scandalous waste of creativity, enterprise and economic potential. Think of how a divided society run by mediocrities pulling the ladder up behind them will eventually tear itself apart.

The recent Tory argument about grammar schools exposes the divide beautifully. So how come all those past Tory governments never built any new grammars or reintroduced selection? Because in truth the middle classes hated the system because their own little darlings might fail the eleven plus. The present system of "parental choice" is infinitely more to the liking of those with the money, resources or low animal cunning to wangle their little darlings into the more popular state schools.

So now Cameron has embraced Blair's beloved Academies. Controlled by charities, private businesses or anyone else who fancies running a school, they may not be to the liking of teaching unions, but everything else has been tried. Under Labour vast amounts of money have been thrown at state schools in Bristol to little effect, except enriching many people in the hidden but growing public/private education industry.

Bristol's first academy has yet to prove itself, but you've got to love the energy and enthusiasm of its head. Others are on the way, including one to be run by Bristol Uni and the Society of Merchant Venturers, another to be run by a Christian charity.

They've got to be worth a try because the present system in many schools is. Not. Bloody. Working. Opting some of the toughest schools out of the control of the local education authority is unlikely to make things any worse and just might turn things around. Hell, teach them bloody creationism in biology classes if that is the price of teaching them to read, write, respect themselves, look in wonder on the works of man and nature and believe in a better future than those their elder siblings have been condemned to.