Judith Woods
Any attendees from the Conservative conference want to do a swap? I hear by the end Suella was handing out gift baskets of winsome kittens (electoral catnip!) and Jeremy Hunt was bribing weepy Red Wall MPs with ponies. Oh, and if some random voter got given the HS2 rotating cutterheads in this week’s Great Sunak giveaway, I’d happily take those. I can lease them back when Rishi’s next digging the Tories into a ruddy big hole.
I’m not sure who allowed our PM to eat the blue Haribos before his party (no, Rishi, not that kind of party) speech but I’m not in the least bit surprised his splendid wife was on hand to reassure us he’s very loveable actually and generally calm things down before nap time. He had no idea what Akshata was going to say. We had no idea what he was going to say. But in scenes reminiscent of Oprah Winfrey telling her audience “You get a car! You get a car!” He reeled off a list of random treats we hadn’t asked for; smoking bans for children not yet born? Oh, all right then. An end to the culture wars? Lovely. But we’re not sure it counts as a proper cessation of hostilities if the other side keep weaponising the issue and slapping out their “lady” meat and two veg in the female changing rooms at the local sports centre.
Oh, and did Rishi Sunak really axe A-levels? Yes, yes he did. Weird. Given the parlous state of education in this country, the crumbling schools, the estimated 24,700 children missing from school on census day in Spring 2023, the post-pandemic mental health timebomb that has placed a generation at risk, it’s hard to credit his best brainwave is to tinker around with exams so far down the line they make the Manchester high speed rail link look eminently viable.
Yes, yes, we know smarty pants Sunak is ashamed our state-educated teenagers aren’t better at trigonometry. His mates at Stanford still take the proverbial. And he would much prefer it if Britain’s youth were au fait with the Canterbury Tales and didn’t carry knives. But here’s the thing. As our last-but-one Prone Minister might have said: “In the words of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man’.”
That’s us done for. In his headline-grabbing flurry of announcements, Sunak obviously didn’t register new research revealing that post-pandemic, twice as many seven-year-olds are now failing to reach their expected reading age. The National Foundation for Educational Research, which has followed 6,000 pupils who were in Reception and Year 1 in March 2020, tested the same cohort again earlier this year. The results show those with very poor reading skills has doubled since the pandemic.
It doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict a child who struggles to reach their milestones in Year 3 is unlikely to show the requisite aptitude to study maths and English up to the age of 18. Hand on heart, to make a real difference at grassroots level then we must look to another public figure – the Princess of Wales and her commonsense crusade to support early years development.
Kate, a mother of three stratospherically privileged children, is genuinely dedicated to supporting those who desperately need help if their offspring are to thrive. In June 2021, she launched The Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood, with the aim of driving awareness of and action on the crucial impact and knock-on effects of nurturing, stimulating and instilling confidence into youngsters from birth. Start as you mean to go on.
Not fiddle about with exams young people don’t want to sit. For a child who hates maths, the idea of being force fed numbers (bonjour kids, time for your co-ordinate geometry gavage!) past GCSE is the stuff of nightmares. And for STEM kids, instinctively drawn to science, the prospect of ploughing through Jane Eyre would feel like an unspeakable punishment. I know this because as the mother of two daughters, I have one of each.
Arguably it would be far more helpful to find out why-oh-why must too many schookids still have to choose between geography and history? They can access porn and buy Bitcoin and hack into the Pentagon on their smartphones; is it really beyond the wit of grown-ups to figure out better timetabling so no child has to forgo the corn laws in favour of cartography? Just something to think about, Prime Minister, while your special advisers dream up new wheezes to distract the electorate as your Government hurtles towards oblivion. A-levels? Smoking bans? These are so feeble they don’t even qualify as bread or circuses.
We just want stuff to work. We don’t much care who makes it happen; ideology is a luxury we can’t afford when there’s sewage in our rivers, kids are getting stabbed on the way to school, NHS waiting lists are Kafkaesque, shoplifting has become the UK’s number one leisure activity, the cost of living is crippling and inflation has its foot on our necks. That’s before we even venture near the moral quagmires of Ukraine and the small boats crisis. If your showing at this conference, Rishi, was a test – of maths, psychology or strategy – I hate to break the news, but you failed it.
The Telegraph
