By Simon Heffer
The Telegraph

What sort of country has to provide 7.5 million training places to improve the skills of its workforce? One with Mickey Mouse schools, of course. I tried to detect some shame on the part of the Government yesterday when it announced this scheme. Half the places are to improve the most basic skills of all, numeracy and literacy. What a mess.


For decades, lies have been told about our education system and its products. First, we were told that comprehensive schools would raise standards for those dependent on state provision. That was complete nonsense. Even Labour now tacitly admits this, which is why it has failed to abolish grammar schools and maintains a drive for city academies, which are supposed to be better.

Then we are told each year, when youths register nearly 100 per cent pass rates for A-levels and GCSEs, that this is a sign of the growing genius of our young people and a tribute to the ever more brilliant teaching and curriculum. That, too, is rubbish. I am sure some who pass these exams well are indeed very bright, and good luck to them. But, as examiners now admit, a student can pass GCSE maths without being very numerate, and GCSE English while being not even semi-literate. Hence the need to try to educate people again once they imagine they have left school. Isn’t it time the lies stopped, and the Government owned up to the severe failings of the education system?

This is where the Marxist drivel taught in teacher training colleges for the past 40 years or so has got us. The odd stand has been made against this poison - notably by Chris Woodhead when he was chief inspector of schools - but little impact has been made. In fact, just as the Government is having to create all these training places because its school system has failed, it continues to seek to do ever more damage.

A considerable minority of parents choose to avoid the horrors of the state system by paying for their children to be educated privately. These people attract the unrelenting hatred of Labour politicians - except, of course, of the few hypocrites who educate their own offspring in the private sector. The caricature is that such people are arrogant, wealthy toffs who use their money to buy privilege. As anyone with a child in a private school - and I have two - knows, that idea is absurd.

I know parents who forgo holidays, drive old bangers and remortgage their house several times so as to afford the fees. They do this not for reasons of snobbery, but because they regard the alternative as tantamount to child abuse. They take strain off the state system, ensure the country has some properly educated young people to help secure its future, and are rewarded with no tax relief for making up for the state’s shortcomings.

Yet, as my colleague Charles Moore wrote last Saturday, the latest act of bullying by this Government is to threaten to remove charitable status from these schools. Were this to happen, tax advantages would be lost, fees would have to rise considerably, and private schooling would simply become too expensive for most families who can currently just afford it. What is disgraceful is that these schools offer countless scholarships to the children of poorer families, so their charity work is real rather than theoretical.

Labour cannot see educational excellence without wishing to destroy it. I rejoice that Buckinghamshire is promising to open a new grammar school, and hope other local authorities will follow suit - and that the Tory party will shut up on the subject. At a time when the failure of our schools is so manifest, central government cannot be trusted to put the problem right. Only by others taking the lead and doing so will the Government be shamed into retreat - and the day might yet dawn when people leave school able to read, write and count.

Talking a right load of old Mallochs

Since his appointment to the Foreign Office in June, I have felt it best to ignore Lord Malloch Brown, not least since a man so preposterous as he is must surely come unstuck without any help from me. I hope we are near the end. Not only has this boastful bigot’s anti-American remarks more or less buried our special relationship for the time being, but now he is alleged to have told the Syrians - suspected by our American allies of sponsoring various terrorist outfits - that he is their “man in the Cabinet”. Why doesn’t he ring up Osama bin Laden while he is at it, and offer to intercede on his behalf, too? Or see whether he can meet Ahmadinejad halfway on the vexed question of Israel - perhaps by offering to wipe only half of it off the map? I recall hearing this clown mouthing off when he was chief of staff to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, one of the world’s most corrupt and failing organisations. That Gordon Brown could have thought him suitable for a ministerial post doesn’t say much for his judgment, does it?

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