The blogger and education policy specialist has made a timely intervention in the discussion about schools' role in addressing inequality. Could any of it work in practice?
The core tension here is one that runs through most structural education debates: we can see the inequality clearly, but every proposed solution creates a new set of distortions somewhere else in the system. The point about regional variation is particularly important and often underweighted in these conversations, because a minimum standard that works in London can quietly extinguish opportunity in the North East without anyone having to say so explicitly.
Fully agree. Part of the underlying problem -- clearer in Sam's original article, I think -- is the entire system's over-reliance on credentials. The civil service has recently done a lot of positive work on blind applications that could be adopted more widely.
The core tension here is one that runs through most structural education debates: we can see the inequality clearly, but every proposed solution creates a new set of distortions somewhere else in the system. The point about regional variation is particularly important and often underweighted in these conversations, because a minimum standard that works in London can quietly extinguish opportunity in the North East without anyone having to say so explicitly.
Fully agree. Part of the underlying problem -- clearer in Sam's original article, I think -- is the entire system's over-reliance on credentials. The civil service has recently done a lot of positive work on blind applications that could be adopted more widely.