"The most incredible news I've heard recently about outcomes is last year's A-level results: 17,500 learners gained three straight As in their exams last August. Of these, 10,000 were educated in the private sector, the other 7,500 in state schools. The private sector educates only seven per cent of children, but gets more straight As than the other 93 per cent put together."
Not incredible news. Just an incredulous Vicki.
We don't normally concern ourselves with mere statistics and especially those relating to examination results (agreeing whole-heartedly with those schools, amongst them some of our finest,
who maintain they're misleading and chasing false gods of educational achievement) but as a start we can remark that anyone with any sort of a head for figures would know that the statistic quoted could not possibly be true today without massive public consternation and outcry (though it was perhaps so 50 years ago as we ourselves were being educated but
things have moved on since and in particular
grammar schools now perform better than private schools) and neither can we bothered to research a more detailed rebuttal.
But in the first place note that we don't deny private education is superior in general to state education. Would that all education could be private and that we could maintain proper diversity and free our schools from the crippling burden of
étatisme but that is not realistic or at any rate is not yet but it is nevertheless certainly an ideal we should strive for.
By way of starters then let's note some of the reasons why private is better: better teachers, better resources, better expectations, better discipline and most all better motivated students and it is here that we find the first of Vicki's incredible mistakes.
1 Not 7% but more than 18% of our 'A' level students are educated in private schools and this mainly because they are better motivated as well as not a little to do with financial reasons we dare say: it costs good money to keep kids in school, private or otherwise, and we welcome
Danny Blanchflower's recommendation to raise the school leaving age to 18 as one of the ways to combat the recession.
Then there's the curiousity of the missing state selective schools,
the grammar schools already noted as today being more successful at 'A' levels than private schools, and which don't appear in Vicki's statistic.
2 If we're deducting 'the 7% contribution' from private schools to make 'the other 93% put together' then in that 93% would have to go the grammar schools and they do better than the private schools. Something amiss there surely Vicki (for the record that last link gives "10,156
pupils from independent schools gained three As last summer, compared
to 7,484 from comprehensives and 4,254 from state grammars" and the link repeats Vicki's error
1 but not her creative arithmetic while the present not wholly innumerate writer would like to see figures for the entire student body sitting the examinations in each of the three classes before commenting on the probability of success in each class).
And then there's the question of scholarships and bursaries enthusiastically embraced by private schools in the interests of social mobility not to mention their exam results (at the public school this writer attended 40+ years ago
Lord Fraser of Carmylie was one such scholar as movingly attested by him in the public domain). We can safely assume the greater part of these scholars will go on to achieve straight As.
3 If each private school were merely to fund one such scholar each year then that would add
as much as some 2,500 (some of these schools of course merely primary and hence the qualification but you get the drift and it's of order right) to their tally of straight A students.
Enough to be getting on with a realistic credible revision we think and we challenge Vicki to do just that using our
contact form (we will make space here): meanwhile we feel someone should be having a quiet word with the head of the governing body of the primary school she says she represents about this bimbo with a
yoni for brains on the board.