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A social revolution in our education system may just still be possible

If ever there was a time for government largesse, it is now

Remember how, at the start of the lockdown, we were all fantasising about what kind of social revolutions it might bring about? I actually thought (shows what I know) that it might level Britain’s famously uneven educational playing field.

Half the appeal of private schools, after all, is their facilities: the swimming pools and cricket grounds and science labs that make Cern look under-equipped. The lockdown would make all that redundant at a stroke, while also removing some of the disadvantages faced by state school pupils, such as huge class sizes and the disruption caused by a few recusant kids.

There may have been some wishful thinking behind my calculations. My children are all at state schools; the eldest is in his first year at a big, tough comprehensive. I have often seethed with unbecoming jealousy in the company of friends whose children go to private schools. But now, I thought, they’d be the ones envying me. All our kids would get much the same education online, but they would have to pay for the privilege. Suckers!

Alas – it soon became apparent that the gap between private and state was in fact widening into a gulf. While state schools were scrabbling to beg, borrow or buy laptops for their poorest pupils, private schools were already mastering the art of the Zoom assembly. A recent study by UCL found that private school pupils are five times more likely than those in the state sector to get near-full-time teaching online. By the time schools reopen properly (and of course, private schools will get there first, because they have enough space to allow social distancing), the gulf will have widened to a chasm.

But perhaps all is not yet lost. Later this week the government will unveil plans to hire thousands of private tutors to help state school pupils catch up. This is what middle class parents – including me – have always done to give their kids a boost. My children are learning more from their one-on-one tutor lessons than they ever could from Google classroom.

Finding, and paying for, the thousands of tutors required to close the educational gap will be a huge undertaking, especially as this kind of emergency measure often turns out to be permanent. It is much easier to introduce a new benefit than to take it away. Private tuition for state school pupils may, if it works well, become something that schools and parents insist upon. (The same, I suspect, will be true of free school meal provision during the holidays.) But if ever there was a time for government largesse, it is now. The right kind of social revolution might still, just, be possible.

 

Thank goodness charity shops are reopening

The shops are open, but I seem to have lost the consumer itch. In fact, the only place I’m dying to visit is the local charity shop – and not to buy stuff, but to give it away.

How I’ve missed those bi-monthly purges; sweeping up all the outgrown clothes and discarded toys and mysterious bits of plastic tat that seem to drift into the house on gossamer wings, bundling it into black sacks and delivering with a smile it to the nice old ladies of the Salvation Army shop, as if it were me doing them a favour and not the other way round. No other activity produces such a giddy mix of emotions: virtue, relief, guilt at the rubbishy contents of the sack and glee at having got away with it.

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