Sink schools and the social divide

If you haven't seen it already, I would strongly recommend watching the documentary by John Humphreys: "Unequal Opportunities" which is all about the huge gulf between rich and poor kids when it comes to education. You can watch on BBC iPlayer.

Most of the programme was a rant about "the middle classes" who send their kids to independent schools, spend thousands on private tutors, and bus their kids to the best state schools miles away whilst everyone else has to languish at the local comprehensive. (can you blame them when there is no decent local state school available?)

But the best and most inspiring part of the documentary was the fact that he visited several high performing schools that were:

1. Based in poor areas with poor pupils
   
2. Had a mixed intake of kids from various countries and communities
3. Were in a delapidated premises

And despite all that, the schools performed well because of

1. strong leadership from the head
2. good teachers
3. strict discipline

It just goes to show that whether you're rich or poor, middle class or working class, give kids the right school environment and they can succeed in life. Throwing all the money in the world at schools (as Labour did) makes little difference. Britain seems to suffer from a "can't do" culture, a mindset that finds every excuse under the sun to explain under performing schools. It's very simple: we need to and we can raise the standards of our schools that serve the poorest kids. We also need to recognise that it's perfectly fair and normal for parents to have the power to choose the best schools for their kids. We just need to make sure that the poorest parents also have that choice.

I just hope Michael Gove's free schools experiment succeeds in raising standards, because Labour have tried just about everything else and with the exception of Academies, nothing else has worked so far.

Opposition parties have a habit of picking the wrong leaders

When the Tories went into opposition after their historic defeat in 1997, they picked William Hague as leader. His election was a disaster with the Tories winning only 1 seat in the 2001 general election. Following their ejection by the electorate in 1979, the Labour party elected Michael Foot as leader. He went on the lead the Labour party to one of their worst defeats in the 1983 general election.

Notice a pattern here? Governing parties that are pushed into opposition tend to learn the wrong lessons of their election defeat. They take the electorate for granted and retreat into their own idealogical comfort zone. They get into a mindset that the electorate somehow got it all wrong and will eventually mend their ways and vote for them again. They find it very hard to absorb the fact that maybe their policies were wrong.

And so it is with Ed Miliband. The new Labour leader refuses to recognise that his party tested the theory of tax and spend to destruction and that we now have a massive deficit that is entirely Labour's fault. He is happy to dance to the tune of his union paymasters rather than appeal to the electorate as a whole. Labour never warmed to the new Labour project. It begrudgingly went along with Tony Blair because they were hungry for power after nearly two decades in opposition. The lesson they are now drawing from their election defeat is that the party was too Blairite (have they ever asked themselves why Blair won them three elections?).

Although my political sympathies are broadly centre right (I don't feel a strong affiliation to any political party), I'm sorry that David Milliband wasn't elected. Governing parties need a strong opposition to keep them on their toes, otherwise they get lazy and complacent (as Labour did when the Tories were in opposition). David Milliband understands the need to win over middle class voters and would have given the coalition government a run for its money. Under Ed Milliband, Labour runs the risk of slipping into insignificance just as the Tories did.