Criticism
One-half of British universities have lost confidence in the A* or A grades that are awarded by secondary schools, and require many applicants to sit for a competitive entrance examination. According to the Schools Minister, “strong evidence has been emerging of grade inflation across subjects” in recent years.
| School type | Primary | Secondary |
|---|---|---|
| All | 19.3% | 15.2% |
| Church of England | 13.1% | 12.0% |
| Roman Catholic | 16.3% | 14.0% |
| Non-religious | 21.5% | 15.6% |
| School type | Primary | Secondary |
|---|---|---|
| Church of England | 63.5% | 39.6% |
| Roman Catholic | 76.3% | 64.7% |
| Non-religious | 47.3% | 28.8% |
An analysis of 2010 school data by The Guardian found that state faith schools were not taking a fair share of the poorest pupils in their local areas, as indicated by free school meal entitlement. Not only was this so at an overall national level, but also in the postcode areas nearby the schools. This suggested selection by religion was leading to selection of children from more well-off families.
The Moser Group of the Basic Skills Agency has found that one out of five English adults are functionally illiterate, while two out of five are functionally innumerate. The Confederation of British Industry is also complaining of falling academic standards. Employers often experience difficulty in finding young people who have such basic employability skills as literacy, numeracy, problem solving, teamworking and time management. As a result, employers either have to pay for employees' remedial education, or they must hire foreign candidates.
Katharine Birbalsingh has written of the problems she perceives in many community schools. She cites the impossibility of effective classroom management, bad teachers who cannot be dismissed, and government policies encouraging "soft" subjects. Birbalsingh has visited schools in Jamaica and India where pupils are desperate to gain the kind of education to which pupils in her own school (and their parents) were indifferent. She was a deputy head teacher in south London until she spoke at a Conservative Party conference in 2010 and was quickly sacked. Frank Chalk, who taught at an inner-city school for ten years before resigning in frustration, makes similar claims.
A survey of 2000 teachers by The Guardian in 2011 cited a recurring reason for not enjoying the job. A lack of trust was referred to by respondents in the survey's "free text" area for extra comments, and related to senior staff, parents and governments. Writing about her own reasons for leaving teaching, a contributing editor to the newspaper's Guardian Teacher Network described the realisation of needing to leave the profession as having slowly crept up on her. Being a mature entrant, she questioned things in her aspiration to improve education and was reluctant to "be moulded into a standard shape".
Read more about this topic: Education In England
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)