Welcome to Casting the net, Liberal Conspiracy’s daily web review. As always, please feel free to share your own recommendations in the comments.

westmonster - From that most industrious governmental department, The Office for Placating the Daily Mail, comes Labour’s latest muddled U-Turn: smoking pot is again a heinous and terrible crime, which may result in 14 years in a PlayStation-adorned redbrick gulag.
Obsolete - Unsurprisingly, septicisle is similarly unimpressed with the drug’s reclassification.
Love and Garbage - It seems that those high flying Labour egg-heads, weren’t the bee’s knees after all.
tygerland - Where I convey my exasperation at being forced to watch Hillary flush more of her fading credibility down the toilet.
Karl Rove - Bush’s former chief strategist observes the race and concludes it’s over for Hillary. He also agrees with me, that McCain is the best candidate to beat Obama.
Political Betting - Suggests that with Hillary’s debts rocketing, Obama may simply pay her off.
UPDATE: Missed this, Robin Lustig makes a prediction. Brave man!
Alix Mortimer - At tea-time with Clegg, Alix finds that Cameron really is a vacuous “PR tosser”.

Never mind what’s best for the kids; education policy in Britain since 1997 has been characterised by New Labour’s free market-driven determination to turn our schools into one big extended profit opportunity for the private sector.

Nothing whatsoever has been off limits. Used car salesmen with a few million to spare have enjoyed free rein to inculcate creationism in evangelical City Academies, entire Local Education Authorities have been privatised, and Private Finance Initiative school rebuilding programmes have handsomely underwritten the profits of construction majors.
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[This was first posted on comment is free this morning.]

I was recently invited to give a speech at the annual general meeting of the NUJ Black Members Council, which I duly did on Saturday morning. I generally try and avoid preaching to the converted so I began, on the subject of how ethnic minority journalists can break the glass ceiling, by illustrating how race intersects with class.

I started with this:

“Over two weeks, BBC 2 films will give voice to the prejudices, alienation, fears and confusion of white working class Britain - a constituency that rarely finds its voice on the BBC, at a time of sweeping social change. … ‘What we wanted to do was look at these issues in a rounded, non-political way and I think we’ve done that,’ says season commissioner Richard Klein.”

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Once upon a time I was in secondary school and had to do cookery lessons with everyone else as part of a revolving door scheme of design and technology work. This meant that cooking was only taught for a fraction of the year but it was potentially valuable experience.

I feel that this is the reality for many going through “food technology” lessons, so I have to welcome the news today about cookery being made compulsory with mixed emotions.

It is, in an objective sense, great news. The idea that kids will be learning about basic ingredients, how to cook basic meals, how to keep a nutritionally balanced diet and do it in a fun and tasty way…all of these things need to be taught to people. But herein lies my concerns.
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The Daily Telegraph website reported on Monday the story that McDonald’s is to be empowered to issue A-levels with an entirely predictable sneer: ‘Would you like a qualification with that?’

The trouble is, that nasty little middle-class jibe reflects the reality on the ground for any kids naïve enough to undergo the course – perhaps with no little arm-twisting from the local JobCentre – in the expectation that they will come out of it with a piece of paper standing them in good stead in any function other than flipping burgers.

They will be following in the tradition of generations of polytechnic students who swallowed the spurious assurance that they would be accorded ‘parity of esteem’ with the products of Oxbridge. They weren’t; indeed, the polytechnic stigma subsequently may even have worked against many in the job market.
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We all want to live in a fair society. But what should that mean - and how could we get there? I propose that our core fairness test could be this: that we should not inherit our life chances at birth.

In Britain today, where we are born and who our parents are still matters far too much in determining our opportunities and outcomes in life. And so our own choices, talents and aspirations count for too little.

The vision of a free and fair society would be one which extends to us all the autonomy to author our own life stories - challenging the extent to which this is determined by forces beyond our control.

This ‘fight against fate’ - breaking the cycle of disadvantage to make life chances more equal - could provide the lodestar to guide future action and campaigns for equality.

But even if we have an accurate understanding of social mobility, we need a deeper agenda for more equal life chances.
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In a world of growing uncertainty its nice to be able to report that all the great modern Christmas traditions are alive, well and seemingly thriving.

The shops have had their Christmas decorations on the go since late October and, round where I live, we’ve just had our first reported sighting of the return of the Cadbury’s Cream Egg.

Slade, Wizzard and few others are back in singles charts - and please indulge me while I put in a good word for the welcome return of the Pogue’s classic ‘Fairytale of New York’, which is still the greatest and most brutally honest Christmas single ever recorded.

And as Sunny nicely illustrates here, even the seething classes are getting into the swing of things with their usual pre-Christmas bout of paranoid histrionics. This year, with the Royal Mail having taken themselves out of the running by releasing a religious themed set of Christmas postage stamps, its the BBC who’ve taken on the role of Captain Hook in the Daily Mail’s latest production of ‘A Christmas Embolism’ which also stars Trevor Phillips as Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Dumber and Melanie Phillips (who else) in her now traditional role as the Fairy Godmother of the Apocalypse.

In the circumstances I think it only fair that I give you all a rather different take on things. Continue reading…

The silly season is almost upon us. Soon the likes of the Daily Mail will be publishing a list of the ‘best’ and the ‘worst’ secondary schools in the country. Local papers will be naming and shaming those schools in their area that come at the bottom of the league tables and the letters pages will be full of indignant parents either defending the school their child attends or calling for the head and the governors to go.

So if we have to have school results published (sadly I think this is a Genie that is well and truly out of the bottle) can we at least agree on the format in which these results should be published. At present the DCFS publishes GCSE results in three different ways: raw results, value-added results and contextual value-added results (CVA). Confused?

Well you might well be if, as a parent, you were trying to judge whether school X is successful, complacent or under-achieving.
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Education policies have raised some good questions lately, and not only about pedagogy (whatever that means). They’ve brought into focus tricky issues – well, I find them tricky – about freedom and equality, choice and social cohesion, “localism” and centralised control.

Consider these recent developments. The Guardian has reported that ministers are conducting an “urgent review” into the academies programme launched under Tony Blair. This will have given some satisfaction to critics who have long claimed that these expensive secondaries, which are state-funded but operate largely independently of local authorities, are failing to fulfil their principal remit of improving attainment among poor children in urban areas.

Stoke-On-Trent Labour Councillor Peter Kent-Baguley is among these critics. He is not alone in seeing academies as, in his words, “creating structural inequality” in education. Their opponents believe that such success as these schools claim – and some can claim very little - can be largely attributed to their enthusiasm for excluding troublesome pupils, who then have to be taken in by neighbouring LEA schools.

Falling pupil numbers mean that Stoke is to reorganise its secondary provision, with some existing schools likely to be closed. Kent-Baguley accepts the need for change, but is enraged by what he sees as central government’s interference in the form of education consultants SERCO being “catapulted” in to manage it. He regards SERCO as the instrument by which the government will impose academies on his city, whether it wants them or not. He fears social division in education imposed from above.

Now let’s look at what David Cameron has been saying. The Tories, of course, have pledged to accelerate the academy programme. But last week their leader made a speech (cheekily, in Manchester) promising to enable parent or community groups to set up their own schools - as “Conservative co-operatives” – using the money their LEA would otherwise be spending on their children at existing ones. Until more details are published it’s hard to judge this policy, but it certainly looks like a further potential challenge to the power of local government. In this case, though, the challenge, though enabled from the centre, could come from below.

Might there be merit in Cameron’s idea? There are obvious reasons for concern. Chris Keates of the NASAWT said such co-op schools would be “a recipe for social segregation.” Would they simply give hardline religious groups, ethnic separatists, the pushy posh and others the freedom to effectively insulate their kids against others “not like us” at those other kids’ and tax-payers’ expense?

But there’s another way of looking at it. Cameron characterised his idea as “giving ownership” of education to parents, a formula to please his core voters. Yet might such a reform turn out to be truly “localist”, reinvigorating active citizenship on the ground and having the potential to support those children, which existing schools and policies are finding hard to help by placing them in environments more suited to their educational needs? And, if so, should the Left consider adopting – or at least adapting - the principle, even if not the precise Tory policy when it emerges?

I find it hard to say. On the one hand I sympathise with Peter Kent-Baguely and I’m receptive to the idea of power being devolved further than even many local councillors might like. On the other, I’m aware that the freedoms this would bestow could end up being enjoyed by the few at the expense of the rest and narrow children’s horizons in the process. Is there a way of having the best of both worlds? And if so, can someone tell me what it is?

The left, if the word means anything at all, is about equality. But what type of equality? This is, of course, a huge question; for serious thinking on the subject, look at the Equality Exchange. I just want to make a quick point - that the left should give less priority to equality of opportunity.

Start from a fact. In 2006, pupils eligible for free school meals were roughly only half as likely to get five good GCSEs as richer pupils; 28.7% vs 56.2% for boys and 37.4% vs 66% for girls (table 7 here). Poverty, then, still leads to poor educational attainment even after nine years of New Labour government.

This is not for want of trying. Specialist schools, greater choice and the Excellence in Cities programme have helped (pdf) narrow the gap. It’s just that progress has been slow.

And there’s no reason to hope that greater spending on poorer pupils will eliminate the gap. The recent report (pdf) from the Primary Review showing that the £500m spent on the National Literary Strategy had “almost no impact” on standards highlights a worldwide finding (pdf) - that spending on education does little to improve standards. For this reason, US research suggests that it would require enormous differences in spending on pupils to achieve true Roemerian equality of opportunity.

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Mike Ion wrote an interesting piece earlier on today about the school leaving age. I found it particularly interesting because of the language that Mike used, and the language that many of us use when discussing education. We tend to think of education as a way of maximising economic benefits to society- if you have a GCSE you will earn x, if you have an A-Level you will earn x+y, if you have a degree you will earn x+y+a etc. To some extent that is obviously true- though higher up the degree structure- with PhDs for example I’m not sure the link is as complete. To some extent the more educated you are, the more you earn and the more likely you are to get a job. But is that really what education is about, is education effectively a synonym for training only a broader sort of training that equips you with some transferrable skills like being able to read and do mathematics?

Part of the argument I think for suggesting that we need to train people as oppose to educate them is an assumption that what our society needs is a constant supply of labour. We need lots of workers and very few drones. But I think that misses something about education that we ought to think about. Because we aren’t merely a capitalist society, we are also a democratic society. There might be skills that a citizen needs in order to make decisions, vote and take part in the political process that aren’t the same as those that she requires as a worker. The point is for instance that if you can’t at a very basic level interpret and evaluate what politicians are saying on TV, you can’t really understand which party to vote for. Education should help you understand a bit of the world around you- understand something about the way that people live and enable you to understand more about that. Obviously it shouldn’t indoctrinate you, but it should provide you with the means to understand and think about things.

As liberals, and therefore committed to democracy, I think we should be a little more ambitious in what we want education to do. I don’t know what this means in policy terms- and obviously there are a hundred different arguments to be had about that. I don’t think it means anything in the context of the debate that Mike and Chris Dillow are having about the school leaving age. I do think though that if we aren’t careful we might just design an education system that reflects the language that we are using about education- that would be a disaster because it would bequeath us a generation of people, who were perfect employees, but unable to contribute to the world around them.

I struggle to understand why anyone on the Left of British politics could oppose Gordon Brown’s moves, mentioned in the Queen’s speech yesterday, to raise the education leaving age to 18. Let me repeat that, I said raise the education leaving age to 18, I did not say raise the school leaving age to 18.

A study in Canada cited by Alan Johnson when Education Secretary found that the introduction of tighter provincial restrictions on leaving school between 1920 and 1990 had helped in raising both average attainment and average incomes. The study found that students compelled to attend an extra year of school experienced an average increase in annual income of about 12%. It also found that compulsory schooling is closely associated with significant benefits in terms of other socio-economic outcome measures ranging from bi-lingual abilities, employment and poverty status.

It concluded that the personal costs of dropping out of full time education aged 16 were high. The study estimated that the earnings foregone as a result of leaving school early ranged from about one to two times the average dropout’s lifetime peak annual wage or three to six times the earnings forgone by staying in school.

What is not in doubt is that the longer a young person stays in education the greater the chance that he/she will acquire additional skills and significantly more opportunities in life as a whole. It has been shown many times that those who have stayed on in education longer often find it easier to find work and that they are much more likely to find that work satisfying. Similarly, the level of education among the population can have a positive effect on the economy as a whole as they can be more efficient workers.

As the Ontario study has shown, the impact of extra years of education on earnings and economic productivity is also disproportionately heavy at the lower end - that is, two more years at school for a 16 year old will make a much greater percentage difference to their later economic worth than two years of graduate work for a 22 year old.

The raising of what should really be called the “education leaving age” would, in my view, be a positive move that would help to promote greater equality. More importantly parents who left school young are more likely to have children who leave school early. Forcing all children to stay in school longer could break this cycle of disadvantage. Increasing the education leaving age is, I believe, crucial to the long-term investment in the talents and abilities of our nation.

For example it is worth noting that in many countries a very large majority of young people voluntarily stay in education beyond the end of compulsory schooling (e.g. France, Germany and Japan). If these countries can already bear the extra cost without economic collapse, it should be possible for nations like our own to cope as well. Raising the education leaving age to 18 is a progressive, bold and socially just policy - we should be pleased that it will be introduced by a Labour government.

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This is a guest post. Mike Ion was Labour’s PPC for Shrewsbury in 2005.
Mike Ion’s weblog is at http://mike-ion.blogspot.com. He also blogs for Comment is free.