Daily Mail, October 7 2002

Rigging the A-level grades – that still-developing scandal – was clearly not the half of it. It is now apparent that university entrance is also being rigged to swindle thousands of young people out of the places they deserve.

According to reports, the top universities are to cut by up to one third the number of places they are offering to pupils from independent schools in favour of those from state schools. Some universities, indeed, are admitting they will accept state school pupils with A-levels two or three grades below those obtained by independent school pupils.

This eye-popping initiative to punish merit and reward mediocrity is the universities’ supine response to the trumped-up ministerial charge that they are giving preferential treatment to ‘privileged’ pupils from elite schools.

Far from remedying an injustice, this reverse discrimination makes a mockery of any notion of equity or fairness, as well as destroying the very essence of education.

For it is not only grotesquely inequitable. It also shatters the fundamental principle that academic success is to be achieved through merit. We are now, it seems, to go backwards in time to a system in which achievement depends not on what you have done but on who you are and what your background is. The only difference is that whereas this once discriminated against the poor, now it is to penalise the better-off.

This travesty of progressive politics is as half-baked as it is unfair. Ministers claim they want to stop pupils from poor backgrounds losing out in the university race against pupils from wealthier ones. Well in that case, merely favouring state schools is plainly woefully inadequate.

Surely, they would also have to discriminate against successful [ital] state schools, since their pupils patently have the advantage of a more favourable education? Surely, they would have to discriminate against professional parents in state schools, since their children undoubtedly have the advantage of coming from book-lined homes?

And if we’re really talking unfair advantage here, then surely they would have to discriminate against all those middle-class parents -- including the Prime Minister himself and so many in his government -- who have their comprehensive-school educated children privately tutored on the side to make up for the dismal education from which their less privileged classmates are left to suffer?

But ministers can no more acknowledge the blatant hypocrisy and incoherence of their position any more than they appear able to grasp the terrible damage they are doing to education. Earlier this year, the Higher Education Minister Margaret Hodge brazenly declared that universities should lower their entry requirements for students from working class homes.

She appeared wholly oblivious to the patronising insult she had thus delivered to working-class pupils by implying that they could not be expected to achieve the same academic standards as the middle classes.

The Schools Minister David Miliband went even further. Top pupils at every school, he said, should get into university regardless of their A-level grades. This is taking levelling-down to staggering new depths.

But then, these ministers are ideological wreckers. Far from raising education standards, they are wilfully and systematically destroying them altogether in the cause of an unattainable and, indeed, quite mad goal of academic equality.

Ms Hodge claims that universities are discriminating against bright children from inner city schools. But there’s no evidence for that at all. She commits the cardinal error -- repeated over and over again by the zealots of the left -- that any difference must mean discrimination.

There are several reasons why so many inner-city state school pupils don’t go to university, none of them the universities’ fault. They may want a job instead. They may not want to incur student debt. Above all, they may not be able to achieve good enough grades in the core subjects the universities require.

This, indeed, is the real scandal that holds so many disadvantaged pupils back -- that standards in many state schools simply aren’t good enough. Instead of putting this right, the government is causing standards to slide even further. It then systematically lies to the public through rigging the results and shoe-horning more and more young people into Mickey Mouse courses, so that it can falsely claim standards are rising.

The truth is that ministers regard education standards as infinitely malleable in the wholly disreputable and discredited cause of social engineering.

This is not some Old Labour aberration in the government’s ranks. Until he became an MP at the last election, youthful Miliband ran the Prime Minister’s policy unit. He is not only a rising star. He is at the intellectual heart of the Blairite project.

We can now see that the abolition of Clause Four was no more than a propaganda stunt designed to mislead us into believing that New Labour had renounced ideology and entered the real world. Not so. Blairism has turned out to be an absolutely lethal combination of old style egalitarianism and post-modern vandalism of existing institutions and values.

Not surprisingly, its education policies have not brought about egalitarian heaven on earth. And as every policy fails in this crazy aim, the government introduces yet another to block the exit for all those desperately trying to escape the rising tide of destruction.

Thus, higher education was expanded; but it wasn’t enough to bump up working-class numbers. So universities were paid by results, with more and more students awarded both places and degrees regardless of standards; but it still wasn’t enough.

So a postcode premium was introduced under which universities lost money if they didn’t take students from poor areas; but it still wasn’t enough. So now ministers are taking an axe to university standards themselves. No doubt it is only a matter of time before they abolish exams altogether and award a degree-level certificate to everyone in the country.

And now to cap it all, parents who have fled in despair to the independent sector as the last redoubt of reliable educational standards (and who have paid twice for education through taxes and fees) find their children are to be punished for the crime of being well-educated.

Enabling bright children from poor backgrounds to rise through the agency of education was once the great liberal ideal of our political class. This meritocracy, which expressed itself through the grammar schools, enabled poor children of talent to rise out of disadvantage.

But now, with the very idea of meritocracy destroyed in the name of a spurious equality, working-class pupils have less [ital]opportunity than before.

The universities have spinelessly connived at this disaster. In private, vice-chancellors bemoan the collapse of standards. In public, they refuse to blow the whistle, choosing instead to further corrupt academic quality in order not to jeopardise government funding.

The only way out is for the universities – and, indeed, the entire education system – to be set free altogether from political control.

For it is truly astounding that this government has fooled so many for so long that raising education standards lies at the heart of its vision. Instead, it is taking an axe to excellence in the name of uniformity. Equal opportunity, RIP.

Posted by admin at October 7, 2002