Guilty secrets

I need to let you into a guilty secret. I had an inadequate education.

At least I now realise that’s what must have happened. Suddenly it’s all become clear. Where I am now must be down to the fact that my school failed to prepare me for success in later life. I always wondered how it all went so wrong, and luckily the answer has been revealed in the Schools Minister’s speech to the Policy Exchange think tank last week. It’s because I didn’t study history or geography at school.

It’s hard not to be resentful. My parents didn’t go to university, and they didn’t know how to guide me, so foolishly I chose to study sciences, two languages and music at ‘O-level’. Humanities were ‘crowded out’ of my curriculum. What a disaster. No chance for me of a career in geological exploration or cartography, archaeology or archives.

At last it’s been recognised that education is all about learning the right things and getting them right in an exam.

No, I went on to study maths and two languages at ‘A-level’. Imagine that – why would anyone want to be fluent in two foreign languages by the age of 18? Clearly the school hadn’t realised that this would prove to be such a life-limiting combination. Luckily, despite the huge gap in my CV, a university managed to spot my potential and offered me a place to study business and economics – phew. I should be forever grateful to them for ignoring the lack of rigour in my academic education, and taking a chance on me.

Of course, I shouldn’t blame my school. Let’s face it, in the absence of league tables and Ofsted inspections, how were they supposed to know that they were putting my best interests at risk by letting me study the subjects that I enjoyed and was good at? It must have seemed like common sense at the time. Too much common sense, I now realise – always a dangerous thing.

Actually I have another guilty secret – I may as well get it all off my chest. Five years ago I re-trained as a maths teacher and I now teach part-time in a local secondary school. Oh what joy to be at the epicentre of an education system that has clearly got its priorities right at last – one that will force the reluctant and the innumerate to continue studying my subject right through to the age of 18 unless they manage to jump like well-trained dogs through that GCSE performance hoop at the age of 16. And one that will now publicly shame my head teacher if she has the temerity to do what my own foolish school let me do, and allow the pupils to study the subjects that they enjoy and are best at.

Heaven forbid that such practices should be allowed to continue. No, no. Thank goodness our new Schools Minister has finally put to bed the wiffly-waffly lefty notion that education is a journey of self-discovery that leads to personal growth and life-enhancing opportunity. At last it’s been recognised that education is all about learning the right things and getting them right in an exam. If only I had swatted up on the dates of the reigns of the kings and queens of England, my life would have been so much richer. Fortunately I learnt how to read a map in the first year of secondary school, so it could have been worse. But when people ask me about the location of the tectonic boundaries where volcanoes tend to form, I always end up shuffling a bit and looking at my feet. It’s been a severe social handicap.

As for allowing arts subjects to be included in the gold-standard EBacc, whatever next? It’s laughable to think that studying a play could possibly be as academically rigorous as studying a novel; or that getting to grips with harmony in music is somehow on a par with mastering simultaneous equations. Maths gives students skills for life and work. But music? When does anyone ever come across music after they’ve left school? How many concert pianists does this country really need? And do we really want to encourage teenagers across the country to gather in each other’s houses to play electric guitar (which isn’t even a proper instrument, of course).

It isn’t fair to those from disadvantaged backgrounds to encourage them to study these soft subjects. Fine for those from wealthy homes, who can afford to take them up as an ‘extra’ after school. If they want to be actors, computer game programmers, film directors, architects, product designers, music technicians or fashion designers, good luck to them. Their families can indulge them if they wish. The Minister is quite right. The state’s role is to ensure that everyone has the best chance to get a ‘good’ job. Social justice is vital in our society, and the EBacc is exactly what we need now to achieve it.

Liz Hill is Editor of ArtsProfessional. (She didn’t study English, beyond ‘O-level’, but has found the grammar training from ‘A-levels’ in French and German to be invaluable in her work).
www.artsprofessional.co.uk