Unequal Opportunities with John Humphreys - BBC2 Monday 20 September

For those of you who saw John Humphreys’ BBC2 programme on the attainment gap between pupils from poor backgrounds and their richer counterparts, it was indeed very thought provoking. Despite massive investment in education over the past decade, the gap seems to be growing wider which will have drastic consequences on society in years to come.

However, the analysis fell into the trap of oversimplifying the relationship between poverty and academic achievement and their subsequent effect on social mobility. While the link between the two is essentially a “no-brainer” Humphreys’ analysis failed to pick up on two essential points.

Firstly, the fault does not lie with private education - there will always be people richer than you who can pay for private education, tuition or anything else for that matter. The quandary is that in modern Britain there shouldn’t be “good” schools or “bad” schools - every school should be a “good” school and as the BBC2 programme highlighted, funding is not the single determining factor. It falls to good leadership, good teaching and a desire to promote excellence. So the question that should be addressed is: Why are there not more “good schools”?

Secondly, the education system can only help break the poverty trap when parents come on board - something Humphreys ignored. A crazy comment was made by a primary teacher from Tower Hamlets, London - that despite living near a park there are “three year old children who have never set foot on grass let alone be taken to a museum or a cinema.”

Sorry, but this has nothing to do with poverty - it’s down to lazy, uninterested parents. It costs nothing to go to a park, library, museum or art gallery. Many of those same parents have no problem spending their cash on plasma TV’s and the latest mobile phones yet can’t afford a bus ride into town to take their kids to the local museum? Stop blaming poverty for what is nothing more than a can’t be bothered attitude! If parents took the time to engage their children more rather than sitting back and expecting the state or the school to do all the work, some of these kids would have a better chance to fulfil their potential.

Education can liberate people from a life of poverty and ignorance but only when it is valued.


Do you agree? If not, why not? let me know by leaving a comment.

Languages develop, grow and die!

While many people imagine learning a new language to be a dull affair with dusty grammar books, endless vocabulary lists and rote learning, languages are actually more akin to living things than most people appreciate.

Languages develop and grow with time - and the English language is probably one of the best examples of this. Look back 20 years and we would never have used words like "blog" or "twitter" as we do today. In fact since Shakespeare's time over a million words have been added to the English language.

That's why learning a language requires constant effort - we will never know all there is to know about our mother tongue let alone a second or third language that we have come to master!

Sadly, by the same token languages also die out. There are many reasons why this is the case, some of which are politically, socially or ethically motivated. Regardless of the reason the death of a language represents the death of a cultural entity.

We talk of the world being like a global village, well the death of a language is like letting a historic building fall into decay and ruin. It might not seem important to some people but to linguists it's a tragedy.