Out of touch protestors...and Guardian, Red Ed, Lisa Nandy, CiF, etc.

So the Guardian claim that the student protests yesterday were justified, Red Ed wants to go and join in and Labour MPs are queuing up to show their support.. If you look at the comments on CIF, it would suggest that there's a lot of public support for the protests. I am not so sure. I've already blogged about how small these protests are as a percentage of the UK electorate. In the staffroom of the school where I work - which is by no means a right wing hotbed - there is a great deal of bafflement at the protests and protestors.  I think the first one had some sympathy, but the others have just seemed like a chance for kids to skive off and muck about in London.

Added to that, a lot of the people I work with - and a lot of normal people in general - didn't have EMA, did have to pay some element of fees, did have to work or bring up children whilst they went to university, and certainly haven't had anything like the cushy lifestyle these students seem to have.  Most people look at the protesting students and see people who are more privileged than them, not less. And they're right. I keep harping on about it, but it's a complete myth to claim that the "older generation" had their fees paid for them.  About 5-10% of the older generation had their university fees paid for them.  The other 90-95% didn't go to university. Even as university places have expanded, that's come at the price of people paying fees, doing part-time degrees, going back into study whilst having a family and holding down a part-time job.

Another incoherent defence of EMA

Lisa Nandy, one of the new Labour MPs, makes another incoherent defence of EMA.  

The argument for scrapping EMA is twofold: firstly, the ‘mess’ that Labour supposedly left the unsuspecting Conservative Party to clear up means that they are reluctantly forced to cut public spending and secondly that it will be replaced with a means tested and directed payment to those most in need. This logic does not even begin to stack up. The cuts are a political choice and not a necessary evil at all. 

Incredible. Does she really believe this? People are talking a lot about Lib Dems and Conservatives betraying their election pledges, but Nandy stood for election on the policies of Alistair Darling who said the cuts would be ‘worse than Thatcher’s.’ Bit of a backtrack.  Even Sunny Hundal over on Liberal Conspiracy has worked out that a return to the free spending era of the early part of this century is just not possible.

That means even if the economy recovers fully we have an £48bn (48, not 18 as previously stated) a year shortfall that needs to be plugged. Plus, we need a budget surplus if we want to reduce the national debt – which means perhaps another £5-7bn a year of cuts.

The reason why I am so insistent on this EMA point is because I do believe in a strong welfare state and because I want the money that is spent on a welfare state to be spent usefully and intelligently. It always seemed to me in the middle of the boom that EMA was fairly wasteful. Right now it seems a classic example of low-hanging fruit – a really easy way to make savings without impacting too much on outcomes.  I say this as a teacher who cares about my pupils. What annoys me as well is that people like Nandy and Polly Toynbee don’t have a clue about how this policy works on the ground.  They don’t see the presenteeism it encourages, the arbitrariness of its allocation, the waste of so much of it, the way that students receiving it would skip your lesson for a driving lesson and still not buy one course-related book by the end of the year.  We see how out of touch Nandy is in this part of the article:

The details of the new discretionary learner support fund are yet to be released but initial statements suggest that it will not include any costs for travel, it will be administered by individual schools and colleges and provide headteachers with the discretion to decide which pupils should receive it. The practicalities of this seem absurd, expecting colleges to means-test students. I can’t imagine that many would opt for this.

I actually have some sympathy with this last point, about turning teachers into social workers. But of course, this is exactly what the current EMA system does! As a 6th form teacher at the moment, I am responsible for logging my pupil’s attendance. This attendance is relayed to the local authority and if it dips below a certain point kids don’t get EMA. I know that there are cases of pupils asking teachers to mark them in when they weren't in so that they won't lose out on their money. I am only a 6th form teacher, but I know for a fact that our head of sixth spends an awful lot of time dealing with EMA problems.  So if you really are worried about teachers becoming responsible for welfare decisions, you’d get rid of EMA altogether. As it is, I think the proposed discretionary fund, whilst not perfect, isn’t bad.  It will eliminate the vast mass of kids who aren’t that badly off and would have stayed in school anyway.  Those kids who are really struggling will be able to apply for it and have their individual circumstances taken into account. Most kids who receive EMA are in London, and in London a 16-18 bus pass costs £8 a week, so even if you had to give a lot of kids the money for that you’d still make a significant saving. The problem comes when you see a pupil who clearly shouldn’t be in the 6th form, who is getting nothing out of it, but who is nevertheless really desperate for the money. If I were the teacher or head teacher called to adjudicate on that, I would probably end up giving the kid the money because I felt sorry for them. But again, as I have established, that’s not a problem new to this discretionary fund, that’s a problem present in the current system.

Nandy’s final point is this:

The EMA is a crucial plank of the agenda to widen participation in education. If Michael Gove wants more people from poor households to get to Oxford and Cambridge, as he claims, then he is going the wrong way about it and, if the demonstrations this week are anything to go by, he will live to regret it.

Why was social mobility higher in the 1950s and 60s when EMA didn’t exist? How did all the poor people who went to Oxbridge and other universities survive in the 6th form then? How did 6th formers survive before 2004? Does Lisa Nandy have any answers to these questions?

Schools, Personal Responsibility and Johann Hari

For various economic and political reasons, there's been a great deal of political focus on education over the past few decades.  There's also been an expansion of a school's traditional focuses, away from just 'the transmission of knowledge' and towards a range of personal and social aims. Thus, the Department of Education was renamed the Department of Children, Schools and Families, and most schools will offer a range of classes or programmes aimed at teaching good parenting skills, stopping kids getting pregnant, stopping kids smoking, stopping kids being anti-social, stopping kids being radicalised, getting kids to eat healthily, getting kids to understand a bank balance, getting kids to switch the lights off and cycle to school, etc. I could go on, but you get the gist.

This approach has led to some worrying that we might lose focus on a school's core activities. But it also has another significant problem.  It denies personal and parental responsibility.  You can have the best sex ed, finance ed and healthy eating ed in the world and there will still be kids who will go out and blow their week's pay packet on a binge drinking session, a Maccy Ds and end up in bed with a total stranger. If you don't believe these activities aren't a problem, then of course there isn't a problem; if you do believe these activities are deserving of blame, then I would humbly suggest the individual should share the larger part of it, then the parent, then perhaps the school and teacher, then perhaps society.

And so, onto physical education. Here we have Johann Hari, writing an entertaining piece about his problems with weight, unhealthy eating and lack of exercise. It's very funny and engaging and there is a sense of uplift as he starts exercising and realises the benefits it brings him.  But then, of course, he has to blow it.

And then, suddenly, I felt angry. It occurred to me that what I had been given so brilliantly at Matt Roberts was a physical education. I had been taught how my body works, what will keep it in good condition, and what best fuels it. I had been taught how to exercise and stretch and eat. And I thought – why was I never taught this at school? 

Of course, of course, of course. It's the school's fault.  Never mind that Johann Hari has gone to one of the best universities in the world and for about a decade has worked in a knowledge industry where he cannot fail to have become aware of at least a few of the above facts. Never mind that he very obviously has the research skills to have investigated the above questions, or that for at least a few years now he must have been making enough money to have employed a personal trainer far earlier than he did. Never mind all of this. IT'S THE SCHOOL'S FAULT.

Hari then commits the next classic error of assuming that his schooldays - two decades ago - bear even a slight resemblance to what happens in schools now:

Yes, there is a subject called physical education – but it does precisely the opposite. Just a few phrases will remind every mildly unhealthy person in Britain of what that experience is like: "All four corners of the gym – go!" "Pick a team!" "Jump OVER the horse!"

I am about the same age as Hari, and I don't remember any school PE lessons like this.  PE lessons today are even less like this. In fact, if you get a GCSE in PE you do lots of the things that I assume Hari wants - reading up about muscles, body shapes, exercises, etc. Of course, what this means is that you don't do as much of the running around outside as you used to, so you can get an A* in PE whilst being unfit and overweight. Plus, most of this sort of stuff is Biology-lite - stuff that really should be a smaller part of a Biology curriculum, and which was a part of the Biology curriculum when Hari did his GCSEs. But of course he doesn't tell you this because then it wouldn't give him someone to blame for his utter failure to do any exercise in the decade and a half since he left school:

Since school, I had carried a deep and profound sense that exercise was horrendous. And it isn't. It isn't at all. It's actually quite fun. But I had to be deprogrammed to see it. 

'Deprogrammed'. That is not only how Hari sees humanity, it's how he sees himself. A robot who is subject to being programmed and deprogrammed by unseen powers, utterly lacking the willpower and personal agency to work things out for himself.

Which is odd, because Hari hasn't needed deprogramming to see the wrongs of capitalism. He hasn't needed deprogramming to see the wrongs of the free market. I bet you that when he discovers a general press consensus that, say, a policy of the coalition's is good, he doesn't need 'deprogramming' to work out why the general consensus is wrong. I bet you there are a tonne of issues with very great media and societal consensus that Hari challenges every day, and I am fairly sure that he owes his success in his career to an element of original thinking and analysis of evidence and sources.  Why couldn't he challenge his own consensus that exercise was horrendous? Especially when he must have confronted a lot of evidence that that wasn't the case. There is one small element of honesty here - very near the end of the article Hari does grudgingly admit personal responsibility before immediately slipping in a 'but' which completely denies the force of it:

Yes, I know I bear personal responsibility for it, too – nobody forced me to eat chicken popcorn – but I do think PE had a perverse effect on me and a lot of overweight people. 

The fact is, Hari could have had the best, most sensitive physical ed lessons imaginable at school, but I bet he'd still have ended up fat. The reason why he's started exercising now is the same reason he didn't exercise then.  Personal will. He didn't want to exercise then, he does want to now.  He did want to stuff his face with fried chicken then, he doesn't now. I've got some sympathy with him. I have always enjoyed exercise, but I really really struggle against the tendency to eat buckets of KFC for every meal. The difference is I know I have greedy and unhealthy tendencies and I fight against them. Hari wants to blame his PE teachers. Is it any wonder people don't want to become teachers when on top of putting up with unruly classes and interfering governments they also have to take the blame for every teenager's insatiable appetite?

What is worrying is that the cult of 'blame someone else' is not just present amongst people who genuinely have been affected by things outside their control, or by poor people who have had fewer advantages. The cult of blame someone else is present amongst fabulously successful and advantaged people who not only want to blame someone else for their failures, but even seem reluctant to acknowledge their success. Hari should give himself a pat on the back.  Just as he deserves most of the blame for being a fat lump till his early thirties, he deserves most of the praise for getting his act together now.  He's right in that it isn't easy to change habits, especially as you get older, and that is why he deserves praise. But whilst it might be difficult to change habits, there's no short cut and it's the only thing that will work.

I guess that's the sort of thing his PE teacher might say...

Polly Toynbee. EMA. Again.

Of the many things that annoy me about the defence of EMA, perhaps the one that annoys me the most is the suggestion that without it, poor kids will simply give up school, sit at home and rot. Polly Toynbee makes this point very clearly in the title of her latest article:

How to turn 60,000 students into unqualified drop-outs.

That statement is based on a profoundly regressive and demoralising belief - the belief that the government are all powerful, that individuals are cogs in a machine, passive recipients of government largesse or stinginess, unable utterly to make a difference to their own lives. With one sweep of a pen, government can transform 60,000 otherwise hard-working and intelligent students into 'unqualified drop-outs'.

This is simply not true, and worse than being untrue it seeks to dehumanise poor kids. It is yet another example of what I see again and again - that many Labour policies of the last decade or so, whilst aiming to help the poor actually ending up entrenching their poverty. Worse, not only do they entrench poverty but they make people’s lives spiritually and emotionally weaker.  If you suggest to kids that their entire success is down to government handouts, you suggest that nothing they do themselves is that important (see Bridget Phillipson and Andy Burnham). If they do succeed, the implication is it’s not really down to their own efforts; if they don’t succeed, well, it’s the fault of government for not being kind enough.

Of course we know that this is simply not true. Personal endeavour does make a difference, and accounts for many of the differences between people born in exactly the same circumstances. Taking responsibility for yourself is not a nasty right-wing doctrine but is actually the first step to leading a fulfilling life.  There are undoubtedly many unfairnesses in British life, and we should work to get rid of them, but we also need to remember that in terms of opportunities and resources, modern Britain is one of the best places in the world and in human history to be born in.

But, the worry is that if you tell people they are completely powerless enough, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and kids really start to believe it.  In case you doubt the impact that these sorts of ideas can have, take a look at the Save EMA website where hundreds of pupils show they have completely swallowed these sorts of beliefs.  None of them attempt to come up with any ways around the EMA cut – their kneejerk response is to say why this means they cannot stay on at school and why this will doom their entire future:

michael Thorpe: this would not be good this is to help me get to college by travel and it is to help me provide for the courses if i dont get my EMA i will not be able to continue my education meaning i woould not get to get the grades i need for universty meaning no future

nadine wellings: If they took EMA from us students at college’s all around the borough will leave the course. They obvoisly need to have money to live on, so will have to there-fore end up working. Meaning that there will be way less nurse’s/doctors/police/etc. It’s not just us losing out it’s the whole of the community.

Connor Clarke: EMA should not be stopped because people won’t want to come to college. I need my ema because this gives me an insentive to learn.

Nicola Duke: I feel that if EMA is taken away I would be more enclined to go and get a lower class job which would not help me in later life. EMA is an insentive for me to learn and I don’t want it to be scrapped.

Leon Sutton: I think that I should be able to get money if i’m attending training it’s my insentive to learn.

James Murray: If EMA stops I will stopp attending college and go on the dole and that would then cost more.

Kathy: I myself as a student would suffer without ema, and so would many others, and then they go on about Anti social behaviour etc..?of course that will increase if students dont bother going to school,what else will they do?

Dianna: THEY SHOULD KEEP EMA GOING BECAUSE I CAN HONESTLY SAY NO TEENAGER WILL BE IN EDUCATION EVERYONE WILL BE ON THE STREET MAKING TROUBLE COLLAGES WILL LOOSE OUT OF STUDENTS. WE GIVE UP OUR TIME AND EFFORT ON COMING TO COLLAGE TO HAVE A GOOD FUTURE, UNLIKE SOME KIDS FINISHING SCHOOL AND DOING NOTHING BUT GETTING IN AND OUT OFF PRISON.

Look at the attitudes in these posts.  Listen to the way the kids quite literally view themselves in a dehumanised manner – they need an ‘insentive’ to learn, because apparently the incentive of it getting you a better job in the long term or, god forbid, the incentive of the love of learning, are just not enough. If Nicola Duke knows that getting a lower class job will not help her in later life, why does she not try and find a way to stay on at college? The myth that kids will be dropping out to get jobs is fairly well exploded by Kathy and Dianna who acknowledge that the kids who do drop out won’t be doing so to earn a few quid for the family coffers, but will be dropping out in order to get in trouble on the street and cause anti-social behaviour. James Murray seems to want to cut off his nose to spite his face - he would rather quit college if he doesn't get EMA to go on the dole and therefore financially punish the government.

What would Polly Toynbee and Bridget Phillipson be doing if they were teachers, I wonder? What advice would they give pupils like these? Would they say that they felt sorry for the pupils but that they should try and stay at college anyway because it would be worth it in the long run? Would they help the really needy with practical ways to meet travel and book costs? Would they try and point out – gently – that before 2004 lots of poor kids did manage to get through 6th form without EMA? Or would they tell all the kids on EMA that they were absolutely sunk, that they’d probably drop out within a few weeks and that because of the evil government there was absolutely no future for any of them so they might as well give up now?

I know what I am going to do, and I think I know what Toynbee and Phillipson would do too.

Polly Toynbee says EMA cuts are 'wicked'...and she isn't using street slang

Sorry, students, but you're low in the pain pecking order | Polly Toynbee | Comment is free | The Guardian

So something I can half agree with Polly Toynbee over. Students are low down in the pecking order of people who will suffer from cuts. But just as I was thinking she's not that bad after all, we get this:

Start with the wickedest cut, the abolition of the education maintenance allowance (EMA) – the £30 a week that helps young people stay in school or college, replaced by a tiny tin of hardship money for unhappy college principals to disburse in extremis.

Yep, that's right.  'Wickedest'. Cutting the discretionary spending of 16-18 year olds is 'wicked'.  Why on earth should anyone take anything Toynbee says seriously when she engages in this kind of hyperbole?  The word 'wicked' needs to be reserved for really evil things, not for policy decisions which at the very very worst will mean a kid having to cycle to college instead of getting the bus.

Things like this also make me wonder if Polly Toynbee knows anyone who gets EMA or anyone who works in the state sector - I mean on the front line of the state sector, of course, not in the panoply of jobs in town halls and quangos. Most of the teachers I know agree with me and think that EMA is ripe for cutting, are we all wicked?  Let's consider some of the other things Toynbee says:

The withdrawal of the EMA for poor sixth-formers that will hit unsuspecting families hard when they find it suddenly gone. Forget Gordon Brown's 10p tax disgrace which only cost people £230 a year: snatching away £30 a week from the very poorest families with studying teenagers will be a £1,560 shocker. 

Unbelievable.  Firstly, these very poorest families didn't get that £30 a week for the first sixteen years of the kids' life.  That's because the point of EMA was never to help families out of poverty - Labour themselves NEVER claimed that. Tax credits, child benefit, other benefits etc., did that.  The point of EMA was basically to persuade kids to stay on at school. It was an educational policy, not a welfare one. The idea was to try and reduce the attractiveness of leaving school at 16 and getting a part-time job. It quite clearly was NOT about lifting families out of poverty - it would be an odd policy that aimed to help families out of poverty by waiting for their kids to be 16 before you helped them. Thus, because it was an educational policy, if a kid didn't attend school, schools were entitled to withhold their EMA money regardless of whether the kid desperately needed the money or not; likewise, a 16 year old in desperate poverty but not in education couldn't claim the money. The clue is in the name: EDUCATION maintenance allowance. Thirdly, pupils became eligible for EMA money as they entered sixth form or college - that is, at precisely the same time as most of them would have a reduced timetable and more time to get a part-time job.  I understand that there aren't that many jobs out there at the moment, but the time sixth formers gain at least makes this a possibility. I also understand that this can impinge on your time for studying, but that seems to me to be an individual lifestyle choice. Lest I be accused of being a heartless bastard, let me restate that I was eligible for the first EMA pilot, that I didn't take it up and I didn't have a part time job - and my family and I didn't suffer some great hardship as a result.

Finally, of course, there is the fact that EMA didn't exist before 2004. I find it hard to believe how such a recent policy has managed to inspire such crazed defences of it, as though it forms a central part of our nation's heritage.  I mean, I thought the child benefit changes were fine, but even so the sentimental appeals to the foundation of the welfare state and its universality did make me a little misty-eyed.  Very few people alive today have had to bring up a family without child benefit, so at least when its rabid defenders claimed that removing it would take us back to the Depression era they had a skewed kind of historical fact on their side. But EMA has been around for barely half a decade. We can all remember a world without it, and we all know that that world was not a wicked, illiberal one where poor kids scrubbed floors instead of doing A-levels. I think the reason why EMA inspires such defences is of course that it was a New Labour policy, so their cheerleaders feel obliged to come out and defend the legacy.  And I think that what this shows is the absolute paucity of that legacy.

Small Schools Good

Expanding good schools can be a recipe for disaster – Telegraph Blog

I think Katherine Birbalsingh is definitely on to something here. Lots of small schools are very good precisely because they are small. The crucial factor in my personal experience is whether you know the names of all the kids in the school.

I will give an example, one of many I could give. Last term I was walking from my department to the photocopying room on the other side of the school. I had about fifteen minutes before I had to register my class. To get there, I had to walk across the large atrium outside the canteen where all the kids congregated before the bell went. As I walked across it, I saw a pupil I didn't know kicking a full can of coke across the floor. I asked him to stop: he carried on kicking on it and it exploded, with the coke going everywhere. I didn't know his name, and it's only when you've been in this situation that you can understand what a handicap it is not to know a kid's name. He ran off shouting down the corridor. I called for him to come back, but at that point you are on a hiding to nothing.  I knew teachers who would do a Sweeney and charge off down the corridor yelling and screaming at the kid to pull them back.  Whether or not you’re in favour of corporal punishment – I am not – this teacher would look like a tit.  Kids would gather round giggling. The naughty kid would look like a rebellious hero.

My tactic in these situations was to call after the kid calmly that I would find out who he was and ring his parents. It didn’t make me look particularly good, but once a kid has completely ignored your instruction in front of about 100 kids, there isn’t a lot you can do to look good. Had I known the kid’s name, then 99 times out of 100 the kid would turn round and slope back towards me. There would be times a kid would be running off, and another teacher who did know his name would come on the scene and call his name. Bingo: the kid starts to listen. 

The conclusion I take from this is that we need schools where everyone knows everyone’s names. The conclusion a lot of schools take from these sorts of situation is that they need more CCTV. And it’s true, generally I could track down who he was through the school’s CCTV. As a liberal I am not in favour of CCTV in schools. But in a school where you don’t know every kid’s name – indeed, in a school so big that three or four teachers could be walking down the corridor and still have a good chance of bumping into a kid they didn’t know – it became absolutely invaluable. 

This is a classic example of diseconomies of scale – expanding schools is meant to bring economies of scale.  Actually, to maintain even a semblance of the bonds you have in a smaller school, you need expensive things like a CCTV system, and you need head of year co-ordinators who spend very little time teaching and a lot of time dealing with naughty kids, and you need teachers to spend an awful lot of time tracking down CCTV tapes, ringing round and chasing round the school to find miscreants. Clearly, if this is what happens every time you rebuke a kid you don’t know for misbehaving, you’re not going to rebuke kids you don’t know for misbehaving a lot.  This is exactly what happened. The bar for what I would rebuke for was raised.  If I saw a kid I did know, I would pull them up for having their tie done up wrong or talking too loudly in the corridors. If I saw a kid I didn’t know – which in a school of 2000 is most kids – I would turn a blind eye to all but the most outrageous misdemeanours. That doesn’t make me proud. But I know I’m not alone there.

The one area where I would disagree with Birbalsingh is where she says that small schools are right-wing thinking. I don’t think they are, actually: I don’t think there is anything ideological about this idea at all. I think the reason why bigger schools have become the norm is that it appears more efficient, which appeals to beancounters on both sides of the political divide. In actual fact, as I’ve shown, the economies of scale are completely cancelled out by the diseconomies.

There is more and more evidence that small schools are the way forward. A Bristol head teacher, James Wetz, has done an interesting study on the impact of large schools on troubled pupils.  He compares secondary schools to primary schools, which are generally much smaller and with much more of a community feel, and interviews pupils who did well at primary but dropped out at secondary.  In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explains some of the science behind this. Apparently the most effective size of a human community is 150.  Throughout history, communities as diverse as Stone Age settlements and Roman armies have been organized on this basis.  But whilst small schools will be cheaper in the long run, I fear that the short-term benefits of big schools will always prove seductive to politicians.

Correlation and Causation

 There was an item on the Today programme yesterday morning about the research Frank Field is doing into poverty, parenting and education. It also referred to a Sutton Trust report that said children from the poorest backgrounds are twice as likely to have behavioural problems at age 5 as more affluent peers. The presenter then made the classic logical error of assuming that because there is a correlation, there must also be causation, and that the causation must run one way, in this case the poverty causing the behavioural problems.  This is utterly utterly absurd. To see how absurd it is, let us consider what would happen if the families of these kids were to win the lottery. Do we really think that those kids would overnight become little angels? Ridiculous. If anything, they'd use their greater spending power to be even more of a nuisance. Joey Barton and Jermaine Pennant didn't have their behavioural problems suddenly cured by a pay packet of several thousand a week.  And yet the principle that giving poor people more money will miraculously improve all of their life outcomes has been the principle that underpinned most of the social policy of the last decade. It completely ignores the fact that culture and values play an enormous part in behaviour and educational success. That's why certain ethnic groups - Chinese girls, for instance - do incredibly well at school despite poverty.  Culture and values don't cost money.

Bridget Phillipson and EMA

Like me, Bridget Phillipson was also eligible for the pilot EMA scheme. Unlike me, she took it up, and in this video claims that without it, whether she would have become an MP 'remains to be seen'.  

This is an incredible claim, and deserves further investigation.  Bridget Phillipson is one of the youngest MPs – not just in this Parliament but ever. She has clearly not achieved this without being extremely hard working, dedicated and intelligent.  According to her website, she joined the Labour party at age 15, well before she had ever heard of EMA.  She must have got exceptionally good results at GCSE, again before she would have been eligible for EMA.  She must have got very good A-level results because she then went to Oxford to study Modern History, so she must have had a lot of innate talent and drive even on top of the EMA. And she is seriously trying to claim that all this talent, all this dedication, all this hard work, could possibly have been cancelled out by the absence of a £20 a week subsidy for two years at age 16? If she hadn’t got that subsidy, she’d have dropped out, waited tables and stopped attending Labour party meetings in order to smoke crack at the local drug den? Utter, utter rubbish. She would have succeeded with or without it, there's no 'remaining to be seen' at all and if she thinks about it I think she knows that too. She’s insulting herself by suggesting her success is mechanistically dependent upon a government programme. She’s insulting her parents – I don’t believe however poor they were that they’d have let her drop out of college for the sake of £20 a week. And she’s insulting all those brave people – from the north east and elsewhere – who struggled successfully against far greater poverty and inequality than she has ever had to confront.

Worse than these insulting implications, however, is the damage this idea does to society.  It suggests that if you don’t succeed in life, it is entirely down to the fact that the state didn’t give you enough money when you were young. This is exactly the attitude I see again and again in the classroom.  Teachers across the country try and give their kids a ‘no excuses’ attitude to get them to overcome petty and sometimes more serious difficulties.  Nothing worthwhile was ever achieved without effort, we say.  We do all this because for very many of our kids, they will use any excuse whatsoever to try and hide the fact that they can’t be bothered.

 But what’s the point in us struggling to get our kids to work hard when the message coming from politicians is: if you fail or drop out, it’s not your fault. It’s the fault of the nasty government for not giving you enough money. If you doubt that the attitudes of politicians and intellectuals influence kids, take a look at the EMA website where a whole gaggle of pupils essentially restate Bridget Phillipson’s argument – if you don’t give me this money, I will be a failure and it will all be your fault. Ever since I started teaching, I became more and more aware of how out-of-touch most politicians are with what actually happens in the public services.  Bridget Phillipson, of course, would never have let the absence of this subsidy deter her from getting a good education. But the idea that she and others like her spread - that their success is down to the munificent bounty of the generous state, and not their own ability - is genuinely believed by many kids out there, those I teach and those all over the EMA website. 

As well as this, the whole thing just reinforces the belief that Labour got us into this mess with ill-judged government giveaways, and are now completely refusing to even consider abolishing any of them. As one of their saner members said, 'we look like we want to die in the ditch for every last Sea Harrier, millionaire’s child benefit payment and pint of student snakebite.' Well quite. The religion of socialism was once the language of priorities, and I can’t imagine any of the 1945 cabinet prioritising giving semi-literate 17 year olds beer money and Apple Macs. 

Educational Maintenance Allowance - EMA

I first heard of EMA when I was in the 6^th form. They were piloting it in the London borough where I lived and I was eligible for it. I never claimed it – partly this was teenage laziness but partly it was because I didn’t really believe something so ridiculous had been invented. I was staying on in the 6^th form anyway. My parents weren’t wealthy but they could afford to give me pocket money. I ate lunches in school and dinners at home. It felt slightly ridiculous that I would actually get money to do what I had been doing for the past five years. I am not being sanctimonious here – in hindsight I wish I had got my act together and claimed the money. I am just pointing out what a waste a lot of it – a waste in the sense that it was designed to encourage people who wouldn’t have done so to stay on in school, when all the evidence shows that about 90% of those eligible for it were like me and would have stayed on anyway.  Now I am a teacher, I can see even more what a waste it is. Of the 60 odd kids I’ve taught who have been eligible for EMA, only a handful would have dropped out without it. And of those only one actually wanted to study in the 6^th form. The others were only there for the EMA – that is to say, it functioned as a bribe.

But EMA exists, and amongst the ahistorical youth of today is seen as a kind of birthright. The NUS have a hilarious website filled with the illiterate rants of teenagers defending their entitlement.  According to the campaign leader, and many of the comments on there, EMA is utterly vital to their education – nay, the nation’s future prosperity. One wonders how people survived at 6^th form in the dim and distant days before 2004, let alone those students in the 50s and 60s. One wonders why it was that social mobility was higher in the 1970s than today.  Not all the students defend it on the grounds of national interest though – some are clearer about the vested interest:

If E.M.A GETS STOPPED I AINT GUNNA GO COLLEGE THERES NO POINT .. X

This young man is at least honest. He’s at college for the money, if you cut it then he will swan off and become one of the NEETs so dreaded by politicians.  You have to wonder what he thinks the point of college is for him – call me a cynic but the point actually seems to be the £20. If he got EMA and did attend college, I somehow doubt it would turn him into a paragon of intellectual devotion. Rather, I would suggest that he would end up sitting hung over at the back of the class, not contributing and not doing any work. If he didn’t get EMA, he probably would become a NEET. If he did, he’d stay at college and be a NEET in all but name and the statistics.  This is what I think some of the statistics about the ‘success’ of EMA show – yes, if you bribe kids to stay on at school, you will obviously raise attendance. You will probably also raise attainment slightly because it’s harder to get a U than an E in a lot of courses, especially where there is a large coursework element. Whether this sort of improved attainment really is an improvement is another issue.  Here is another pupil:

I Think that without ema i will never be able to afford to go to college and pay for the equipment i need as most of my work is done on apple macs as i am a media student all my ema will go towards paying off my fee for my apple mac and other equipment.

This sort of poor grammar and spelling is not unusual on the Save EMA website.  Very few of those agitating to receive it demonstrate the sort of writing ability you would expect of college students. Or, as one of my friends once said to me, 'if you can’t spell college, you shouldn’t be going to college.'

One more student:

Its difficult to get a part-time job, because of the credit crunch. Cutting EMA will just make it worse, as students will drop out, affecting the economy even more.

Im doing 6form this september and i hope i get my EMA. Thank you for this campaign, hopefully It will work out.

It would seem to me that if it really is difficult to get a job – as many of the comments testify - then that’s all the more reason for staying on at college, because the alternative is presumably NEETdom which isn’t going to do any good for your personal prospects or those of the country.