According to a report in today's Observer, privately-educated children are expected to get three times as many A stars at A-level as state school pupils when the results are announced later this week. Given that the new A star grade has been introduced to help top universities identify the most able applicants, that's a terrible indictment of New Labour's education policies. It inevitably means that the percentage of places at Russell Group universities filled by children from state schools will fall.
Nic Dakin, Labour MP for Scunthorpe and a member of the House of Commons select committee on education, claims these results illustrate the folly of cancelling the Building Schools for the Future programme. In the Observer report, he says that the only way to narrow the gap between the state and private sector is to spend more money on school buildings. "It's about investing in state education, not scrapping Building Schools for the Future, so that our state system can have the state-of-the-art accommodation our young people deserve," he said. (To read more, click here.)
