The only word possible to describe Islington’s education system

If there is one place in the UK that could be said to epitomise the values of the Middle Class Left then that place would be Islington in North London. There is also no place that embodies the failure of these Middle Class Leftist values than the education system in that borough.

In Islington from the early 1960’s onwards, influential middle class Leftists were able to gain control over the education system both in those schools that were administered directly by the borough and those that were controlled by the now defunct Inner London Education Authority. The result was chaos, indiscipline and most importantly the cheating of working class pupils of their right to a decent education.

Islington slavishly followed the progressive child centred views of Leftist educationalists such as AS Neil and of the Plowden Report. The failures of these policies have been very plain to see and the Commentator blog has an excellent history of the educational disaster that Islington created. The situation got so bad that the offspring of Middle Class Left who live in Islington now send their children outside the borough for education and working class parents are struggling, sometimes by doing four jobs, to pay for independent education for their children. Several generations of children have been failed by policies that seem good on paper, such as mixed ability teaching, learning by self discovery and a retreat from discipline.

The Commentator said:

“Islington was the home of Britain’s first outwardly “progressive” comprehensive school, and this country’s most acrimonious school scandal. The borough’s schools have spurred politicians of all stripes into action, from the right-wing Tory MP Rhodes Boyson, to Jim Callaghan’s head of policy Bernard Donoughue. Tony Blair, once Islington’s most famous resident, risked the ire of his own party by refusing to send his children to a local school, and charged another Islington resident, Andrew Adonis, with reforming British education.

An Islington school even provided the choir for perhaps the world’s best-known song about education, Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”.

During the Sixties and Seventies, Islington’s elegant but crumbling Georgian terraces were bought and renovated by an influx of vaguely bohemian professional couples — “the white wine and marijuana brigade” in the words of one historian. In keeping with their countercultural outlook, many of these couples sent their children to a clutch of new “progressive” local schools, where the rudiments of a traditional school — academic subjects, uniforms, strict discipline, examinations — were giving way to experiments in “child-centred” learning and minimal adult authority.

Here, middle-class children rubbed shoulders with the inhabitants of Islington’s large new council estates, including many recent immigrants from Cyprus and the West Indies. These schools set out to provide a liberated school environment where children from all classes and cultures could be freed from adult authority and achieve self-fulfilment. The reality could not have been more different. 

In 1960, a secondary school called Risinghill opened next to Pentonville Prison in the Barnsbury neighbourhood of Islington. The school’s head, Michael Duane, was a left-wing former army major who had been ousted from secondary moderns in Suffolk and Hertfordshire for his unconventional approach to schooling. He was a friend of A.S. Neill, founder of the do-as-you-please boarding school Summerhill, where lessons were optional and school rules non-existent. “

Later the Commentator said:

“By 1996, Islington reportedly had the worst GCSE results for any local authority in the country. Few were surprised when Islington resident and Labour Party leader Tony Blair refused to send his sons to the local secondary school. Instead, he sent his sons eight miles across London to the Oratory in Fulham, a Catholic school known for its traditionalist ethos.

Even former Islington Council leader Margaret Hodge made a similar concession, sending her children across the boundary to a school in Camden. In 1996, the Sunday Times sent a reporter to Islington to find out why the top brass of the Labour Party were avoiding their local schools. He reported: “The progressive ideologies of the 1960s . . . are still very much alive in [Tony Blair’s] back yard.” 

Progressive education was not a passing fad of the Seventies. In schools across Britain, ideas which were once radical and revolutionary had by now become ubiquitous. Chris Pryce, the Liberal Democrat leader of the opposition at Islington Council, reported in 1996: “The people running Islington schools believe that personal achievement, especially in exams, is ‘middle-class’ and therefore suspect, and that failure of individual children should not be recognised because it is ‘discriminatory’.” 

Most shocking of all, the school system that trendy lefties had designed for other people’s children during the 1970s did not seem so appealing when it came to their own families. Pryce conducted his own research and found as few as 10 percent of Islington homeowners were now sending their children to the local schools.

This was particularly the case with secondary education; by 1998, more than a third of Islington primary school pupils departed the borough for their secondary education. The affluent liberals of N1 were finding escape routes via London faith schools, or simply going private.”

Child-centred progressive education has failed to educate children in the way that they should be educated and the failures of this policy are sadly not confined to Islington. In schools up and down the country the dire influence of the Islington progressive educators can be seen. We have schools that do not teach and inspire children to learn, but instead spend valuable time promoting the latest trendy education or political theory at the expense of real learning.

Islington schools have been a failure, but the failed policies that sent Islington schools into a pit of educational despair are not confined to that benighted borough. Those who failed to teach in places like Islington are now teaching the teachers and that should give any parent nightmares. We should rise up and tell schools that our children are Britain’s future and are not to be seen as playthings or subjects for the latest Leftist social engineering experiment.