Pat Dollard | Young Americans

British Daily Telegraph:

Middle-class teenagers are being turned into “whipping boys” as ministers discriminate against them in favour of students from poor homes, teachers warned today.

Education is being “dumbed down” as universities turn their attention towards easy subjects like surfing studies, beauty therapy and knitwear to attract more working-class students, it is claimed.

In a fierce attack, the Professional Association of Teachers called for the Government to halt its drive towards so-called “social engineering”.

The comments come amid controversy over policies designed to increase the number of university students from state schools and deprived backgrounds.

Ministers want to see half of all school-leavers studying beyond the age of 18 and have given dons tough targets to attract “hard to reach” students.

But Peter Morris, chairman of the PAT in Wales, accused ministers of “creating barriers in education based on social class”.

Addressing the union’s annual conference in Harrogate, he said: “I am angry because this Government has interfered with my children and their children’s chances of getting a good education in this country.

“They have changed the ways that examinations are assessed, and clearly this has had a ‘dumbing down’ effect on the academic standards, in order to get more pupils to achieve.”

Under new rules, teenagers applying for university will be asked to say whether their parents have degrees in an attempt to attract more students from poor homes. But Mr Morris insisted it amounted to discrimination against middle-class pupils.

“This political interfering with university applications clearly is designed to reduce the chances of hard-working applicants getting places,” he said.

“How can any academic institution make a selection of candidates for university courses based on the perceived social class of the parents?

“The middle classes are becoming the new whipping boys for ‘New Labour’.”

Criticising the Government’s education record, Mr Morris, a retired teacher from Swansea, said exams had gone from being academically rigorous to posing “woolly, touchy-feely” questions with little intellectual merit to act as a leg-up to the working classes.

Courses such as physics, chemistry and maths have been replaced with “non-academic” degrees such as “surfing, beauty therapy, knitwear, circus skills, pig enterprise management, death studies, air guitar, David Beckham studies and wine studies”, he said.

The comments come just days after universities were accused of cashing in on soft courses by plugging degrees in subjects such as complementary medicine.

It was disclosed that applications for complementary medicine are up more than 31 per cent this year, while there has been a 19 per cent fall in applications to study anatomy, physiology and pathology.

Speaking at the PAT conference, Nardia Foster, a psychology teacher from Enfield, north London, said that Labour had created a more “fractured, divided, selfish society”.

“There is a lack of consistency, stability, moral integrity and fairness in our society,” she said.

“To dumb down declares to the whole world ‘British children are stupid’.”

Geraldine Everett, PAT chairman, said universities should not set “quotas” for admissions.

“It is wrong to manufacture reasons to put one group forward ahead of another,” she said.

“It is an invasion of privacy to take account of parental background. Places should go on merit – not your parents’ education.”

Last month it emerged that leading institutions were actually taking fewer students from deprived areas - despite the Government’s drive to redress their middle-class bias.

Teenagers from wealthier families and private schools increased their hold on places at half of the 20 most sought-after universities, according to official figures.

A spokesman for the newly-formed Department for Children, Schools and Families said: “We are ensuring every child has the best possible start in life and the opportunity to succeed - nobody can argue with that.

“New ways of raising standards in schools, such as progression and personalisation, will ensure that all pupils get the education they deserve to reach their full potential. And it is only right that we are also ensuring the opportunity of higher education is accessible to everyone who desires it.”