Camden High School For Girls - Shows Just What Schools Should Be About

Margot visits Camden High and demonstrates that Conservative Policies will result in more good schools.

Why can’t more state schools be more like Camden High?  If they were you can be sure that property prices in the local area would fall by as much as twenty per cent as parents would not have to pay a premium in house prices to get their child a good education.

My visit in November started with an interview with the School Head, Anne Canning.  Within minutes it was clear that the most often stated reason for a school being good, a good head, is very true in Camden High’s case.  Founded in 1871 the school has a strong ethos based on respect and learning.  With fewer than a thousand pupils it is not as large as some inner city schools and the eighty or so new places available each year are always over subscribed.

It is a genuine comprehensive and proof that the comprehensive ideal, so widely discredited in inner cities, can work.  Applicants for new places sit an exam and are classified into four groups according to ability.  Equal numbers of pupils are given places from each group ensuring an intake of genuinely mixed ability.  Maths, science and languages are streamed at year eight, otherwise pupils are taught together.

Most classes have 28 pupils.  The school tries to keep classes as small as possible despite the loss of income this entails.  The more pupils they have in a class the more money they get from the LEA.  As the government are always talking about smaller class sizes this funding strategy is yet another example of perverse incentives (at best) and/or spin over reality at worst.

I asked Anne Canning for her view of Conservative proposals to allow good schools to expand at the expanse of bad schools whose demise would be hastened under our policies.  Her response was cautious; she said that the difficulty was space.  There was no more room to expand Camden High.  I have had a similar reaction from another head that welcomed most or our proposals but said that schools becoming too large would detract from what made them good in the first place.

I agree with these criticisms.  However our policies are flexible enough to get around them.  I would like us to focus on the policy we have of encouraging the takeover of bad schools by the management of good schools.  This would enable schools like Camden High to spread their values and performance over many more pupils than just adding another two hundred places (even suppose that were possible). 

The education of people who will have to develop the intellect and skills to compete with the Asian economies of the future is too important for us to accept the very slow and piecemeal improvements that the Labour government are bringing about.

There are too many bad schools and nowhere near enough schools like Camden High.  No wonder proportionately fewer students from state schools are getting into the top universities than was the case before the abolition of grammar schools.  It was Labour policies that caused this decline in the first place and it is Conservative policies that will increase opportunities once again for children from less well off families.