My blog

Tag: Gina Miller

  • Opinion: Gina Miller on a new beginning for schools

    Gina Miller

    We have 167,000 charities in the United Kingdom – that’s a phenomenal number. But we have only one or two parenting charities. That’s a pity because the days of learning parenting from your own parents have gone: the family network isn’t there as it once was. You can’t leave the welfare of children only up to the schools. When they’ve had initiatives in the past such as SureStart it got commandeered by middle class parents even though it wasn’t particularly aimed at them. These initiatives have failed to bring in the parents who really need the support.

    Our schools could be used more as a hub to provide for the people who need assistance. Too many people are stuck in the idea of what a school is for. A school is actually to serve our community – it’s not just about educating people. If you think of it that way, you can utilise schools as a way of teaching in a wider sense. We don’t need to be so narrowly focussed.

    Education, a bit like the NHS, has been used as a political football and political parties tend to guard their territory jealously. This is why I propose a fourth summer term. The weather can create a sense of summer school, and volunteering could enter the picture. One charity I know works with ex-service people and they go in and teach sports. They understand that kids can get into mischief. They do phenomenal work – even the most difficult teenager will pull their socks up.

    We also have a retiring population who have so much knowledge and experience and who are actually physically fitter than they were in the past. We need to think more broadly about what happens to them and use the wisdom they’ve accumulated in their lives to better our own children.

    That also means we need to broaden and rethink the curriculum. At the moment, the conversation is all around history and how we teach it, but this approach is nowhere near bold enough.

    When I speak to the educators and they’re very frustrated. As a result, we’re losing good people in our education system because of the politicisation of our schools. It’s so interesting to me that whenever I speak to a politician about education it always starts from a position of defensiveness. I always say: “What are you defensive about?” I don’t mind which political party they come from. The facts are clear: we can’t deny that we are failing in our educational standards, that we have a low take-up when it comes to further education, or that we made a mistake when we got rid of training colleges. When we got rid of training colleges, and qualifications in plumbing, hospitality, or food and drink, we devalued those professions. Before, when you had the qualifications, you gave those careers standing.

    My daughter is 14 and her school is offering coding for GCSE. Only two girls out of 90 took up the task. We have to think about what we’re teaching for. That will go in hand-in-hand with the need to put more resources into life learning as people will change professions at least twice during their lives now.

    We used to laugh at Nordic countries, and the fact that children go to school at six and not four. But look at the statistics: they are much more confident at six. Sending children to school at four is to rip them from their mothers and fathers. If you’re really retiring at 70, what’s the rush? You’re teaching them to: “Don’t cry, be tough.”

    Resilience for me isn’t about being tough, it’s about being empathetic and being able to turn yourself to anything and not being rigid.

    In a similar spirit, I would also get rid of the 11+ as that’s far too early to be pigeon-holing people. I’d also get rid of the 7+. The narrowness of choice at GCSE level also needs to be looked at. If you don’t do sciences it narrows you, and if you don’t do languages it narrows you – and again we’re locking people into the consequences of premature decisions. I would also argue that projects are much better than exams: the inventiveness required for a history project is a world away from what you get when students just regurgitate facts from memory for an examination. If we could look at all of the above, then we might begin to address the problems of education in our society.

    Gina Miller is the founder of the True and Fair Party

  • Gina Miller: ‘We need a fourth school term devoted to non-academic aspects of education’

    Gina Miller: ‘We need a fourth school term devoted to non-academic aspects of education’

    Before Covid-19, education was being neglected but I think the pandemic has really shone a light on our underfunded education system. It’s a hard truth, but we haven’t really thought enough about how we’re going to educate our kids in the future.

    The biggest conversation now is about catch up – but it’s about catching up to back to where we before. What we’re not doing is thinking of this as an opportunity to really rethink. We need not just to modernise education, but to rethink the curriculum, rethink our schools architecture, and look again at teacher training. What’s needed is a commission to look at the entire system. If I look at where we are now as a country, we’re a long way away from where we were when I was growing up in Guyana. In those days, British education was the gold standard everywhere in the Commonwealth. I was brought up by English nuns in a convent in British Guyana and we all understood that education is the most precious thing you could give your children. That was because whatever happened in life, they would have the skills, resilience, heart and brain to deal with what came next.

    My fear is we’ve lost that thinking about education as being about building mental and physical agility and resilience. Instead we’ve become obsessed with assessment.

    And of course this series of missteps has had ramifications. If you look at us now on the global index, we’re nowhere near the top – we’re actually in the bottom, and our reading skills have dropped dramatically. This is especially astonishing when you consider that economically we’re a country that’s doing well. Added to that, we’ve got problems with our approach to teaching which seems to be based on the notion that the future will be much like the past. But the world isn’t where it was, and we’ve got to look at the warning signs.

    One thing we have to focus on is the Fourth Revolution, and what’s happening with digital technology. We know that this has its mental health aspects. Sadly, it’s especially prevalent among teenage children that too much exposure to technology creates this sense of depression and sadness. There are emotional consequences to learning remotely which have been accelerated through Covid. There’s an analogy with work here – where we’ve learned that we’re social animals, and that some tasks are far better conducted face to face. Likewise, we need to realise that there’s a sensory aspect to learning – you’ve got to engage the five senses.

    And if we’re to keep all our senses healthy what does that mean? It means art, music and literature – it can’t all be about the academic curriculum so I think we have an opportunity here if we can find the courage and imagination to think radically. For instance, we have three terms in the UK at the moment – and that’s based on the rather outdated notion that kids used to need to go and bring in the harvest in summer. That’s what the long summer holiday is based on – and it hasn’t happened for hundreds of years!

    I would propose that part of the review is to look at the possibility of a fourth term. I would dedicate that term to things that are not necessarily academically led, but which have an academic element: the environment, gardening, cooking, community service, sports. It would be a term where children aren’t in the classroom, but they’re in the community and they’re learning a different skill set, which would keep them in good stead for the future.

    That would be good not just for mental health and mental agility but for coping against adversity in a world which we know will be radically different to what we know now. Look at some of the up and coming countries and how they’re coping with education, and there’s a huge amount for us to chew on there. It’s really quite remarkable the subjects they’re teaching. In Singapore, or in Rwanda or in Ghana, they’re focused on handing down entrepreneurial skills to the coming generations. They’re learning about their environment and the challenges facing their countries.

    So we’ve not yet made that leap into understanding that we need to invest in our education – that it’s the best investment we can make. I’d argue it’s one we need to make now.

  • Gina Miller: “There’s a new kind of presenteeism in the workplace”

    Gina Miller: “There’s a new kind of presenteeism in the workplace”

    The fact is that after Brexit, we’d been living in lockdown for about three or four years anyway because we’d stopped going out. The attention generated by Miller I and Miller II had meant that life had become pretty restricted. Anyway, we carried on as normal and what changed is that the not so pleasant people we were busy dealing with had their own life and so they let us alone.

    However, it all popped up again with the anniversary of Brexit, and I had forgotten actually how horrible it is to be on the receiving end of this kind of abuse. It doesn’t really get to me – but I had forgotten how nasty it can be.

    But we’ve had a time of reflection, and society is now coming to a point where everybody’s wondering what they’re supposed to do with these supposed new freedoms. Family life has changed. Everybody had got to a place where home was almost an afterthought – even though it costs so much money. The challenge is going to be finding the balance as we move forwards.

    What I find very interesting is that the UK is in a dilemma over remote working, whereas other countries have already decided their approach. For example, in New York, the authorities have that said if you can eat out, you can work out, and so they’re encouraging people to go back to the office. That’s happening across Europe and in Asia as well. It all comes down to productivity, and how you get that up and working from home works better in some sectors than in others.

    I work in wealth management, and I think for professional settings – and I include lawyers, accountants, and bankers in this – there’s so much that you learn by watching people and seeing how they make decisions. It’s also a question of mentoring and asking ourselves how we bring on the juniors. Business-owners will realise that you can’t do that remotely.

    But the reality is that each profession – and each business – is going to have to make up their own minds and I don’t think we’ll see a holistic view of how we work for the future. But it also raises other issues, many of which people aren’t thinking enough about. One of those is pay. For instance, if people are using more of their own energy and electricity and they’re going to be at home, do we need compensation structures for that? Many companies had travel allowances before. Will we now have a home allowance? That needs to be resolved. 

    Then there’s the question of human resources. How do you actually assess progress? The problem is that if progress is going to carry on being measured by outcomes then that could actually create all sorts of other discriminations, as you’ll find output varying a lot according to home circumstances. 

    That opens up onto a topic I’ve become especially concerned about, which is presenteeism at work – that’s to say, people showing up at work and being unable to be productive. For parents – and for women, in particular – it was fantastic during Covid-19 that you could be at home so much. But for professional women we’re beginning to see data that they’re already thinking of going part-time or giving up work. That’s because at home, they’re still the mum and the wife, and they’re having to do an awful lot more. Middle management women, or women in senior management roles, are working late into the night once they finish their domestic day. They’re working until two or three o’clock in the morning, and we shouldn’t be surprised if such people experience burnout.

    So you have a concerning situation whereby presenteeism at the workplace is being replaced by presenteeism at home. It’s disturbing to me that we’ve fought so long to get into the workplace, and to push the diversity agenda, to consider the unintended consequences here: if we’re not careful, we might undo all that work very quickly. 

    We’ve got to look at this business of virtual mansplaining. Do we want a world where women are being left out of team meetings and pitches, and we have male workers go: “Well, we know she’s really busy in the day, they’ll pick it up in the evening?” Of course, not, and we’ve got to be mindful that that’s happening in order to prevent it.