Ben Jeffreys: Our education system should be designed to reflect the fact that one size does not fit all

Ben Jeffreys is a teacher and contested Cheadle at the general election.

The driving up of tuition fees is not a cure. It is a symptom of the general failings over the last 60 years in educational provision. Throughout that time, Left-wing thinkers have controlled the arguments in education and have maintained a single underlying principle. This is that all students, irrespective of background, interest or ability, must get exactly the same provision and all do as well as each other. In other words, the equality of comprehensive education for all. No-one can be left behind, ignored or made different. All students are equal.

How to achieve that? The first step is to ensure that every student is studying the same things in every school. So a National Curriculum was brought in and steadily extended, while the school leaving age was pushed up. This meant testing the students to ensure that the teachers stuck to the same syllabus for all. But some students did worse than others! A disaster to the comprehensive ideal – after all, it undermined the idea that all students were the same. So grade inflation began, with results pushed higher and higher, so that no one should fail. Once this was achieved, through comprehensive schools and the near-universal GCSE pass, the comprehensivising Left looked at Higher Education. Some students got this and some not.

Surely that was unfair? All students were equal, weren’t they? And everyone should be able to have exactly the same education as their peers? So the comprehensivising Left began the crusade to make all students equal at Higher Education too. This meant making institutions equal – out went the technology colleges and polytechnics, and every institution became a university. Grade inflation was masking the differences between student performance, so now university offers could be made to almost anyone. The numbers flooding in went up and up.