13th March 2014 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Schools minister David Laws has told parliament that pushy parents are role models for society. Complaining that parents have low aspirations, Laws told a parliamentary committee that ‘sharp-elbowed parents’ are displaying desirable behavior that should be emulated by other parents. He made the comments in response to a question about the problem of the middle-classes dominating schools system, preparing their children for grammar school entrance or paying for private school. According to the schools minister, rather than viewing this as a problem, more parents should be aspiring to pay for private education.
Speaking to the committee, Laws said that pushy parents were part of the answer, not the problem. He went on to say that the government needed to encourage selective and private schools to make opportunities more available to students from disadvantaged areas, commenting that rather than capping opportunities such as these, they should be made more widely available. He spoke of the issue of parents employing private tutors to coach their children for school entrance, and said that schools needed to do more to ensure that tests were fair.
Laws went on to attack what he referred to as a culture of low aspirations, referring in particular to the white working classes. He cited a ‘poverty of expectation’ and said that parents and students needed to set their sights higher in order to be successful. Referring to the improvement in results of London schools, he said that it was possible for students and schools to aspire to better things. He also accused schools in poorer areas of ‘tolerating failure’, and encouraging students to maintain low aspirations.