Rebecca Smithers, education correspondent
Tuesday August 29, 2000
The Guardian
The campaign against grammar schools is to be relaunched this week, after the government bowed to pressure to make it easier for parents to abolish the surviving 165 selective schools.
Campaigners in Kent, which has the largest number of grammar schools, 33, will on Friday reactivate the petitioning process they were forced to abandon this year. The government is to relax some of the technical regulations to make it easier for campaigners to collect the signatures they need to force a vote among parents.
But the education secretary, David Blunkett, is expected to face fierce criticism of Labor’s policy on grammar schools at a fringe meeting at the party conference at the end of next month. It has been accused of “sitting on the fence” by letting parents decide the schools’ fate.
Speakers on the highly sensitive issue will include Lord Hattersley, a former Labor deputy leader, who is still outraged over Mr Blunkett’s claim this year that his “read my lips” comment about being opposed to selection was a joke.
The campaign in Kent was suspended at the end of March because of “political confusion” over the issue, the complexity of Campaigners needed to get 46,000 signatures of eligible parents for a vote to take place but are understood to have secured fewer than 7,000.
Their decision came hard on the heels of a vote in Ripon. North Yorkshire, where a two-thirds majority voted to retain their grammar school – the oldest in England – in the first ballot under legislation introduced by Labor.
Ballots are triggered by support from 20% of eligible parents. In Ripon it took campaigners six months to obtain the 1,800 signatures needed.
In Kent the parents of all children at the 600 primary schools are eligible to vote. The Stop the 11-plus (Step) campaign will on Friday ask the Electoral Reform Society for a threshold figure for the number of signatures they need in 2000/2001.
A Step spokesman, Martin Frey, said it had been told not to reprint the old petition forms, suggesting that changes were likely. A spokesman for the Department for Education and Employment confirmed technical changes such as allowing space to include up to 10 names on a petition form, rather than only three.
He said Mr Blunkett, in a Commons debate in June, had recognized the need for some practical changes, but there would be no amendments to the ballot system as enshrined in primary legislation.
Mr Frey said: “We are hoping for some meaningful changes that will make our Herculean task a little easier. Anything less than this and there will be hell for Mr Blunkett at the party conference.”
The selective structure in Kent was damaging standards, not raising them, he added. “As the GCSE results showed last week, there are some comprehensives that are doing magnificently well, despite having some of the best pupils creamed off to the grammars.”
He pointed to little-known changes that meant the “loss” of around 500 places from Kent grammar schools next year.
In addition, the 11-plus test is being changed, with a pass/fail-on-the-day format being introduced and consultation due to take place to bring it forward from January to September, when nearly all children would be only 10.
Big Brother could lead to fatal copycats, rivals claim
Matt Wells, media correspondent
Tuesday August 29, 2000
The Guardian
A BBC executive and a prominent psychologist have criticized the Channel 4 TV show Big Brother as a “freak show” that could spawn dangerous and even fatal copycat versions.
Phil Harding, head of editorial policy at the BBC, said the race to replicate the successful format would “mess up” participants’ lives as rival shows tried to outperform each other.
And Raj Persaud, a psychologist and media commentator, said Big Brother’s premise – filming a group for 24 hours a day and ejecting one each week – was based on exploiting ordinary people’s lives.
Both were speaking at the Guardian Edinburgh international television festival, in a debate about the surveillance-TV format that is increasing in popularity around the world.
Peter Bazalgette, head of Bazal, the company that makes Big Brother for Channel 4, denied that any of the participants would be harmed. All had applied to take part in the show, and had been told of what to expect.
He also categorically denied that Nick Bateman, a contestant who was evicted for cheating, was a “plant” designed to spice up the show. While the programme was never intended to be a social experiment, he said: “It’s riveting, it’s revealing, and it’s entertaining.”
Mr Harding said while Channel 4 had taken responsible steps to care for the contestants, other producers might not be so scrupulous. Warning against the inevitable rash of copycat shows that will follow Big Brother, he said: “At the top of the curve, there will be dozens of shows. They will push it and push it, and it won’t be a responsible company like Bazal, there will be a real plant, and it will really mess with people’s lives. A killer application will become a real killer application.”
Dr Persaud said the current series had already taken advantage of its contestants in a damaging way. “These people have been stereotyped. They have been turned into freaks.”
Sada Walkington, the first contestant to be “evicted” in the process by which the 10 contestants are gradually eliminated, said the editing of the show was designed to cast certain people in defined roles, and did not show the flaws of others. “We weren’t told that we would be manipulated as characters,” she said. “I was typecast as the dippy hippy southern posh blonde. They were putting us up to be people we weren’t.”
She was critical of the programme’s website, which contains written summaries of the activities in the house. “I find some of the stuff they wrote was really cutting, quite destructive of my personality.”
Ms Walkington said the show’s editors had promised not to broadcast scenes of participants in the shower unless there was a good reason to do so. Recently, she claimed, several had been shown showering for no reason other than to titillate the audience.
Ruth Wrigley, the show’s executive producer, said after the debate that there were always “editorial reasons” for showing someone in the shower, such as to demonstrate that they had just got up. “I just got bored with exactly the same getting-up sequence,” she said.
At an earlier session, David Liddiment, ITV’s director of programmes, revealed that he had turned down Big Brother because he thought it would be boring. “Everyone has their turning down the Beatles story,” he said.
In brief
Tuesday August 29, 2000
The Guardian
