BBC Shock Admission: City Technology Colleges Worked

The ever left-wing BBC has admitted that Thatcher's City Technology Colleges WERE A GOOD IDEA:

They may be a political anachronism but they are also highly successful schools. Moreover, unlike the academies, they now have a track record of well over a decade. The evidence is definitive.

I looked them up in BBC News website's performance tables. Excluding Djanogly College, now a city academy, all 14 have GCSE-level results well above the national average - with eight scoring above 85% of pupils achieving five A*-C's or equivalent qualifications.

No slowdown

On the even more telling value added score (charting pupils' progress from their tests aged 11 to their GCSEs), 11 scored above 1000, showing they had improved attainment by more than the national average.

All 14 had value added scores that were higher than the average for their local authority area.

Like the city academies, the CTCs are located in the cities. They admit pupils from the full range of ability.

They may have been an expensive experiment but they can, definitively, be said to have raised attainment.

Naturally, the BBC only admit this in an attempt to justify the Labour government's flagship education policy. Still, regardless of their motives, let us savour this rare (if limited) conversion of the BBC to Thatcherism!