QC and the SSRP
Editorial
The International Committee of Queen's College is in the country this week, and one of the items on their agenda is a panel discussion to be held on Thursday at 5:00 pm on the role of QC in the delivery of secondary education in the 21st century. That is a discussion which cannot take place in a vacuum, of course, and one expects that first of all the Ministry of Education will enlighten participants about the Secondary Schools Reform Project (SSRP), and exactly what future is envisaged for the school within that framework. The general outline of the project is well known, involving in its first phase the introduction of a common curriculum throughout the first three years of the secondary system, the abolition of streaming and the abandonment of the Common Entrance Examination, which under the circumstances would become redundant. Community High Schools and Primary Tops would go, and all would be converted into secondary schools offering the same fare as QC or wherever. There would be no competition for places in particular schools, since pupils would be required to attend the secondary school located in their catchment area. The one little crinkle in this plane of uniformity, is the indication from the Ministry of Education that gifted children would be specially catered for under the new arrangements, although the details have not been made public. No one can quarrel with the upgrading of the Community High Schools and the Primary Tops into secondary schools, and the offering of a curriculum which would better equip the students to cope with this dog-eat-dog world of globalization, but the elimination of competition from the system altogether is not necessarily a wise move. As it is, the Ministry of Education has had nothing to say about the future of the sixth form schools, whose emphasis has traditionally been on academic excellence. Are the gifted students to be accommodated here, or is it the Ministry's plan to turn some of the oldest educational institutions in the country, whose academic record has been formidable, into ordinary secondary schools whose ethos and curriculum are indistinguishable from the former Primary Tops? Against all the odds, QC continues to turn out scholars. That is still what it does best. And parents go on pushing for their children to go there, and no upgrading of local primary schools is likely to change that. If tomorrow Queen's were to become just another secondary school accepting entrants from its catchment area only, parents from other zones would still be manoeuvring to try and get their children placed there. If they failed with QC, they would turn their attention to one or another of the sixth form schools. The one thing which we should have learnt from the Burnham era is that one should never interfere with institutions which work. And while QC does not work anything like as well as it used to, for reasons which are only too well known, it still somehow manages to do that which it is supposed to do. It is a school with a long tradition, which in the 1870s was ranked second in the then empire for scholastic achievements; only Liverpool College in England surpassed it. In the twentieth century, for a long time it was regarded as one of the leading Commonwealth schools. The Ministry needs to come clean with the International Committee, the Queen's College Old Students' Association and the nation at large. Just how do the sixth form schools in general, and QC in particular, fit into the SSRP? The issue might as well come out into the open now, because in this instance it will not be possible to impose a new direction on QC without first securing some form of consensus from those organizations which have poured so much money into maintaining their former alma mater.
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