Britain's Finance Minister and Exmouth Community College

As I will reveal at the end of this post I have more than a little personal interest in this report.

The BBC ran a day of schools acting as journalists yesterday and from Devon a group of students set out to 11 Downing street to ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer some questions on what he describes as the recession but the students elsewhere more accurately call The Credit Crunch. A full report is here. The following are the questions put by the students, I will link his replies here when they become available.

Alistair Darling Questions
1. How has the credit crunch affected you personally – and your family – outside of work?
2. What are your plans to fix the credit crunch?
3. If something goes wrong at school, someone gets blamed and they get into trouble. Who is to blame for the credit crunch and how will they be punished?
4. We are constantly told to get a job to learn responsibility and the value of money, but it is becoming increasingly hard to get Saturday jobs, what are you proposing to do about this?
5. As our mums and dads are struggling in the credit crunch, we are having to pay for more things ourselves but as we’ve just said, it’s really hard to find jobs now - how do you propose we get hold of money to ensure we still lead active and healthy lives?
6. If the government is concerned with our carbon footprint, why are bus and train prices still rising? As we can’t get Saturday jobs and parents are increasingly hard up, we have less money to pay for transport.
7. What would your advice be to a struggling family about how to beat the recession?
8. Has lowering VAT made any difference, other than creating awkward prices everywhere?
9. My dad’s just been made redundant and so have many of my friend’s dads. Why are the unemployment rates so high and what are their prospects when we keep hearing there are fewer and fewer jobs to go round?
10. How much do you earn? And do you think that MPs should set an example and take a wage cut

Why my particular interest? Well I had an extraordinarily varied educational experience within England, but among the many schools in both the state and private, day and boarding sectors that I attended the jewel for two whole years from 11years to 13 years was the Exmouth Grammar School in Gypsy Lane. I suspect that has now become this same Exmouth Community College as the road location could not accommodate two such schools (although typically on the College's excellent web site there is no mention of its history).

When I attended the Exmouth Grammar School in the mid-nineteen fifties we were streamed from A to D at 11 and the A stream in which I was lucky enough to find myself covered Latin and French, all the separate sciences and the other standard subjects. There were only eleven pupils and we were compelled to give one another mutual support in the hot house academic environment it being emphasised failure for one would be considered as failure by all. None of us came from a privileged background and arrived from a spread of the local Primary schools, although if I recall correctly I was the only pupil from Exeter Road in the A stream.

The teaching staff were incredible and Mr Amos who taught maths was phenomenal, the Public School I latterly attended even at sixteen never came up to the curriculum level we had achieved at twelve!

It was this system that was destroyed by Labour's Anthony Crosland and the ghastly and pompous (now Lib/Dem) Baroness Shirley Williams and much of Britain's prosperity in the process. More shame to the present disgraceful product of Britain's Public Schools, David Cameron who refuses to contemplate a return to educational selection.

What a waste - the evidence Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Bankrupt Nation.