The creeping return of the grammar school
The creeping return of the grammar school | Melissa Benn | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
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Remember that robust national debate we had before the 2010 election about the need to expand grammar schools across England? Exactly. Neither do I, because it didn't happen. What I do remember, however, was a sequence of carefully placed interviews with Michael Gove and David Cameron promising a raft of excellent non-selective schools for all.
The terms of the education debate have shifted over the last 18 months, almost without our noticing. We are now facing a de facto return to a tripartite system, the same system that was abandoned from the mid-60s onwards. On the one hand, the government plans to open hundreds of new technical style schools; the studio schools and University Technical Colleges. On the other, the grammar school estate is to be enlarged on the sly.
By law, no new grammar schools can be opened. Why? Officially, at least, all the main political parties are opposed to academic selection. Instead, existing schools are to be expanded, with so called satellite add-ons, as has just been proposed in Sevenoaks, Kent. No doubt, other authorities and schools will soon follow suit. And thanks to government sleight of hand on the new admissions code, other local schools, even if demonstrably affected by the expansion of selective education in their area, may not even object.
At the same time, we are seeing a return of the powerful "social mobility" narrative in relation to grammars. The House of Commons played host last autumn to one of the most partial debates I have ever read on the subject. Now BBC4 has apparently joined the fray with an emotive two-parter on the glories of the old grammar and the apparent tragedy of their so-called destruction.
Grammar school education clearly provided some children from families of modest means – the Alan Bennetts and Ted Heaths of this world – with undreamed-of educational possibilities in a world dominated by the powerful public schools. But the wider claim that grammars gave a significant boost to working-class youngsters simply does not stand up to statistical analysis.
According to Early Leaving, a government study in the mid-50s which tracked the school careers of 9,000 grammar school children, only 23 children from the cohort who went on to get two A level passes were from unskilled working-class families. According to the 1963 Robbins report, only 1% of the children of semi-skilled or unskilled workers went on to higher education.
As for the 164 grammars that exist today, the evidence is incontrovertible. A Sutton Trust report in 2008 found grammars to be among the most socially exclusive schools in England, educating tiny numbers of children on free school meals. This followed the seminal 2007 speech, by David Willetts, then frontbench Conservative spokesman on education and employment, who declared that "we must break free from the belief that academic selection is any longer the way to transform the life chances of bright poor kids". Not surprisingly, the grammar school lobby were incandescent at Willetts's intellectual honesty.
But there is a modern twist to the age old selective narrative. Grammars are now presented as just one element in a tempting menu of parental choice, their middle-class base very cleverly played down. There is also a shift away from arguing for the 11 plus – increasingly hard to justify in a more sensitive, child-aware culture – towards the introduction of a more continental-style division of children at around 13 or 14.
Nearly 50 years on from the phasing out of a national grammar/secondary modern model, largely as a result of massed parental revolt against the inhuman division of the nation's children into winners and losers before puberty, we are still in limbo about the fundamental direction of our schooling system.
There is a clear choice to be made. The grammar school clearly fits neatly into an elitist top-down template, in which the private sector still holds sway and the state subsidises an elect minority to both complement and challenge that privilege. Whatever the faux democratic rhetoric around the rest of the school estate, it still leaves the vast majority of our children consigned to second-rate institutions and lesser resources and grievously divides many communities.
In contrast, the non-selective principle now governs some of the most successful education systems in the world, from Shanghai to Finland. And in many parts of England, from Hackney to Hampshire, genuinely comprehensive provision can still be a vehicle for excellence for poorer children, while schools can at the same time play an important part in uniting, rather than dividing, communities. Sadly, the coalition has not made up its mind which model it really wants to follow. But it's clear you can't have both.
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Well apart from the fact that, being a stats nerd, I actually went and had a look at that Early Leaving Report, and the figure is 230, not 23... Why?
I just can't grasp the mean-spirited ideology-fixated logic of it - "Well we can only afford to give a certain percentage of pupils an intensive, academic education. We could select those most likely to take full advantage of it, but instead we'll just pretend that all education is equal and send kids to good or crap schools based on their postcodes (ie. their parents' earnings). Mmmmmm egalitarian."
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