There is a certain justice in the way that Alastair Campbell, for all his maniacal efforts to manipulate our perceptions, has managed to get himself stuck with an image that enrages almost everyone.
It is perhaps less just that the anger he provokes should be directed at his consort, Fiona Millar, and at her new television series on state education. Admittedly, she can be pretty infuriating in her own right, but the questions she raised in last Friday’s programme ought to have been seriously considered long ago.
Underlying her series is the confused socialist logic, no less annoying for being discredited, that unless everybody can have something, nobody should have it. Since not everybody has choice in education, nobody should have choice. Since some people have no option but their local “bog standard” comprehensive (as Campbell once memorably described them), nobody should have anything better.
Choice is in fact the problem, in her view. If only the — how shall we describe them? — better sort of parents would patronise their local state schools, they would pull them out of the bog standard. But as everyone knows, given a choice many of them won’t. Many of them in their parental perversity prefer to choose what they think is best for their children, as far as they can.
However, Millar completely failed to convince me that the problem with state schools is choice. The choices that lead to white flight, inner-city blight and gross inequalities between state schools (which she describes well) are not the problem, but a response to the many problems that failing schools face. Most of these problems lie outside the school gates. Schools cannot fix inside the gates the problems that are destroying them from outside. Nor can a few well-meaning middle-class parents.
The problems that make many state schools, particularly in big cities, absolutely unacceptable to responsible parents, let alone to parents of very able children, are social. They have to do with high levels of delinquency and crime among young people, with drug abuse, with a disaffected youth culture and with large concentrations of people newly arrived from other countries and cultures who speak little English. Everyone knows this.
Nobody in her right mind would send her child to a school on the other side of the city if he could go to a reasonably good school down the road. Nobody wants her son to go to a school an hour away which won’t provide local friends to play with afterwards. Parents cannot get involved with these schools because of the distance. They also involve using unreliable and dangerous public transport. Parents do it because they feel driven to, not because of snobbery or racism or frenzied ambition.
It is an article of faith, to which Millar subscribes, that demanding “middle-class” parents can pull up a school to meet their own aspirations (and therefore they ought to). But what is the evidence for this unexamined creed? It may be so, in some cases. But how many parents like that does it take to make a critical mass in a huge state comprehensive? The inertia they would face is immense.
My experience of middle-class amelioration in action is just the opposite. We live on a communal garden that includes some social housing. At one time a difficult and aggressive boy with many of the usual social problems was terrorising the younger children. Despite the fact that he was in a minority of one, swamped, one would have thought, by middle-class children and their well-meaning mummies and daddies, nobody could do anything to restrain him.
The atmosphere in the garden was soured, the strong feeling of community was threatened and little children were afraid to go out. Talking to him was useless, thumping him was against the law and his mother could do nothing. The problem was never solved; it merely disappeared when he moved elsewhere.
Translate this boy and his problems into an inner-city state school and multiply him many times. In some of the worst inner-city schools 30% of children have special educational needs and 25% is common. That means they have either serious emotional or social problems or learning disabilities, or they can’t read, or they speak little English.
To have 30% of the children in a classroom presenting complex and disruptive problems is not good news for the other 70%, or for their teacher. How could the presence of a few aspirational middle-class children in such bedlam possibly help anyone? How can a couple of bossy parent governors make a dent in such complex problems? I don’t want to sound entirely negative. Even the worst of failing schools can be turned round, though it is almost always by a charismatic head teacher more than by anything else.
Until recently our local comprehensive in Holland Park, west London, was famously bad. Its previous Ofsted report was one of the worst I’ve seen — it had low standards throughout, poor discipline, a rough catchment area and all the problems of having more than 100 foreign tongues. Recently, however, I heard a charismatic new head teacher was achieving great things, so I went to visit.
The school had changed out of all recognition. The atmosphere was friendly, purposeful and quiet. Discipline was good, the facilities were excellent and a few months later this notorious school received a good Ofsted report. I wanted to send my son there — it would have suited him well.
However, it was out of the question. The school manages to control the children inside its gates, but once outside there is nothing to stop any delinquents behaving as badly as they like. A few do — it only takes a few — and they terrorise the others; a few get into drugs and gang life early on and any boy who is unlucky enough to get involved with them is in for trouble.
It is hard, if not impossible, for schools to exclude disruptive pupils. The police, it seems, either can or will do nothing with such social wreckers. My ambition was to get my son as far away as possible from them. The only other state secondaries for boys in our borough, both very good, are open only to Catholics — this does not seem fair, as Millar’s film suggests.
These are social, not school problems. Schools cannot solve them, although they can help a little. Idealistic middle-class parents can’t solve them either although they can help a little, too. In my view there are all kinds of reforms that could be tried, outside and inside schools, beginning with segregation.
Different children with different problems and abilities should be educated differently in different classrooms. Some children should be excluded altogether from their school and even sometimes from their neighbourhood. But until some such solutions are found it is pointless to expect what we have to call “middle-class parents”, meaning good, purposeful parents, to bear the burden of our failing schools and be denied any choice.
It is unjust in any case, but more to Millar’s point it is a tried and tested way — tested throughout the communist world — of ensuring not that standards go up, but that they go down even more widely.
minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk
