While the armed struggle in Northern Ireland appeared to be coming to an end, it was clear last week that the class war in the province is entering a deadly new phase. The government (of the United Kingdom) announced that it would scrap the grammar schools there, even though they have been a great success and enjoy broad public support.
In Northern Ireland the proportion of pupils gaining five GCSEs at reasonable grades is 10 percentage points higher than in England, where grammar schools are now rare. A-level results in the province are substantially better. A survey has shown that almost two-thirds of the public favour retaining them. At a time when the institutions of devolved government in Northern Ireland are suspended, the Whitehall government has made a decision that defies public opinion and common sense.
As with many government announcements, it carries a whiff of hypocrisy too. Tony Blair sent two of his sons to a selective school. The sentence pronounced on Ulster’s grammar schools coincides with a pledge by Ruth Kelly, the education secretary, to increase parental choice in secondary schooling.
If the government’s action was predictable and depressing, events in Buxton, Derbyshire, were surprising and encouraging. A teachers’ union, the Professional Association of Teachers, voted at its conference for the reintroduction of grammar schools. Leading the debate, Peter Morris, a Welsh teacher, described them as the most successful type of school that Britain had had.
He said parents in Kent (which still has grammar schools) would kill to keep them. Certainly the only ballot yet held on the subject, in Ripon, North Yorkshire, showed two-thirds of parents favoured retaining them.
The outbreak of support for grammars brought a swift riposte from the abolitionists. Margaret Tulloch, of the organisation Comprehensive Future, described them as divisive, separating children according to academic ability at an early age.
Of course that is a feature of grammar schools. Parents may well be deeply upset if their children do not pass the 11-plus exam and there is no denying that it can be a blow to a child’s self-confidence, as are all setbacks in life. But what price have we paid to end those maladies? The egalitarian agenda has pushed all other considerations aside. A rather sentimental concern about the “damage” done to children who fail the 11-plus has been used to blind us to the failures of the comprehensive system and the harm that it does to many students of all abilities.
Morris lamented the difficulty of trying to teach gifted pupils alongside the average, and in the same class as those who needed special support. Many state schools run mixed-ability teaching without streaming, either because of a lack of resources or because of ideology. The most able pupils often have to be left to their own devices. The weakest students have to rely on teaching assistants. Even those in the middle get less attention than they need because of the impossible stretch demanded of the teacher. Discipline suffers in classes not taught as a whole, and that leads to a further deterioration in achievement for everyone.
Perhaps that helps to explain why research by Kelly’s department shows that over the past six years the gap between the achievements of children from poor backgrounds and those from more affluent homes has widened. Increasing numbers of middle-class parents are buying their children extra coaching, as Blair did for his two eldest children.
Bright children from poor families probably suffer disproportionately from the comprehensive system. Professor David Jesson, of York University (once considered the mortal enemy of grammar schools), has found that a pupil who was doing well on leaving primary school is twice as successful at GCSE if taught alongside other very bright children, compared with a child who has no very able companions in its group. Again, a middle-class family may be able to offset that impact in a way that a poorer one cannot.
It may not be a surprise, then, that grammar schools strongly outperform comprehensives, measured by the value that they add to a pupil’s performance, whatever his score at the start of his school career. Special schools also do much better for their pupils, as do independent schools, whether selective or not.
Still, grammar schools continue to beat independents in getting pupils into higher education. When I left my grammar school in 1971, 22 of us went to Oxford or Cambridge. At a recent school reunion we received apologies from a contemporary, who was unavoidably detained in Stockholm collecting his Nobel prize. Diane Abbott, the Labour MP, was in the sister school to mine and went to Newnham College, Cambridge. Had our schools and others like them not been abolished (even when Margaret Thatcher was education secretary), Abbott might not feel it necessary to pay for her son’s education.
With few grammar schools left, the universities have struggled to maintain the proportion of entrants from state schools without dropping their standards and discriminating against the independent schools. The government’s policy of cramming students into colleges (in pursuit of an arbitrary objective that 50% should pass through higher education) has cut the quality of that education. International league tables show that even our great universities have fallen behind several top US institutions.
There are moments when Labour shows signs of understanding what is going on. When Alastair Campbell worked at No 10 he attacked “bog-standard” comprehensives. The government introduced specialist schools (focusing on, for example, the performing arts or sports). That model might provide a way of raising the level of esteem for the courses taken by pupils who fail the 11-plus. (Curiously the government allows those schools to select 10% of their pupils, but logic is not its strong suit).
However, the government’s retrograde move in Northern Ireland suggests Labour has not come far since one education secretary, that great intellectual Anthony Crosland, vowed to “destroy every f****** grammar school”, nearly 40 years ago. His thinking has infected policy ever since. Even the teacher Peter Morris recoiled from the term “elitism” in an interview. Why has it become a dirty word? Elitism is democratic. It means nurturing unusual intelligence wherever it is found.
It seems clear to me that the success of a country, and so the living standard of its people, depends substantially on what its most brilliant minds can achieve. We should take young people who show promise and develop them. If anything, we would need to be on the lookout for them earlier than age 11 because children grow up faster than they used to. Youngsters from poorer backgrounds (boys, especially) can buckle to peer group pressure and develop negative attitudes to learning early on.
It is likely that an elitist policy would increase social mobility, not reduce it. Already Cambridge University has discovered that among the small minority of entrants who are working-class, half were educated in independent schools (mainly on charitable bursaries). What an indictment of the comprehensives.
We have gained a lot of experience since Crosland’s day and Britain has got richer. The comprehensives may have spared the feelings of children who would have failed the 11-plus, but there is little evidence that all-ability education has benefited them or the country. As incomes have risen, more parents have been able to opt out of the state system or supplement it. Money makes a bigger difference to a child’s prospects now than it did when every town had a grammar school.
The great egalitarian experiment has failed. The government has made A-levels ever easier in an attempt to disguise the debacle, but it has failed in that too. The few surviving grammar schools offer an embarrassing example of how we might do better for disadvantaged youngsters. So those tiresomely successful schools in Northern Ireland must be swept away. Generations of children have paid the price for the utopianism of politicians like Crosland and Blair who were educated at independent schools. Apparently such ideologues are still not ready to admit defeat.
