You can tell when you have won an argument. Your opponent attacks the man, not
the ball. When David Cameron was interviewed on education last week, the
best the BBC’s John Humphrys could do was to accuse him of having gone to
Eton. It was as if John Reid could not talk about the police without having
been mugged or Patricia Hewitt run health without having had an
appendectomy.
The Tory leader had a tough week. He saw the “Brown bounce” narrow his poll
lead to single figures. He cannot attack Tony Blair’s valedictory tour of
Labour’s foreign policy failures, largely because he agrees with them. Nor
can he get a grip on Gordon Brown’s tour of domestic policy because nobody
knows whether Brown is to blame or not.
One thing Cameron did right was to intervene on grammar schools. Though not
planned as a slap in the face to his backwoodsmen, the opportunity of a
controversial speech on selective schools from his education spokesman,
David Willetts, was deftly turned into that cliché of modernisation, a
“clause 4” moment. Cameron contrived to support a colleague under fire, take
a blow at the old right and speak the truth all at the same time.
The grammar school lobby had been to recent Tory leaders much like the League
of Empire Loyalists to the post 1950 generation. It meant nothing in terms
of policy but somehow harked back to a golden age. Selective school transfer
at 11, formally introduced in 1944, had become massively unpopular by the
1960s.
At political meetings at the end of the 1960s, the then education spokesman,
Edward Boyle, was torn limb from limb by Conservative voters infuriated at
their children who had “failed” the 11-plus being sent to secondary moderns,
along with 70%-80% of each age group. They had regarded the grammars as
“their schools”. The 11-plus, they said, lost them the 1964 election and
would lose them every one until it was abolished. Margaret Thatcher
recognised this as education secretary after 1970, as has the Tory party in
practice ever since.
All Willetts added to the argument last week was to question even the thesis
that selection aided the “bright working-class child” in the few, mostly
prosperous, areas where selective schools survive. The essence of the 1944
act was a psychological theory that a child’s educational and thus career
trajectory could be predetermined by a test of aptitude (not academic
ability) at the age of 11.
This prewar scientism was crafted to be class-neutral in allocating children
to schools equated to their likely ability. As even Thatcher acknowledged in
her memoirs, the idea that “the state should select children by the simple
criterion of ability” and direct them to specialist institutions “was far
more consonant with socialism and collectivism . . . than with liberalism
and conservatism”. Like her successors, she preferred to regard grammar
schools as middle-class entitlements (plus a handful of places for the
deserving poor) rather than as the outcome of some educational theory.
Nostalgia from today’s politicians and commentators who passed the 11-plus and
enjoyed the resulting upward social mobility ignores what the system meant
for the two-thirds who were rejected. The process was laden with social
segregation, for parents as much as children. Later selection, as once
proposed at 15 or 16, might have avoided this pitfall, as does setting and
streaming within schools. But at 11 it was probably the greatest contributor
to social division and an underskilled workforce of any postwar policy. The
continued existence of private schools was trivial in comparison.
Britain’s emphasis on excellence for the few masked an institutionalised lack
of concern for the deselected majority, which led to Britain at the time
having the worst record in Europe for early school leaving. Sloppy teaching
and dire underinvestment in school buildings left the new comprehensive
system struggling to encompass social disparities, particularly in
high-profile inner cities. But after four decades the concept of going to
the local secondary school has bedded down almost everywhere; 93% of
state-educated children attend them. If parents do not like that, they can
move to another community or go private. But any basis for admission to
state secondary education other than geographical proximity is likely to be
more discriminatory or feel less fair.
As Willetts pointed out, in the few mostly rich and Tory council areas that
still practise selection at 11 (164 schools out of some 2,000), children are
either ordered to schools by the local council or the schools choose the
parents. Middle-class parents whose children are rejected for grammar
schools tend to turn to the private sector, leaving the secondary moderns
(however renamed) overwhelmingly working class. Such often chaotic selection
at the tender age of 11 is no longer plausible in the 21st century. As
Cameron said, the debate is over.
In 18 years of Conservative government, selection was not reintroduced
anywhere in Britain. The only council that tried, Solihull in the 1980s, was
roundly defeated in a local referendum. Even today advocates of grammar
schools shudder at the thought of returning to the 11-plus, relying instead
on some sort of “immaculate selection”. They tell pollsters they “want more
grammar schools”, but as in an absurdly biased ICM poll last week, are never
asked their view if their child was allocated with the majority to a
secondary modern.
For a quarter of a century the Tories have fumbled for an intellectually
coherent path through this minefield. They toyed with postponed selection,
to 13 or 16, with middle schools and sixth-form colleges. They, like Blair,
took refuge in using urban church and trust schools as covert grammars,
doing less damage to comprehensives by creaming off just a few per cent of
each cohort, like the American charter schools. This has relieved pressure
(as on the Blair family) in places such as inner London where large
injections of immigrant children have led to “white flight”, either to the
suburbs or to the fee-paying sector. Since these are areas where politicians
and commentators tend to live, their predicament dominates the debate.
The nearest Cameron came this week to appeasing his party’s old guard was his
adoption of Blair’s academy schools, a version of the Conservatives’
sponsored city technology colleges. But the 47 academies are not, at least
at present, academically selective, despite the attempts of Blair and his
minister, Lord Adonis, to make them so. They are compulsorily comprehensive
in their intake and are mostly in tough inner cities.
Early results show them to be not particularly successful but ruinously
expensive, costing Whitehall four times more to build and maintain than
council schools. Since they must adhere to centrally ordained rules on
admission, they will suck ministers into constant controversy with local
authorities.
For all this, Cameron clearly wanted to make a point. He referred to the
grammar debate as “delusional, self-indulgent and pointless”. These were
hardly the words of someone eager to calm those in his party who still
regard grammar schools as akin to white colonies and the Church of England.
Here the parallel is plausible with Labour’s old clause 4 and its aspiration
to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and
exchange”. Most Tories know they will never return the education system to
11-plus segregation, any more than Labour in 1997 would renationalise coal,
steel, gas or electricity. But the fundamentalists find comfort in echoes of
past struggles and leaders do well to tread softly on their dreams.
Blair during his new Labour “rebranding” in 1994-7 wanted a shock that was
unlikely to entail any shift in policy. So does Cameron - the more so as
centrist voters seem minded to give Brown a honeymoon in the polls. He is
desperate to indicate that his party is not the sectarian one the electorate
detested in the 1980s and rejected in the 1990s. “We cannot revive old
factions,” he says with Eliot, “We cannot restore old policies / Or follow
an antique drum.” Hence his use of the drastic epithets: delusional,
self-indulgent and pointless. For all the howls of the last-ditch brigade,
there could be no going back to 1994.
If Brown is to fight on education and the Tories wish to retort that they care
about all state schools equally, then Cameron had to clear his decks of
intellectual clutter. That he has done and with aplomb.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
