Tory strategists must have feared that Labour would hog the headlines during
the long interregnum between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. They need not have
worried. The internal party row over grammar schools has guaranteed the
Conservatives a stream of publicity - all bad. High-level rebellion has been
succeeded by top-level climbdown. According to one opinion poll the party is
now seen as more divided than Labour.
An odd feature of the bust-up is that David Cameron’s position was not new. He
made plain in his leadership campaign that his party would not return to
academic selection. It is curious, too, that the speech that sparked the
commotion, by David Willetts, the party’s education spokesman, contained
important arguments that had nothing to do with grammar schools. For better
or worse they have been overlooked, but I will come back to them.
Cameron’s petulant response to the uproar in his party has been interesting to
watch. He has repeatedly dismissed criticism as “delusional”. His
exasperation is partly understandable. During 11 years of Margaret
Thatcher’s government and seven years of John Major’s, the Conservatives did
not reinstate grammar schools.
Indeed, Thatcher had approved the abolition of many of them while education
secretary in the early 1970s. Why, then, would anyone expect the modernising
Cameroons to adopt a policy that the Tories have not pursued for more than
four decades? During all that time the party leadership has recognised that
because only a minority of children would pass the entrance exam, to commit
to grammar schools would be, in Cameron’s words, “an electoral albatross”.
When Cameron first said that, the party took it quietly because that is
language that power-hungry MPs can comprehend. The mistake that Willetts
made was to reject grammar schools on evidential grounds. He reasoned that
because they accept so few children from poor families (measured by whether
they receive free school meals), selection is ill-suited to an education
system that aims to restore social mobility.
Put that way it becomes more than an argument against building additional
grammar schools. It undermines those that still exist. Not surprisingly the
Tory MPs who represent those schools could not stay silent.
In any case, Willetts had chosen his evidence selectively, focusing on the
issue of the poorest families. More broadly, might not new grammar schools
help the state sector to compete better with private schools in achieving
academic excellence? Willetts himself pointed out that the percentage of
children getting five A* to C grade GCSEs including English, science, maths
and a modern language has declined since 1997; and he highlighted the
depressing statistic that 64% of modern language A-levels are taken in
private schools, although they constitute a small minority.
Graham Brady, the party’s Europe spokesman, produced compelling evidence that
on average all pupils in areas that have grammar schools do better than
others elsewhere. Even those who fail the selection exam, and therefore go
to comprehensive schools instead, do better. He refuted the Tory
leadership’s argument that this is because grammar schools are found only in
more affluent areas. Pupils in Trafford, where there are grammars,
outperform those in Bury, where there are none, even though the cities are
socially similar. Children “in leafy Oxfordshire”, wrote Brady (a dig at
Cameron’s own constituents), “fail to reach the national average”.
“Two brains” Willetts had been defeated on the evidence (but not necessarily
the politics) by Brady, who always struck me as one of life’s plodders.
Incidentally, Brady’s courageous defence of grammar schools, contributing to
Cameron’s limited U-turn, is at least his second decisive impact on the
history of the Conservative party. In the final hours of the 2001 leadership
campaign I failed to convince Brady to support me. I then lost by one vote
to Iain Duncan Smith.
In summary, the Tory leadership had no need at all to resurrect the issue of
grammar schools and Cameron’s frustration would be better directed at
Willetts than at his party. By being forced to agree that more grammars
might need to be built in areas where they exist (even though, apparently,
they are no longer a good thing), the party has supplied its opponents with
sticks with which to beat it.
The more important part of Willetts’s speech suggested that a future
Conservative government might, after all, adopt a brave and radical schools
policy. He proposed that the rules applying to academies (a type of school
invented by Blair) could be loosened to make it much easier for, say, a
charity to set them up and that the granting of a single licence would allow
one organisation to set up maybe 10 or 20 different schools.
Crucially, Willetts advocates that schools popular with parents should be free
to expand. That is indeed the only way that more parents can be given
choice. He also mentions the “V-word”, the policy idea that normally dares
not speak its name: vouchers.
For decades many Conservatives have secretly believed that if the state in
effect gave parents a cheque that could be cashed only by schools, they
would acquire real spending power. Schools would have to respect parents’
distrust of educational faddism and respond to their demand for academic
rigour and better results.
But because the voucher is a market mechanism, past Tory leaders including
Thatcher thought it electorally too risky: Labour could misrepresent it as
privatisation and so scare the voters. If Willetts was trying to camouflage
his bold espousal of vouchers by attacking grammar schools in the same
speech, his tactic was painfully successful.
Last week George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, embarked on a separate
exercise in disguise. To further harrumphing from his party he declared that
the Tories are the heirs to Blairite reform of the public services, which
will soon be threatened by Brown’s dislike of choice and the mixed economy.
The reason for making that argument is that it helps to make Tory proposals
for reform seem less alarming. The British electorate is wary of trying
anything new, even when systems and institutions (such as our state schools
and the National Health Service) let us down. Voters are more relaxed about
things that have been tried, even if they are not conspicuous successes.
So anything that builds upon academies, introduced by the well-meaning Blair,
should not be too scary. The Tory trick is to argue that all the radical
reforms that Willetts proposes, including vouchers, are just the logical
culmination of Blair’s initiatives. That might even be true. Had Blair been
thinking straight from the start of his premiership, rather than wasting
time demolishing Tory legislation, today British parents might have vouchers.
Part of Osborne’s argument may be wishful thinking. He assumes that Brown will
be reactionary, sweep aside Blair’s reforms and snatch choice away from
parents. But the chancellor is unlikely to adopt policies that are hostile
to parents’ aspirations for their children. Admittedly he obstructed
academies, but not necessarily because he opposed them. That was when he
wanted to make Blair’s life so tiresome that he would opt for early
retirement. Once prime minister, Brown may well champion academies.
Willetts’s decision to mention vouchers may not have been much noticed by the
press or Tory party. But it will certainly have been carefully recorded by
Brown. It gives Willetts an unusual opportunity, given that the shadow
cabinet usually avoids controversial proposals. Vouchers look a good idea
and there is a growing body of evidence from other countries that they work.
But that will not stop Brown denouncing them as Thatcherism gone mad.
The Conservatives have therefore exposed a flank. They must hope that Willetts
has been prudent in raising the issue now. Sadly, most Tories have little
confidence in his judgment after his ill-considered tilt at their beloved
grammar schools.
