Keeping Out the Oiks, and other spurious arguments against Grammar Schools

Comment of the week comes from Christopher Charles, who wrote (first quoting me):  'A non-selective school system is as absurd an idea as a swimming pool without water, or an aeroplane with no wings." Was the school [attended by]PH and his brother 'selective'? Not making a dig here, but the only criterion for getting in was one's ability to pay, wasn't it? I went to a Grammar School. For all the talk of meritocracy, it was an almost exclusively middle class place. The working class kids went to the Sec Mod down the road. There's an awful lot of tripe said and written about selective education. What its defenders are saying [if they're honest and they seldom are] it's about keeping out the oiks.'

I'll come on to 'keeping out the oiks' in a minute.  First, of course, I wrote of the absurdity of a non-selective school *system*. Such a system might well contain schools which at least appear to be non-selective themselves, but are part of such a system even so. Once again, I should point out that my most concentrated explanation of the grammar school/comprehensive problem is to be found in a long and closely researched chapter,  'The Fall of the Meritocracy' in my book 'The Cameron Delusion' (originally published as 'the Broken Compass') . I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

The private schools which I attended were selective in various ways. Of course, they were able to select through parental income, the principal mode of selection in British schooling today. By charging fees they also created a contract between parents and school which meant that there was a far stronger parent-teacher alliance than in schools where there are no fees.

The preparatory schools I attended (I don't think the USA has any equivalent of these fascinating and often bizarre establishments, where the minds of so many of the British elite  are formed) did have entrance tests of a sort. I seem to remember a general knowledge quiz, and a short essay, plus an interview with the Headmaster. And I suspect that the point of this was to provide an excuse (if one were needed) for refusing a child they didn't like the look of.

But the minor public school I and my brother went on to (where he stuck it to the end and I lasted only two years) was definitely academically selective. That is, it relied on the Common Entrance examination, in those days a pretty rigorous set of papers on major subjects,  tougher in many ways than modern 'A' levels. Your score in this decided whether you got in at all, and which stream you were placed in, though in fact it was closer to what is now called 'setting' than to streaming, since I was in the 'C' stream, for maths and 'sciences' and the 'A' stream for everything else. 

The entire public school system (US, private school system) was and is in itself graded and selective, with schools varying between the grandeur of Eton and Harrow and the workful obscurity of establishments like my own. In my time, arriving in 1965, the minor public schools were pretty dingy academically, having been outdistanced by the post-1944 grammar schools. Also their ancient and often Edwardian or Victorian traditions of discipline and austerity were pretty much incompatible with the 'Never Had it So Good' world outside, let alone with the moral and cultural revolution.  Reading Hugh Walpole's 'Jeremy at Crale' recently, I was struck by how recognisable this late-Victorian fictional public school was to me, born in 1951 – and how completely baffling it would be to anyone born in the past 40 years.

Anyway, what were we going to need those stiff upper lips for? The empire was gone, and the next war would just be mass incineration in which individual acts of bravery would be futile and unnoticed.

My own view is that many of the minor public schools would have vanished by now if the grammar schools had not been killed off.

Which is where we come to Mr Charles and to the BBC4 TV programmes in the 'Secret History' series, which for the past two weeks have examined the grammar schools.

I had a particular interest in these programmes,  for a specific reason. A few years ago I was contacted by a very senior BBC executive, who invited me first to dinner and then to lunch, to say first how much that person thought I should be making programmes, and next, how much that person wanted me to make a programme for BBC4 about …grammar schools.
The executive's own experience with comprehensive schools had not been a good one. My strong pro-grammar school views  - and knowledge of the subject – seemed to mean that I was an ideal person to present such a programme.

I had got as far as proposing a production company, known to me, to handle the actual filming when suddenly the BBC executive ceased to be friendly,  strange and absurd excuses began to be offered for abandoning the project, and as far as I was concerned, it was dead.

I suspect that it was similar to other experiences I've had at the Corporation, where politically naïve persons interested only in programme-making have put me forward for panels or presenting roles in programmes,  because they thought I might be good at it, and have eventually come up against the hissing, white-hot loathing of people such as me which exists in the higher echelons of the Corporation, and which was so beautifully demonstrated by the unembarrassed transmission of a show-trial of me (in my absence) by Radio 4's Feedback programme a little while ago, documented here and elsewhere (see index) . I'll never know, though the missed opportunity has grieved me ever since. In the weeks when I thought I was going to make that programme, I floated several inches above the ground, full of the anticipated joy of having a chance to make a really good job of a really good case before a new audience.

So I looked with a keen and critical eye at the programmes that were made. They were good in a way, in that they showed that for so many people, 'oiks' included, the grammar schools were a liberation. Whatever Mr Charles says, I'm more inclined to believe the testimony of Roy Strong, who recalled his grammar school teachers  (themselves far from rich) slipping money into the pockets of some of their poorer pupils to help them in their penurious lives, and in their studies.

Sir Roy's testimony (which involved, as in several other cases, his breaking down in tears at the memory of the teacher  who had changed his life for the better) was moving, well beyond my power to describe, and everyone should find it, if they can, on the i-player (it is in the second of the two programmes).  There were many other affecting scenes of this kind, and others detailing the joy and self-sacrifice of grammar-school parents,  which must have made clear to anyone that the grammar schools did a great deal of good, and are a terrible loss to our educational system

But in the commentary, delivered by an unidentified voice, and written by I don't know who, there were lots of little statements unsupported so far as I can see by any facts, about how by 1965 experimental comprehensives had been proved to work, and how many parents didn't like selection, and about how awful the Secondary Moderns were. Then there was the usual stuff about the desolation of failing the eleven-plus, and some incoherent twaddle apparently suggesting that grammar schools were incompatible with the age of the Beatles.

And we had three politicians, Michael Portillo, Paul Boateng and Neil Kinnock, giving what seemed to me to be unequivocal testimony that in their lives, grammar school had been a bounty and a boon. Mr Portillo was pretty specific about how much he deplored the end of selection. Well, perhaps I haven't spotted it, but I have seen no sign of any of these three lending their names to campaigns to restore the lost grammar schools, for children from homes which aren't rich, but who happen to be alive today rather than 50 years ago. Perhaps I've missed it. Maybe it is yet to come.

By contrast, the admirable Robert McCartney, a Northern Irish politician whom I know and for whom  have great respect, hymned his grammar education on the programme, and campaigns for them now with all his might, bless him.



In the meantime, let us deal with the 'arguments' which are paraded against grammar schools over and over again, and which go unchallenged anywhere but here.

1.Yes, failure to get into a good school is hard to take. But is it any worse to be told that you have failed to get into a good school because you have failed an examination than it is to be barred from such a school because your parents are too poor and nobody cares if you would have passed the exam or not? And not even to know until later in life that you were cheated?
2. Yes, the 11-plus may well have been too rigid. So why not do as the Germans do, and select by assessment, allowing appeals and reconsideration within reason?

3.Yes, there were many areas with very poor grammar school provision. So why not open new grammar schools in those areas?

I could say much, much more about this. But my basic point is this – that all the valid criticisms of grammar schools have force. But none of them are answered by shutting most of  them down, and replacing them with a system that selects entirely on postcode and wealth.

(WARNING. The duff argument about the inaccessibility of the few surviving grammar schools, wholly distorted by the fact that they are restricted to small areas, often in commuter range of London, has been dealt with at length. Anyone intending to make this dead point is urged to consult 'grammar schools' in the index here, thoroughly, before boring us all with it again. This problem does not exist in Northern Ireland, which still has a completely selective system despite the efforts of Sinn Fein to shut it down).