Grammar Schools - the Campaign to restore them grows in strength, but still their opponents will not argue seriously or honestly

Here and elsewhere I often run into people who want to quibble about the grammar school issue, rather than actually address the problem of  how we select children for proper academic education.  I have to assume that all intelligent people think that the academically talented ought to be encouraged, and that they flourish in schools where their talents are valued and nourished, and I really have no common ground with those who would resist such a view.

 

But once we’re past that. almost all these quibbles  are diversions, beginning ‘What about…?’ First of all there’s ‘ What about the secondary moderns?’ (similar to the nuisance-making, and unserious ‘Wot abaht alcohol and tobacco’ quibbles I get in the drugs discussion).

 

Well, what about them? If you think they weren’t very good, then I agree with you, though as I often point out some of them managed to do quite well. But nobody has ever explained to me how abolishing grammar schools made life better for secondary modern children – though in fact there is one way in which it *did* make life better for *some* secondary modern children. But I would be surprised if anyone is prepared to say this particular improvement is one they desire, or which justifies the destruction of hundreds of fine schools, many of them with long histories and traditions going back centuries.

 

The one case of ‘improvement’ for a minority of secondary modern pupils was this. It ensured that people who had money, but whose children had insufficient talent to qualify for a grammar education, could get their children into the better comprehensives, by buying houses in the right area. These ‘better comprehensives’ by the way, aren’t a patch on the old grammar schools, which is why O levels have had to be abolished and A levels diluted.  So the talented children who do go to them do not get anything like as much of a good schooling as they would have done had the hated privilege of selection been maintained. But who cares about that? Britain is prosperous and well-run anyway, isn’t it, whatever happens in the state schools? [SARCASM WARNING: The preceding passage may have contained sarcasm]

But they are better than the average or bog-standard comprehensives, which are like the secondary moderns only bigger and more undisciplined.  I will be told that modern children get many more ‘qualifications’. Indeed they do, but what, exactly, do they qualify them for? How can people seriously suggest that the quantity of pieces of paper is an indication of the quality of the schooling? Yet they do.

 

Every education system has a problem with children who are neither academic or vocationally gifted (the comprehensive system certainly does, hence its very high rates of truancy and ‘exclusion’), and I have no solution to it, except perhaps a more flexible leaving age and better primary schooling. But I am not saying that I do. By advocating grammar schools, I am saying we should make better use of our national resources of talent, by allocating them on the basis of ability rather than wealth. That is all.

 

Then there’s all the stuff about how the tiny number of remaining grammars are besieged by parents who spend money on prep schools and private tutors to get their children through the exams . Well of course they do. How would you stop them? Success in this ploy means they can win an education which would cost them at least £100,000 in post-tax income, if they went private. And a fair number of the remaining grammars , especially in Buckinghamshire and Kent, are within reach of the London commuter belt.

 

Can’t people grasp that this is a distortion caused by the hopeless shortage of grammars, which are desirable, rather than by the existence of grammars, which wouldn’t face these pressures if there were more of them? Private education and private tuition are virtually unknown in Northern Ireland and in Germany, both places with fully selective state secondary schools. That is because they have enough of them.  And it doesn’t it also make the point that this form of school, even in modern Britain, retains an edge in its ability to educate which is worth a great deal of effort to attain?

 

What I don’t hear (because in fact there isn’t one) is any argument that comprehensive schools are *educationally* superior to grammars. They just aren’t. And I don’t hear this argument because the idea’s supporters, unlike its pioneers, are very coy about the ultimately political purpose of the comprehensive project.

 

What you do get is stuff about ‘creaming’ (perhaps they teach it in PSHE classes). ‘Creaming’ is a complaint that schools ‘x’  and ‘y’ in Bennville suffer worse overall exam results because the Bennville grammar school has ‘creamed off’ its talented pupils.

 

But schools don’t exist for themselves. They aren’t maintained so that they can score high in league tables or at Ofsted. They are maintained to educate their pupils. And school ‘x’ and school ‘y’ will not educate *any* of their pupils better because they contain a larger number of talented pupils. What will happen,  if the logic of the ‘creaming’ argument is followed is that those talented pupils will all do worse, because the Bennville Grammar School is close and merged with school ‘y’. And nobody will do better. Why would anyone desire that? (See above for answer. It’s political). I might add that those who want the classes to mix on equal terms should surely be glad that in grammar schools they do just that . But that is not, in fact, what the class warriors want. They want the middle classes to be compelled to lower their expectations and culture to the level of the non-middle classes. They don’t want Joan Bakewell taking elocution lessons. They want Samantha Cameron dropping her aitches.

 

Another diversion is to say that some (unspecified) way should be found to improve the comprehensives, and that they should be 'given a chance' to work. How absurd. They have been given 48 years to work ( I date their real national beginning from Anthony Crosland's 1965 circular, though some places had comprehensive systems much earlier) . If a way to make them work could have been found, it would have been by now. The 1944 tripartite system, by contrast, was given 21 years before it was smashed - and no serious effort was made to provide the planned technical schools, or (in my view) to build an even spread of grammar schools.

 

By the way, after what must be at least 15 years of campaigning for the return of grammar schools (at the start of which I was told that the cause was long dead, doomed, hopeless, politically unrealistic etc), I was gratified this morning to see that two newspapers supported their return in leading articles.

 

The first, perhaps less unexpected, came in the Daily Mail, sister paper of my own ‘Mail on Sunday’. It said:

 

 ‘Bring back grammars

 

 

THE Ofsted findings could hardly have been more devastating or depressing. Inspectors found that, at England's nonselective secondary schools, 'low expectations' are causing tens of thousands of pupils to miss out on the top grades their intelligence deserves.

 

Shamefully, some staff did not even know who their most able pupils were.

 

Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw sensibly suggests that schools should return to streaming pupils, to stop staff from 'teaching to the middle'.

 

But, with social mobility so tragically stalled, isn't the case for re-introducing grammar schools now overwhelming? By opening a large school in every town, and allowing pupils to enter at any age post-11, the criticisms of grammars - that they favour the wealthy through catchment areas, and that they shut out late developers - can be overcome.

 

Michael Gove deserves huge credit for his efforts to restore rigour to the nation's failing education system.

 

But, for the sake of Britain's children, he must now go further by overturning David Cameron's bewildering opposition to grammars which, for years, encouraged far more social mobility than exists today.

 

 

But under the headline ‘Academic Excellence – without the 11-plus’, the left-liberal ‘Independent’ also came very close to the position I advocate here. Its leader writer said :

 

‘Educational surveys have a habit of focusing on the more obvious failings of our state schools: the drop-out rate, truancy, the proportion of pupils who leave with no qualifications, the poor standards of numeracy and literacy that place our school-leavers at a disadvantage when compared with better-educated East Europeans. And it is right that so much attention is paid to the chances of those at the bottom. It is they who, most clearly and urgently, need help.

 

This does not mean, however, that everything is rosy, or even satisfactory, elsewhere. In a report with a self-explanatory title – “The most able students: are they doing as well as they should in our non-selective secondary schools?” – the education inspectorate, Ofsted, trained its lens on the other end of the school spectrum and answered its question with a loud “No”.

 

It found that in 40 per cent of state secondary schools, the brightest children, as identified by primary-school scores, were not reaching the standard they were capable of, and that two-thirds of those who did best in English and maths at primary school failed to achieve A* or A grades at GCSE. It spoke of thousands of bright children being “systematically failed”, and said that many of those who had excelled at primary school became “used” to performing at lower levels.

 

Regrettably, such findings chime with criticisms made periodically since they came to government by both the Prime Minister and by his Education Secretary, to the effect that many apparently good schools were “coasting”. No less regrettably, they also confirm the concerns of many parents with children at state and private schools that many state schools entrench low expectations and fail to “stretch” the brightest – a defect reinforced by an exam system that demands too little.

 

The laxness of the exam system is now being addressed – in the face of fierce hostility from the teaching establishment – though provision for those of a less academic bent will remain neglected. And if there is anything more depressing than the findings of this latest Ofsted report, it is the defensiveness, even denials, that at once poured forth from teachers and their leaders.

 

They began by challenging the inspectors’ methods, complaining that Level 5 achievers at primary school formed too wide a band to be considered the brightest, or necessarily capable of an A at GCSE. They continued by insisting on the excellence of most schools (and, of course, most teachers) and they blamed league tables for distorting incentives. Of these excuses only the last, a reference to the pressure to lift pupils from a D grade to a C, holds water.

 

One proposal is that secondary schools should “set” or “stream” pupils by ability from the start. Another is for closer parental scrutiny of comparative performance, which will not necessarily improve relations with teachers. But an obvious solution – allowing schools to select by ability – remains taboo, even though such a system produced some of the greatest social mobility this country has known.

 

There is no need to reintroduce the dreaded 11-plus. Sats give primary schools a good grasp of their pupils’ ability. Nor need 11 be the age of selection. The rigidity of admission to grammar schools was one of their biggest downsides. Standards and facilities in schools catering to the less academic must be far better than they were then. But to reject academic selection on ideological grounds alone is to fail many of our most promising pupils just as surely as many of the most disadvantaged are also failed ‘.

 

A third newspaper, 'The Daily Telegraph' also published a leader sympathetic to some sort of selection.

 

I begin to think that we might perhaps be getting there. By the way, can anyone tell me when UKIP discovered the grammar school issue? Someone annoyed me the other day by suggesting that I was supporting UKIP by campaigning for grammars.