On Doing Your Homework - a Riposte to a Bog-Standard Attack on Grammar Schools
If I could, I would write an article at least once a week calling for the return of state grammar schools. But unlike Emile Zola, who wrote about nothing but the unjust imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus for years until justice was done, I don’t own my own newspaper. So I wait for a good opportunity. And one has just arrived.
The fact is that there is huge public demand for selective state education, which has no significant ally or spokesman at Westminster or in Whitehall. It is up to people such as me to express it, and I like to think that years of hammering away have brought the issue much further up the agenda than it was 15 years ago.
But there is still no obvious shift. Despite the occasional wisp of smoke from below the decks, the issue has yet to burst into flames. Why? All the major political parties, and the official elite, are committed to comprehensive state schooling. All of them, having been captured by Gramscian revolutionary thought some years ago, are dogmatically wedded to ‘equality of outcome’, a policy which demands aggressive egalitarianism in education.
At least, they are wedded to it for everyone except themselves, and the super-rich oligarchs who finance their dead parties. Politicians know all the tricks for getting their children into secretly selective schools, closed to non-insiders, or they buy their way into the catchment areas of better schools, or they pay fees, as do the Oligarchs and plutocrats. In all cases, this means they do not really understand the terrible position of bright children from poor families, or care about it. I read the other day that Anthony Blair’s youngest child is now attending a London Roman Catholic ‘comprehensive’. There seems to be some general reluctance to say which school this is, so I shall stay silent. But the school involved is ‘comprehensive’ in the same way that Ten Downing Street is an ‘inner-city terraced house’ – the description is technically correct, but otherwise deeply misleading.
This miserable hypocritical, self-serving egalitarianism - not some empty piffle about public ownership which was a dead letter 50 years ago- is Labour’s real ‘Clause Four’. Not only has Labour never abandoned it . The other parties have adopted it too.
Some politicians are perhaps not bright enough to grasp this. One of them is probably Sir John Major, the supposed ‘decent man’ and ‘nice guy’ (really?) who mysteriously rose to the top of politics (by not being Margaret Thatcher or Michael Heseltine), mysteriously won a general election( by not being Neil Kinnock), and was (nominally at least) Prime Minister for an incredible seven years, only ceasing to hold the office because he wasn’t Anthony Blair.
Now (and one has to wonder why this is) he seems anxious to remind us all that he also isn’t David Cameron. So this account of a speech he gave on the 8th November somehow found its way on to the front of a Tory newspaper on the following Monday. I wonder how. Sir John is not inconsiderably distressed to find that Britain is in the grip of a privately-educated elite. Has he only just realised this? What was he actually doing when he was occupying all those great offices of state? What has he been doing since? Watching the cricket?.
Ludicrously, Sir John blames this bipartisan catastrophe on Labour. Perhaps he doesn’t know that his own Tory Party supervised the destruction of hundreds of fine grammar schools under Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher instead of saving them. But he must surely know that he didn’t reopen a single one of them in his seven long years as Britain’s helmsman, instead concentrating on an irrelevant scheme to create so-called ‘Grant-Maintained’ schools, which did nothing to address the real problem. He must also know that the softening and dilution of the examination system was largely achieved by Tory governments.
The newspaper which trumpeted Sir John’s outburst (see below) has corrected in its online version the claim made in the print version that Sir John attended a comprehensive school, when in fact he went to a grammar school (Rutlish School). One wonders what would have become of the young Major if he really had gone to a comprehensive. But it retains the misleading statement that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, ‘went to state school’, when in fact Mr Gove won a scholarship to a private school, Robert Gordon’s College, where he received the most important part of his education. How interesting that a Tory newspaper should get into such a muddle. It used to be considered politically advantageous for Labour politicians to claim to have been less grandly-educated than they had been. Now it’s the egalitarian Tories who do this, notably Mrs Theresa May, who went to a Convent School, and then to a girls’ grammar school which became a comprehensive while she was there (presumably retaining a grammar stream for the existing grammar pupils, as this was standard procedure at the time) , but says in a major reference book that she went to a ‘comprehensive’.
This outburst, whose purpose is mysterious, appeared on the same day as this puce-faced assault on the grammar school idea by Mr John Harris of the Guardian newspaper.
Mr Harris is particularly annoyed that some on the left are beginning to realise that the return of grammar schools would be a good policy for a party which truly spoke for the poor, as here
http://shiftinggrounds.org/2012/06/more-grammar-schools-please-but-open-them-up/
This is very interesting and an encouraging sign. But my main business is with Mr Harris and with his comrade-in-arms, Owen Jones (‘The Peter Hitchens of the Left’), who stormed on to Twitter to declare : 'Anyone who thinks grammar schools would improve social mobility needs to do their homework. They make things worse.’
Ah, now, do they, though? Regular readers here will know the trick that is being pulled by these two. But do Mr Harris or Mr Jones grasp that their argument is hollow?
The most significant concentration of remaining grammar schools in England (there are now none in Scotland or Wales) is in Kent and Buckinghamshire.
Both these counties are within commuting distance of London (Other London commuter Counties, such as Oxfordshire, Sussex, Hertfordshire, Essex, Hampshire and Berkshire, have very few grammar schools or no grammar schools at all). The same is true of the outer London boroughs. It is therefore both rational and practicable for families whose breadwinners work in London to plan their lives so as to give themselves access to grammar schools. (In most parts of the UK no such planning is possible, as grammar schools are a remote memory). Given that the cost of five years of private single-sex secondary day-school education (comparable to a grammar school education) is roughly £100,000 of post tax income, it is not surprising that parents who value schooling do the following:
1.Buy houses in the catchment areas of grammar schools.
2. Spend money on preparatory school and tutor fees to ensure that their children pass the grammar school examinations. In this, by the way, they are comparable to the many left-wing (but non-RC, for leftist Roman Catholics have another way out) London parents who boast that they use state schools, but spend fortunes on private tutoring to make up for the inadequacies of their children’s bog-standard comprehensives (so also making those schools appear a good deal better than they really are at results time).
But Mr Harris doesn’t seem worried by this equally important distortion. Nor is he worried by the behaviour of left-wing luminaries (some of them zealous and noisy campaigners against selection by ability) who move into the tiny and expensive catchment areas of certain nominal comprehensives in North London, which are in effect selective schools. If Mr Harris gets in touch with me, I’ll suggest some lines of inquiry.
As for the grammars, this siege of catchment areas, and the linked systematic targeted cramming of course completely distort school provision. But it is a *consequence* of the closure of hundreds of other grammar schools, not a criticism of the existence of the remaining 164, whose continuing survival is loathed by the comprehensive campaigners, because it emphasises the utter and unquestionable failure of the comprehensive project in educational terms.
When we had a national selective system, state primaries routinely prepared children for the eleven-plus (which readers here will know I would like to replace with an agreed assessment, on the lines of the ones used in Germany, coupled with more flexibility about the age of transfer). There was no need for people to move house or splurge on tutors.
Mr Jones, meanwhile, needs to do *his* homework on the subject of social mobility. People such as me are calling for a reintroduction of a national selective system. The inevitable failure of a localised, pressurised selective system to promote social mobility does not in any way refute our case.
The first bit of homework he needs to do is geography. Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom(just) and still has a wholly selective secondary school system (just, despite the efforts of Sinn Fein to kill it off).
I contacted the Higher Education Statistics Agency (an independent body set up by the universities) in Cheltenham, and asked them for the latest figures on the proportion of lower-income entrants to Higher Education institutions, broken up into the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. .
This, it seemed to me, would be a good indication of the effect of grammar schools on social mobility, because we could see directly how well lower-income children did in university entrance, in a system which was wholly selective, as against three systems which were either wholly comprehensive or almost entirely comprehensive.
I can see no objections to this as a good, objective test of the matter.
So, in 2011/2012 the proportion of young full-time first degree entrants, from socio-economic class 4 to 7*, to Higher Education institutions were as follows.
(*National Statistics Socio-Economic Classes)
England…30.9% (Largely comprehensive)
Wales…..29.1% (Totally comprehensive)
Scotland….26.6% (Totally comprehensive)
Northern Ireland…..39.1% (Almost wholly selective)
The UK average is 30.7%
England and Wales combined 30.8%
So the university chances of a child from a poor background in selective Northern Ireland are almost one third greater than those of a similar child in largely comprehensive England and Wales, and the advantage of Northern Ireland over totally comprehensive Scotland is greater still.
It took me about 45 minutes to obtain these figures. But of course that is because I was already aware of the Northern Ireland exception, which is for many reasons unwelcome to the Comprehensive Zealots. Mr Harris is clearly aware that the Province still has grammar schools, as he mentions it. But he is interested only in the measure of how many pupils receive free school meals.
This is of course significant. But it is not the whole point. It would hardly be surprising if the middle classes, with their bookish homes and educated parents who value education and understand how it works, *dominated* grammar schools. Such schools do not represent a Maoist new dawn of total equality. The point is that in a selective system they dominate them by *merit* and by *ability*, not by paying fees or buying expensive houses. And that the schools they dominate also retain an open door to bright children whose parents do not have these advantages, a door which is not closed against poor homes by bars of gold.
That is the best we can hope for, and it is much better than the selection by influence, faith, secret knowledge or raw unadorned money, which we now have.
The second bit of homework Owen Jones needs to do is History. I wish I could reproduce the whole chapter I wrote on this subject in my book ‘The Broken Compass’, later republished as ‘the Cameron Delusion’. But any good library will find it for you for a trifling fee (the relevant chapter is called ’The Fall of the Meritocracy’).
This traces the blatantly political, and egalitarian origin of the comprehensive idea as developed by Graham Savage. It also reproduces the figures from the (1966) Franks Report into Oxford University, which noted that in 1938-9, private school pupils had won 62% of places at that University . A further 13% were won by direct grant schools (fine institutions which after 1944 operated as combined grammar schools and independent schools, until stupidly abolished and driven out of the public sector by Labour in 1975 – now they moan that they want the independent sector to ‘help’ state schools, but of course they wouldn’t want that sort of ‘help’, on terms that challenged the comprehensive orthodoxy). And 19% came from other state schools, presumably all grammar schools at that time.
By 1958-9 (14 years after the Butler Education Act created the national selective system), private schools were down to 53%, direct grants up to 15% and state grammars up to 30%. By 1964-5, private schools were down again to 45% , direct grants up to 17% and grammars up to 34%.
(The totals do not add up to 100% because of foreign students and home-educated entrants)
Until Antony Crosland put a stop to this, this was an accelerating, almost revolutionary process. The next year (the last recorded by Franks) private schools were at 41%, direct grants at 17% and grammars up to 40%. Michael Beloff, a former President of Trinity College, Oxford has said that the state schools were supplying 70% of new entrants to Oxford by the early 1970s, just as the grammar schools began to disappear in large numbers, but (though it seems perfectly possible on the basis of the figures I do have) I have not been able to verify this.
Note that the grammars and direct grants stormed Oxford (and Cambridge) in the 1950s and 1960s, without any special provision or concessions, despite the great advantage the private schools had in those days in the teaching of Classics (then essential for Oxbridge entrance). Now, Oxbridge colleges struggle to raise their state intake by all kinds of concessions, striving to fulfil egalitarian quotas, and as a result give huge advantages to applicants from the remaining grammars, religious schools, elite sixth-form colleges and covertly selective ‘comprehensives’ which are in truth selective, but not in fair or open fashion.
Mr Harris and Mr Jones are very welcome to reply here at length if they wish.
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