The Grammar of Equality - Has Selection been Discredited?
A week ago several newspapers carried stories about a report ( jointly prepared by the Institute of Education and the University of Manchester) which was said to show that Grammar Schools were no better than comprehensives at getting working class students into top universities.
For instance, The ‘Independent’ said (on 21st November) :
‘ Grammar school no better for students than a comprehensive
Apparent success is due to an advantaged social background, says new research
By: SARAH CASSIDY
Grammar schools are no more successful than comprehensives at getting their pupils into elite universities, according to new research.
Working-class pupils are just as likely to get a degree after attending a comprehensive school as a grammar school - contradicting claims that bringing back grammars would improve social mobility.
Researchers at the Institute of Education and the University of Manchester analysed the education histories of more than 7,700 people in England and Wales whose lives are being followed by the 1970 British Cohort Study.
They found that those who attended private secondary schools in the 1980s were about two-and-a-half times more likely to gain a degree from a highly selective Russell Group university than comprehensive or grammar school pupils with the same A-level results. They were also almost one-and-a-half times more likely to graduate from a mainstream university than their state-school peers.’
The whole thing can be found here
It does contain a rebuttal from the Grammar Schools Association: ‘Yesterday grammar school heads insisted the findings revealed little about selective schooling in the 21st century.
Dr Mark Fenton, vice chair of the Grammar School Heads’ Association and headmaster of Dr Challoner’s Grammar School in Buckinghamshire, said: “Any study of pupils in grammar schools in the 1980s would need to take account of the fact that this was a period of sweeping change during which many grammar schools became comprehensives; so many children born in 1970 would have started their education in a grammar school and finished it in a comprehensive.
“The process of application to the top universities was also very different in the 1980s, as was membership of the Russell Group of universities.” ‘
But please note that the pro-grammar forces only ‘insisted’, and did not ‘say’. ‘Insist’ is the word the media use to suggest that the person quoted is publicly maintaining a hopeless position. It is much like ‘claim’, generally used as a verb before statements which the writer does not believe, and hopes you won’t believe either.
I was interested that the stories in the papers generally reflected the Institute of Education’s own account of the research, which you may read here
http://www.ioe.ac.uk/newsEvents/107903.html
I think it would be fair to say that the Institute is not exactly a conservative body, nor has it been a dogged opponent of the radical changes made to education in the past 60 or so years.
The Daily Telegraph ran a similar story, beginning
‘Private pupils gain better degrees than brighter state peers
Extensive study reveals dramatic influence schooling has on students' chances of graduating from top university, regardless of A–level results
By: Rosa Silverman
PRIVATE school pupils are significantly more likely to graduate from an elite university than state school pupils, even if their academic ability is inferior, researchers have found.
A study of more than 7,700 people cast light on the immense advantage that a private education confers on children, regardless of their exam results.
It found that those who attended private secondary schools in the 1980s were about two and a half times more likely to have gained a degree from a highly selective Russell Group university than comprehensive or grammar school pupils with the same A–level results.
They were also almost one and a half times more likely to have graduated from a mainstream university than their state school peers. It would follow that private school pupils with worse A–level results were more likely to have obtained a degree from a top university than their higher achieving state school contemporaries, Professor Alice Sullivan, the study's lead author, said.
You can read the whole thing here
‘The Times’ which I cannot quote in full because it is behind a pay wall, carried a broadly similar story under the headline: ‘Grammar Schools offer little advantage. Similar but not the same. Interestingly, it began thus : ‘Grammar school pupils have the same chance of enrolling at an elite university as bright children who attend comprehensive schools, a study has found.
'Although a higher proportion of grammar school pupils attended leading universities, this pattern is believed to be as a result of their academic ability prior to sitting the 11-plus exams and their family background, it suggested.
Academics who studied the schooling of thousands of children found that those who went to grammar schools did do better at exams aged 16, when they sat O-levels — replaced by GCSEs in 1988 — but this advantage disappeared when comparing A-level results and university progression.’
There’s also a BBC website version, which I have to say (and I surprise myself by doing so) I personally thought was a fairer representation
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-30128472
Interested by this, I obtained a copy of the full report.
The Grammar Schools Association, it seems to me, do have a point. The children chosen for research were born in 1970, five years after the abolition of most grammar schools began (there were about 1,200 in England and Wales, now 164 survive. In Scotland, all the comparable schools, generally known as ‘Academies’ have been abolished. In Northern Ireland, which I will come to, a broadly selective system has survived to this day) .
This was a complicated era.
The process of reform was uneven, and affected different areas in different ways at different times. I have alluded to the case of Mrs Theresa May, who won a place in a grammar school which was turned into a Comprehensive while she was there, in the early 1970s. This fate befell others much later. In many cases, pupils in this position remained in a ‘grammar stream’ until they left. But in other cases (one of which was recounted to me recently by a prominent politician who went through it) the school was immediately turned into a comprehensive, and the grammar pupils were expected to cope in mixed-ability cases from the start.
At the same time, there had been a revolution in teacher training, with older and more traditional teachers increasingly supplanted by younger teachers trained quite differently in less formal ways. It has always been difficult to disentangle the comprehensive revolution from the effects of the expansion of teacher training (under Harold Wilson) and the bipartisan first expansion of universities (following the Robbins Report of 1963).
For instance, many of the early comprehensives continued to behave much as grammar schools had done, with teachers in gowns and even mortar-boards, honours boards on the wall, formal meals, religious assemblies, strict discipline, houses, organised games etc. This faded away gradually as the staff changed, and new, ‘progressive’ heads rose to the top.
The other thing one has to note is that in 1981, many people planning on a professional white collar career would never have considered going to university. The modern idea, that a university degree is an essential qualification for such a life, did not then exist.
Also it is perfectly true and always has been that children from poorer homes come under pressure to leave school as soon as they are able. Their families cannot afford to keep them, when they could be earning. Like many of the supposed arguments against grammar schools (the poor quality of secondary moderns, the non-existence of technical schools, the shortage of grammar places, the inadequacies of the 11+, this is not a fault of grammar schools themselves, but a fault in wider society, easily soluble without destroying grammar schools.
So the measure used by the study as a mark of success, the gaining of a degree, and most especially the gaining of a degree from an ‘elite’ university, may not actually be much of a test of success for a working class child born in a poor home in 1970.
The report quite rightly stresses the significance of certain things in the home, to mark out the fortunate form those less so. It is a giveaway sign of a poor home that the child has not been read to, that the house is crowded, that mothers gave birth when young. ( and so probably have little formal schooling themselves). It is plain that houses which have well-educated parents, where serious newspapers are available, are more likely to produce ‘elite’ university graduates than those which lack these advantages.
One might say ‘so what?’, and it would not be a bad point. Schools alone cannot possibly make an unequal world equal. Nor, in my view, can any other force. All they can do is find and nurture talent wherever it is, and lift the talented out of poverty and ignorance, so that their lives are not wasted.
But the point here is the report’s contention that , as the institute’s own summary puts it : ‘Grammar schools have been no more successful than comprehensives at helping to ensure their pupils gain a university degree or graduate from an elite higher education institution, new research suggests.
Contrary to popular opinion, a grammar school education also does not appear to have increased working-class pupils' chances of getting a degree.’
First of all, note that the summary clearly and correctly states that it is referring to the past. The children involved are now 44 years old. So can you see anything wrong with the introductory sentence of the Independent’s report ‘Grammar schools are no more successful than comprehensives at getting their pupils into elite universities, according to new research.’
Yes, it’s that word ‘are’. The experiences of those born in 1970 are very different from those of the current generation of 11-year-olds, not least because what grammar schools remain are (precisely because there are so few of them) besieged by pushy parents, hopelessly oversubscribed and are much-beloved of Oxbridge admissions tutors anxious to crank up their state school admissions rates. I wonder how many working-class pupils even get into them in the first place. In 1981, it was very different.
By the way, I must note here that the report says without qualification (on page 10) that ‘British qualifications have been subject to substantial grade inflation since the abolition of norm-referenced marking in the 1990s’. How I longed for anyone to admit that back in the 1990s when I first started saying it, to hoots of rage and derision from supposed education ‘experts’.
But here on page 12 is what I think is the crucial bit: ‘Private schooling is powerfully linked to degree chances. Compared to their peers at comprehensives with similar backgrounds and cognitive attainment at age 5 and 10, privately educated cohort members had 1.7 times the odds of gaining an ordinary degree, and over three times the odds of an elite degree. In contrast, there was no statistically significant advantage of attending a grammar school or disadvantage of attending a secondary modern school (my emphasis). Differentials due to the cohort member’s home resources, both economic and educational/cultural, are only modestly attenuated by school type, which makes sense given the very small proportion of children who attended private schools (5% of the sample).
And this
‘…were grammar schools especially beneficial for those working class pupils who attended them, even if there was no overall grammar school advantage? However, we found no statistically significant interactions, suggesting that the advantage or disadvantage of attending each type of school was similar for pupils of different backgrounds and prior attainment levels.’
The main influences appear to have been having graduate parents and going to a private school. But then, of course they were. In 1981, the numbers going to good universities were very small, most did not expect to go to them, or indeed to any university. In that era, Graduate parents could either afford fees, or houses in the catchment areas of well-researched ‘good’ comprehensives. Working class parents were unlikely to be properly informed about such things, and powerless to act if they were informed. In any case, they did not expect their children to stay on at school.
Because here comes the bit the media reports tended to underplay, and which I think highly significant.
On page 14 we find: ‘Surprisingly, grammar schooling was not linked to any significant advantage in getting a degree.’
I agreed with that ‘surprisingly. It requires an explanation (and I think I may have offered one above).
It continues, rather devastatingly for those who think the report demolishes the case for grammar schools: : ‘Note that the lack of a grammar school advantage in degree chances does not imply that grammar schools made no difference to attainment within compulsory schooling. Indeed, our preliminary investigations (not shown) suggest that grammar schools did make a difference at O level, but this did not follow through to university chances.(my emphasis).
They rightly conclude: ’This ‘leaky pipe’ between grammar school attainment and university entrance warrants further investigation. In future work, we will investigate the characteristics of these schools in detail, including the degree of academic selectivity, as it may be that some grammar schools attended by this cohort were no longer highly selective institutions.’
It might be. Or it might just be that in 1981, university entrance was not a realistic test of the effectiveness of such schools in bringing their pupils forward. Whereas ‘O’ levels might have been.
One indication of this is the current performance of selective schools in modern Northern Ireland. In this part of the United Kingdom , which still selects at 11 by ability, the university chances of a child from a poor home are now almost one third greater than those of his or her equivalent in largely comprehensive England, and almost 50% greater than in fully-comprehensive Scotland ( figures supplied by the independent Higher Education Statistics Agency). I think the case for selection by ability remains strong.
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