Finlandisation - is There Really an Educational Case for Comprehensive Schools?

How many times have you heard defenders of our disastrous Comprehensive schools claim that Finland has somehow made this mad system work?

 

The source of this claim are the (to my mind rather dubious) PISA tables published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) . In 2001 Finland came top of these PISA tables in mathematics, reading and scientific literacy.

 

Actually, though this is not mentioned so often, Finland slipped down the charts in the PISA tables in 2009, and slipped even further in 2012. So, even if you do think PISA is a reliable guide, the news is no longer so good.

 

Now a new report from the Centre for Policy Studies, ‘Real Finnish Lessons – The true story of an educational superpower’’ , by Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, casts serious doubts on these claims in general.

 

(see the whole report here http://www.cps.org.uk/files/reports/original/150410115444-RealFinnishLessonsFULLDRAFTCOVER.pdf )

 

In fact it opens with this devastating summary: ‘Why did Finland achieve such success in PISA? The standard policy explanations for the country’s rise include its focus on equity, with the comprehensive school reform of the 1970s as the bedrock, and the absence of standardised tests, accountability, and market reforms. Other explanations highlight comparatively little school- and homework, and the country’s current teacher education system. Yet there is little hard evidence for any of the standard explanations – in fact, most research explicitly does not support them.  Furthermore, a closer examination of Finland’s results over time reveals that its rise began well before most of the highlighted policies were able to take effect.’

 

In the Foreword,  Professor Julian Le Grand ( who holds the Richard Titmuss Chair of Social Policy at the LSE) points out ‘Proponents of the traditional explanations for the Finnish success appear either to ignore the on-going decline or to come up with ad hoc arguments in an attempt to save their original ones.’

He adds (and I have often struggled to make the same point when Finland has been introduced into this argument) : ‘His [Sahlgren’s]research is an object lesson in how difficult it is to make international comparisons of policy without a full understanding of the politics, economics, and history of the countries concerned.’

 

 

It opens with a wonderful quotation from a 1954 work by Hannah Arendt, which should be carved in stone above the portals of every Education Ministry in every free country on the planet:

 

‘The problem of education in the modern world lies in the fact that by its very nature it cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition.’

 

The Finns were apparently baffled by the first PISA claims of their success. They didn’t think they were that good. An alternative set of tests does not show results anything like as good.  The next time you hear this argument, be sceptical. The case for selection is strong.

 

I append below my own article on the subject from a recent pamphlet

Published by the Think Tank Civitas:

http://astore.amazon.co.uk/civitas-21/detail/1906837716

 

It is a summary, in one place, of all my arguments on this subject. The small numbers in the text refer to footnotes (at the bottom) 

 

Why Is Selection by

Wealth Better Than

Selection by Ability?

Peter Hitchens

Enemies of the grammar schools have a favourite

argument. What about those who fail to get into them,

and are condemned to ‘secondary moderns’? They treat

us to tear-stained reminiscences of the sad day each year

when the 11-plus divided brother from sister, neighbour

from neighbour, friend from friend. The lucky winners

skipped off in their blazers to a bright future. The

miserable losers crept shamefacedly to a sink school,

doomed to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.

Actually, this day still takes place, all over England,

every year at the start of March. It is called ‘national

offer day’, and it is when parents find out if they have

got their children into their ‘first choice’ secondary

school. Officially, about one in five won’t, but the truth

is far worse than that. It is risky to aim too high, as

failure to get into a top school will often rule you out of

a place at a middling one, and send you sliding down

the snake of misfortune. So many parents cautiously opt

for a ‘first choice’ that is in fact nothing of the kind,

settling for second or third best for fear of having their

children exiled to the worst school in the town.

 

Most towns and cities in England have secondary

schools that are known by the well-informed to be the

best. Many are former grammar schools and quite a few

are single-sex. The easiest way to get your children into

them is to live close to them, and estate agents will tell

you that such schools can add an average of £54,000 to

the price of a house, in the capital.1 In some cases it is

more like £200,000. London left-wing parents are

particularly good at this Game of Homes. It is also often

a question of faith, real or alleged. Too bad if you don’t

have well-informed parents, who can navigate the

complex entry procedures of the better schools. Take

The Grey Coat Hospital (Church of England

Comprehensive Academy for Girls), the elite secondary

school favoured for their daughters by fellow-Blairites

Harriet Harman and Michael Gove. Its admissions rules

go on for pages, and give great privileges to those who

show the outward signs of Christian faith. As there is

no way to check the inner truth, points are awarded for

observable levels of piety, work and commitment, such

as turning up for services, contributing to the parish

magazine and sitting on committees. (This is rather

contrary to the spirit of Luke 18:10-14, in which Christ

prefers the genuinely repentant to the ostentatious

worshipper). The Grey Coat Hospital also selects its

sheep from its goats through the use of a catchment area

so precise that it takes 134 words to explain. Here is a

sample: ‘Where it is necessary to differentiate between

applicants living in flats using the same street entrance,

priority will be given to the applicant(s) living closest

to the ground floor and then by ascending flat number

order.’2 This sort of thing is not confined to church

schools.

 

One non-religious former girls’ grammar

school in London has a catchment area which currently

extends 1,230 yards from the school gate, a

measurement that does wonders for property prices in

a few favoured streets nearby, and has caused at least

one millionaire New Labour power couple to move

house at great expense to secure good schooling for

their daughters without committing the socialist sin of

paying actual fees. If anyone can work out the true

moral difference between these two forms of buying

privilege, I should like to know what it is.

Thus can the whole course of a child’s life be decided,

by a parent’s willingness, sincerely or not, to press their

teeth on the Communion wafer, their readiness to

warble in the church choir, their ability to afford to live

sufficiently close to the school gate, or even their

prescient cunning in choosing the ground-floor flat

rather than one higher up the building. I could go on.

These procedures, arbitrary, elaborate, labyrinthine and

ever-changing, are well-known to the pushy and sharp-elbowed.

They are baffling to almost everyone else.

Forget jokes about putting children down for Eton at

birth. To get into some of these alleged comprehensives

it is necessary to start house-hunting before you are

even pregnant. The bright child of a poor home, whose

parents know little of schooling and perhaps care less,

will seldom if ever penetrate through this thicket of

trickery and self-aggrandisement to the best state

secondary schools. And yet the enemies of grammar

schools defend this system of secret knowledge,

privilege and (often) false piety, as being fairer than

open selection by ability. Perhaps that is because it is

fairer to them, personally. Perhaps it is because it allows

them to obtain all the advantages of the old grammar

schools, while not in any way challenging the

egalitarian comprehensive system or threatening their

 political or media careers. All parents are equal, but

some are a lot more equal than others.

 

There’s no doubt that the pre-1965 system had many

faults. There were too few grammar schools in general,

and especially in some parts of the country. There were

far too few grammar school places for girls. An

interesting result of this shortage was that by the mid-

1960s, some secondary modern pupils were winning

good A-levels and getting into university, both

achievements rather more difficult than they are today.

Few of the technical schools that had been planned and

promised in the 1944 Education Act had ever been built.

Many primary schools in poorer areas were not as good

as they should have been at bringing on talent. No doubt

the quality of grammar schools varied, and there was too

little help for children from poor homes who wanted to

stay in full-time education. Even so, the grammars

themselves worked well in several important ways. None

of their faults were fixed by their abolition, and all of

them could have been addressed without their abolition.

The 1966 Franks Report into Oxford University,

published at the very end of the pre-comprehensive era,

recorded that in 1938-9, private school pupils had won

62 per cent of places at that university.3 A further 13 per

cent were won by direct grant schools, independent

schools which took large numbers of bright state pupils

in return for government or local authority payments.

Just 19 per cent came from other state schools,

presumably all grammar schools at that time. The rest

were from abroad, or educated at home. By 1958-9 (14

years after the Butler Education Act created the national

selective system and made grammar schools more

widely available), the private school share was down to

53 per cent, direct grants up to 15 per cent and state

grammars up to 30 per cent.4 By 1964-5, private schools

were down again to 45 per cent, direct grants up to 17

per cent and grammars up to 34 per cent.5

 

How much further this revolution might have gone, we will never

know. It was abruptly terminated by Anthony Crosland

and Margaret Thatcher in their bipartisan dissolution of

grammar schools, just as it was really gathering pace.

The direct grant schools survived for a while longer, but

were casually wiped out by Fred Mulley (more famous

for falling asleep next to the Queen during an air show)

in October 1975.

 

Was this burst of meritocracy just a feature of our post-war

society, as some have suggested? I do not think so.

Interesting figures suggest that the effect would have

continued, if the schools had survived. In Northern

Ireland, 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 per cent

greater than in fully-comprehensive Scotland (according

to figures supplied by the independent Higher

Education Statistics Agency).6 It is reasonable to

suppose that the pre-1965 mainland grammar system

(including Scotland’s parallel system of academies) had

a similar effect.

 

More generally, a recent study of

European schools has produced some very interesting

results, worrying for those on the Left who believe

selection is bad for the poor. Several continental

countries still maintain selective state secondaries, and

Germany has recently successfully restored them in the

former German Democratic Republic (which, being

Communist, was almost wholly comprehensive). This

happened, in the states of the former East Germany, by

popular demand. It is an interesting disproof of the

repeated claim that ‘you can’t turn the clock back’. The

survey, conducted across Europe by France’s National

Institute for Demographic Studies, actually set out to

prove that selective education discriminated against

children from poor backgrounds. But it found that,

when children were taught according to ability, family

wealth had almost no influence on their achievements.

By contrast, in non-selective systems, a poor

background did influence outcomes, with British pupils

doing particularly badly on this scale.7 The study,

(published in the European Sociological Review) reached

its conclusions by examining the reading performance

of tens of thousands of 15-year-olds across 22 countries.

So it is reasonable to say that, whatever was wrong with

the pre-1965 secondary school system, destroying the

grammar schools was not the cure.

 

The policy of annihilating the grammars reminds me of Evelyn

Waugh’s response when news was brought to him that

surgeons had removed a non-malignant tumour from

some part of Randolph Churchill. ‘How typical of the

medical profession’, he said, ‘to have rummaged

through the whole of Randolph, found the only part

that was not malignant, and removed it.’8

Another much-used argument against grammars is

the accurate contention that the few remaining

academically selective secondaries are middle-class

fortresses, with a low take-up of free school meals. This

is perfectly true. But it is a consequence of the abolition

of a national selective system, not an argument against

such a system itself. The middle-class stronghold in

selective secondaries proves nothing except that the

middle-classes will fight very hard indeed to get an

education worth at least £100,000 in taxed income. They

will hire tutors, send their children to expensive

preparatory schools and move into cramped houses in

areas they can ill afford.

 

None of this would be necessary if there were a national system of grammar

schools. The remaining grammars are hopelessly

oversubscribed because there are too few of them. The

same is true of the secretly selective elite schools which

exist where grammar schools don’t, and it is not even

mitigated by the continuing possibility that the child of

a poor home might penetrate the screen of privilege. But

the take-up of free meals in these schools tends not to

be criticised by egalitarian leftists, because that would

draw attention to the very large number of privileged

middle-class families who have made cunning use of

them. These objectors are also very reluctant to discuss

the general destructive effect on state and private

education which has followed the abolition of a national

selective system. This may be the clearest sign that the

comprehensive system has brought about a fall in all

school standards. One of the saddest effects of this is

that many private and state schools can call themselves

‘excellent’ because they regularly harvest sheaves of

high grades in public examinations.

 

But in fact there could well be huge differences between these schools,

which modern examinations do not detect because they

are hostile to or uninterested in excellence, and instead

interested only in ‘qualifications’ for their own sake.

They compress all reasonably high achievers into a

single top grade, and allow children to pass who would

until recently have failed. It is amazing how often

defenders of the egalitarian system will defend it by

saying that it has led to many more children possessing

‘qualifications’. When challenged to show that these

‘qualifications’ are worth anything, or actually qualify

their holders for anything, they fall silent or change the

 subject. As with all vast egalitarian projects, from

collectivisation upwards, the statistics ultimately

become more important than the truth, and end up

concealing it.

 

 

There is little doubt that general levels of secondary

education have fallen since selection on merit was

abandoned. It is now 14 years since the Engineering

Council revealed the results of a ten-year survey of

undergraduates entering maths, science and

engineering courses.9 All were given an identical,

unchanging test. This showed that, as these entrants’ A level

grades had risen, their mathematical

understanding had declined. Students who had

narrowly failed their A-levels in 1991 had actually

scored higher in the Council’s tests than those who

obtained ‘C’ grade passes seven years later.10 Durham

University mounted a similar exercise, giving a general

ability test to its first-year students over a long period.11

As Jenni Russell wrote in the Guardian 11 years ago, ‘The

results show that students of the same ability are now

achieving two A-level grades higher in every subject

than they were 15 years ago.’12 The reality of grade

inflation (shamefully denied by the education

establishment for years, but now grudgingly admitted,

even by them, to have taken place) was in fact quite

evident very early on in the comprehensive experiment.

In October 1975 Raymond Baldwin, a member of

Manchester’s Education Committee, warned of a ‘great

comprehensive gamble’ as GCE results in merged

schools declined in that city.13 Two months before, the

Daily Mail had reported a severe fall in the GCE

performances of schools in Liverpool, following

comprehensive reorganisation in that city.14 Sheffield’s

experience was similar.

 

In a report in November 1974 the Daily Telegraph noted that Sheffield had experienced

a ‘gradual decline in the percentage of comprehensive

school pupils succeeding in GCE examinations’.15 Pupils

at the about-to-be-abolished direct grant schools,

meanwhile, showed ‘a constant increase in GCE success

rates’. But at about that time, the grading system of O levels

was altered, so that candidates who would

previously have failed were now awarded pass

certificates graded ‘D’ and ‘E’. Even this did not manage

to conceal the continuing fall in exam scores, which

eventually led to a further dilution – the creation of the

GCSE in 1987. This wholly different type of examination

makes it impossible to compare today’s secondary

school performance directly with that of the old

selective system. It is tempting to speculate that this was

one of the aims of those who introduced it. But the

Engineering Council and Durham University surveys

both show that a measurable decline has taken place in

the period following the abolition of selection by ability.

Claims that the evidence for decline is based on nothing

more than anecdote are simply false.

 

 

None of the facts above are particularly difficult to

obtain, nor will they come as much of a surprise to

anyone who has been either a school pupil or a parent

of school-age children during the past 40 years. There

is no doubt that English state and private education has

experienced a revolution in that period. Not all of it

resulted from the abolition of selection. Harold Wilson’s

expansion of teacher training in the late 1960s greatly

changed the teaching profession. When I was an

education reporter in the late 1970s, the (then) socially

conservative Daily Telegraph was still crammed with

advertisements for teaching posts. Now, most of this

recruitment is done through the Guardian, and the Daily

 Telegraph has adjusted smoothly to the age of drug

decriminalisation and extra-marital sex. Even if the

grammar schools had survived in large numbers, they

would by now be very different places from the cane-haunted,

mortar-board infested establishments of 1965.

But then the same is true of the German gymnasiums.

Even in conservative Bavaria, they have relaxed a little,

but they still provide an excellent education, compared

with our comprehensives.

 

All this is a rather cautious prelude to a sort of cry of

pain. I have striven to rebut in detail the standard

arguments of those who continue (against all facts and

reason) to pretend that no harm was done by the closing

of the grammar schools. As it happens, it is clear from

Anthony Crosland’s own book The Future of Socialism

(recently re-published) that the man who wrecked state

education had almost no idea what he was doing, and

wholly misjudged the likely outcomes of his own

policies. But the worst thing about this debate is that it

is completely ignored in mainstream politics. The Left

have their own egalitarian reasons for wishing to shut

it off. They actually banned the creation of any new

grammar schools in David Blunkett’s School Standards

and Framework Act.16 Since then, they have been

working hard to minimise selection by ability at the

English and Welsh universities, putting pressure on

them to make social as well as educational judgements

and making public attacks on the ancient universities

where selection by ability is still strong (such as Gordon

Brown’s ill-informed assault on Magdalen College,

Oxford, over the non-admission of the state-school

pupil Laura Spence).

 

The passion of the Left for comprehensive education

is such that at least one former Labour MP (I will not

 name him because I find his behaviour almost

admirable) claims to have attended a comprehensive

school when he could not have done. The school

involved, long ago merged, was at the time a secondary

modern. But I feel quite differently about Frances

O’Grady, now the General Secretary of the Trades Union

Congress. O’Grady allowed the Guardian newspaper to

say in 2012 that she had attended ‘Milham Ford

Comprehensive’ in Oxford.17 This is not exactly

accurate. When she arrived there, in 1971, it was still a

girls’ grammar school. Like most of those who entered

grammar schools during their transition into

comprehensives, O’Grady is likely to have benefited

from a selective education, in a ‘grammar stream’ until

the end of her schooling. In fact (largely thanks to

pressure from Muslim parents) Milham Ford survived

as Oxford’s last single-sex girls’ state secondary until

quite recently. I don’t recollect it ever describing itself

as a ‘comprehensive’ (few schools do, but see below).

Had it really been a ‘comprehensive’ when she entered

it, one has to wonder if O’Grady would now be in

charge of the TUC.

 

It is easy enough to see why a trade

union official might fudge this matter. But far more

significant is the behaviour of Theresa May, the current

Home Secretary, now being spoken of as a possible

future leader of the Conservative Party. May annually

tells the MPs’ reference book Dod’s Parliamentary

Companion, that she attended ‘Wheatley Park

Comprehensive’.18 In fact, when she arrived there (from

a convent school) it was still very much ‘Holton Park

Girls’ Grammar School’.19 Like O’Grady, she would

have been kept in a grammar stream during the school’s

merger with the nearby Shotover secondary modern.

Again had she not been treated so, one has to wonder if

she would have gone on (as she did) to Oxford and to

the Cabinet. Again, I don’t think Wheatley Park has ever

actually described itself as a ‘comprehensive’.

 

 

The Tory surrender to the comprehensive revolution

has been one of the most interesting political

developments of the last 20 years. As late as the 1990s,

John Major (who attended a selective school) talked of

having a grammar school in every town.20 Michael

Howard used to boast of his grammar school past in

parliamentary tussles with the privately educated Tony

Blair.21 Nothing happened as a result of these promises

and flourishes. But since the advent of David Cameron,

even the rhetoric has altered. In May 2007 the Tory

leader had a damaging public quarrel with Graham

Brady MP, and many other members of his own party,

over his decision to abandon past promises to build any

new grammar schools. Presumably Mr Cameron thought

the question important enough to alienate quite large

numbers of supporters (which it duly did). It is

interesting to wonder why a Tory leader might be ready

to do this. In fact it is one of the most startling political

facts of modern times – and so one of the least examined

– that nominal Conservatives have adopted socialist

attitudes towards education. They have done this most

especially by speaking and writing as if it is a self-evident

virtue to send one’s children to a state, rather

than an independent school. Yet this could only be a

virtue for a dogmatic egalitarian, which nominal

Conservatives have never openly said they are. After

all, a rich person who can afford fees and sends a child

to a scarce good state school is actually depriving a poor

family of that place. For a non-egalitarian this must at

least be morally dubious, if not actually greedy and bad.

 

 

Yet in December 2005, soon after becoming leader of his

party, Mr Cameron was asked if he wanted his children to

attend state schools and replied: ‘Yes, absolutely. I’ve

got my eye on a particular one. I’ll make my decision

for my daughter based on my views as a parent not as

a politician. That’s the right thing to do. But I would like

them to go to a local state school.’22 Nobody seems to

have asked him why. Soon after this he (alongside then-

Education Secretary Michael Gove) had succeeded in

inserting his children into a wholly untypical,

picturesque and hugely oversubscribed Church of

England primary school in Kensington, far from his

home. In November 2012, Mr Cameron went further still.

He said:

I would like my children to go to state schools, that’s

my intention, and I think what’s happening in the

state school system is really exciting. What we’re

seeing is something we should have seen years ago

which is the flowering of more choice, more

competition, more diversity and crucially, higher

standards. I want my children to be part of that and

I’m very heartened by what is happening. 23

 

 

The assumption in all these words and actions was

that there was some sort of special virtue inherent in

sending a child to a state school. What virtue is that?

For left-wingers, it is obvious. In the state system the

classes mix, religion is weak or absent, the purpose is

egalitarian. But for conservatives, the classes mix on the

wrong terms. In the grammar schools, everyone aspires

to middle-classness. In the comprehensives, they do not.

The difference is clearly encapsulated by the way that

middle-class children now speak with fake estuary

accents whereas grammar school pupils, such as

Margaret Thatcher and Joan Bakewell, took elocution

 lessons to acquire BBC voices.

 

Michael Gove’s journalist

wife, Sarah Vine, explained in the Daily Mail why she

wanted her daughter to go to a state school:

The private sector is built on very different

principles. Its agenda is a fundamentally selective

one, based not only on ability to pay, but also on

pupil potential. And it is also, let’s face it, about

snobbery. Of course the parents of private school

children are paying for the best teachers and

facilities. But let’s be honest: they’re also paying for

their child to mix with the right kind of kids.24

The school she has chosen for this act of anti-snobbish

social mixing is The Grey Coat Hospital, miles from the

Goves’ modest west London home. Though it (very

unusually) describes itself as a ‘comprehensive’ on its

freshly-painted signboard, it is a former girls’ grammar

school which has somehow managed to stay single-sex,

and whose entry requirements go on for pages, so much

so it would take a combination of Einstein and Thomas

Aquinas to grasp their full meaning. Its official uniform

supplier is Peter Jones of Sloane Square. It may

disappoint her if she wants her daughter to mix very

much with ‘the wrong kind of kids’. When the Labour

politician Harriet Harman chose it for one of her

children some years ago, the Daily Mirror accurately

described it as an ‘elite’ school.25 Just 14 per cent of its

pupils are eligible for free school meals, hardly enough

poor girls to go round for serious inter-class mixing.26

Had the Goves been really keen on egalitarian rough

and tumble, and the mixing of the classes, they would

surely have been better off picking Burlington Danes

Academy, which is also an Anglican school and is a

couple of minutes’ walk from their front door.

 

What is more, it has the former Education Secretary’s personal

warm approval. In 2011 Gove wrote a newspaper

article in which he listed Burlington Danes among

schools in which ‘excellence is becoming a universal

expectation, academic study a driving purpose’.27 Later

he numbered it among ‘some superb state schools

in disadvantaged areas generating fantastic results’.28

He said of these schools:

They do much better in exams than many schools,

including private schools, in leafy areas. Their

students win places at Oxbridge on merit. All

because their heads, from the moment any child

arrives, refuse to accept excuses for underperformance.

29

Why not then choose this paradise, and be spared the

tedious shopping trips to Sloane Square for uniform? It

can’t be that it doesn’t provide enough opportunities for

social mixing. Tom Hodgkinson, a Burlington Danes

parent, wrote in the Independent in March 2014 that

nearly 70 per cent of its pupils were eligible for free

meals, so sharply reducing the risk of snobbery.30 He

added ‘Our daughter says some of her classmates were

amazed she lived in a house with stairs.’

Somehow or other, the oddity of this decision by the

Education Secretary at the time was not much explored

by media who preferred to coo that he was the first Tory

Education Secretary to send his child to a state

secondary (actually even this is not true: Gillian

Shephard did so 20 years before). But it does explain

why the irresistible logic of selection by ability never

seems to gain any supporters at the top of British

politics or our great media empires.

 

Left and right

together have learned to use the state system to get their

own children the advantages of grammar schools,

without the need to face a difficult political battle. The

recent movement for ‘free schools’ has created a similar

escape route for the active and pushy middle-classes. It

is hard to be sure whether these people actually imagine

that their lives are normal. It would be much kinder to

think that they do, for if they understand their own

actions properly, they must know that they are actively

abandoning the children of others to a fate they would

not allow their own offspring to suffer.

 

 

Notes for :

Why Is Selection by Wealth Better Than Selection by Ability?

1 R. Bloomfield, ‘Top London School Catchment Area Premium Hits

£54,000’, London Evening Standard, 29 January 2014.

2 The Grey Coat Hospital Church of England Comprehensive Academy for

Girls, ‘Admissions Policy 2015-2016’, 2015.

3 University of Oxford, Report of Commission of Inquiry, Oxford, Clarendon

Press, 1966, Volume II, statistical appendix, p.47, table 31.

4 Ibid, p.47, table 31.

5 Ibid, p.47, table 31.

6 Higher Education Statistics Authority website, Column ‘V’ of Table 1a

(T1a) ‘Participation of under-represented groups in higher education: UK

domiciled full-time first degree entrants 2012/13’, linked under heading

‘Young full-time undergraduate entrants’.

7 R. Breen and K.B. Karlson, ‘Education and Social Mobility: New

Analytical Approaches’, European Sociological Review, 30(1), 2014, pp.107-

118; M. Howarth, ‘Poor Pupils from Disadvantaged Backgrounds “Benefit

Most in a Grammar School System”‘, Daily Mail, 15 March 2014.

8 E. Waugh, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, M. Davie (ed.), Phoenix, 2010, entry

for March 1964.

9 Engineering Council, ‘Measuring the Mathematics Problem’, 2000.

10 Ibid.

11 P. Tymms and C. Fitz-Gibbon, ‘Standards, Achievement and Educational

Performance: A Cause For Celebration?’, in R. Phillips and J. Furlong

(eds.), Education, Reform and The State: Twenty-five Years of Policy, Politics

and Practice, London, Routledge Falmer, 2002, pp.167-73.

12 J. Russell, ‘Drilled, Not Educated’, Guardian, 20 August 2004.

13 Daily Telegraph, 15 October 1975.

14 Daily Mail, 25 August 1975.

15 Daily Telegraph, 11 November 1974, quoting Sir Rhodes Boyson and

Professor Brian Cox, citing surveys by the education authorities of

Manchester and Sheffield.

16 Schools Standards and Framework Act 1998, c.31, Part III, Chapter II,

Section 99.

17 K. Cochrane, ‘TUC Leader Frances O’Grady: “People Want Some Hope

for the Future”‘, Guardian, 5 September 2012.

18 F. Elliott, ‘Theresa May: “More Than 500 British Muslims Have Gone to

Syria – We Face a Real Threat”‘, The Times, 27 September 2014.

19 Theresa May, born 1 October 1956, would have gone to Holton Park

Grammar aged 11, in 1967 or possibly 1968. The school became

Comprehensive in 1971. J. Chipperfield, ‘Girls Were Taught in Idyllic

Surroundings at Holton Park’, ‘Memory Lane’, Oxford Mail, 8 June 2009.

20 J. Judd and F. Abrams, ‘Time to Bring Back Grammar Schools?’, The

Independent, 23 June 1996.

21 Commons Debate between T. Blair and M. Howard, 3 December 2003, col

498.

22 G. Jones, ‘I Would Send My Children to State School’, Daily Telegraph, 10

December 2005.

23 T. Shipman, ‘SamCam and PM “Will Send Daughter to a State School”‘,

Daily Mail, 10 March 2014.

24 S. Vine, ‘Why I’ve Chosen to Send My Daughter to a State School’, Daily

Mail, 5 March 2014.

25 S. Atkinson, ‘Harman Snubs Local Comp for Top Girls School’, Daily

Mirror, 7 April 1998.

26 K.R. Bradford, ‘Call This a Comprehensive? Grey Coat Hospital Could

Hardly be Called Inclusive – Unlike the Local Secondary Michael Gove

Has Passed Up’, The Independent, 12 March 2014.

27 M. Gove, ‘Academic Rigour is Liberating Not Limiting’, The Times, 15

August 2012.

28 M. Gove, ‘The Crude Social Engineering of A-Levels Insults Any Child

Who Wants to Succeed on Merit’, Daily Mail, 28 September 2011.

29 Ibid.

30 K.R. Bradford, ‘Call This a Comprehensive? Grey Coat Hospital Could

Hardly be Called Inclusive – Unlike the Local Secondary Michael Gove

Has Passed Up’, The Independent, 12 March 2014.