Backgrounder: grammar schools
Is it right to select at the age of 11? It’s a question that’s been debated with renewed vigour since the government announced plans to expand grammar schools in 2016. Two historians offer their takes on an issue that’s divided opinion for decades
When,The Labour party’s grammarschool alumni included Harold Wilson, who declared that they would be “closed over his dead body”
in 2016, Theresa May promised to expand grammar schools, she single-handedly catapulted the topic to the top of the news agenda. There is, of course, nothing new in this: the media, public and governments alike have been wrestling with the issue of selection at the age of 11 since the Second World War.
Grammar schools were part of a tripartite system (along with secondary moderns and secondary technicals) established by the Education Act of 1944. At first, politicians of all stripes supported the act. Socialists celebrated the provision of free secondary education, which gave working-class pupils a route into white-collar jobs. Conservatives saw it as a way of finding Britain’s talents in a competitive postwar world.
But, by the 1960s, progressive researchers and Labour politicians were criticising the 11-plus exam, which selected grammar school pupils. Sociologist AH Halsey found that, in the 1950s, just one in five pupils who passed the 11-plus were working class. Halsey was adviser to Anthony Crosland, the Labour education secretary who, in 1965, required councils to plan the introduction of comprehensive education, basing school admission on geographical communities rather than exam performance.
This process split both parties. Labour was divided between grammar school alumni in its own ranks, including Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who declared that they would be “closed over his dead body”, and comprehensive enthusiasts like Shirley Williams, education secretary in the 1970s.
However, it was Margaret Thatcher who, as education secretary in the early 1970s, agreed to the closure of most grammar schools. It was not a record she would be proud of: she wrote in her memoirs that she regretted that the Conservatives had been “bitten by the bug of comprehensivisation”.
By the time Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, the number of grammar schools had fallen dramatically. Most of those remaining were in areas that opposed abolition. They also survived in Northern Ireland. The Conservatives now concentrated on creating a market among comprehensives to strengthen parental choice and drive up standards.
Tony Blair institutionalised this truce by guaranteeing that, while grammar schools could not grow, remaining ones could only be closed by local referendums. His press secretary boasted that Blair promised “the end of the bog-standard comprehensive”. New Labour governments allowed new ‘Specialist’ Schools to select some of their intake on aptitude.
David Cameron endorsed Blair’s programme of city academies as an alternative to grammar schools, which he dismissed as being dominated by the middle class. Tory MPs rebuked Cameron as a privileged Old Etonian who did not appreciate the opportunity grammar schools offered those who could not afford private education.
Theresa May’s intervention has to be seen in this context. Her support of grammar schools marked a break with Cameron. It was a populist appeal to provincial, suburban ambition. But some Conservatives feared being marginalised as defenders of a socially exclusive system. When she lost her majority in 2017, May lost the will to cut this Gordian knot. No one looks likely to raise the knife to it in the immediate future.
DR MATT COLE
Grammar schools have been a part of England’s academic landscape for, perhaps, 1,500 years. The first grammar school is widely considered to be the King’s School in Canterbury, founded by none other than St Augustine in the sixth century.
From the early days, these schools were characterised by strict discipline and a dedication to teaching Latin to the English priesthood. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary definition of the grammar school as a place in which “the learned languages are grammatically taught” suggests that these principles remained in place for centuries. And they were the basis of the ‘Eldon ruling’ in 1805 that fees should only be used for the teaching of Classical languages.
Gradually, however, many affluent parents began to turn their backs on grammar schools’ narrow, old-fashioned approach, and chose instead what we would today call public schools. The likes of Eton and Winchester were soon the institutions of choice for Britain’s aristocracy; other public schools, like Uppingham, introduced a greater breadth of subjects such as natural science. By the late 19th century, grammar schools had lost much of their cachet.
That didn’t stop the 1902 Education Act – which was instrumental in developing and expanding state secondary education provision – offering financial support for existing grammar schools. Although grammar schools were now mandated to provide one in four of their places to poorer children, cost remained a barrier for many.
By the end of the Second World War, the emergence of the welfare state and the need for reconstruction brought a fresh approach in educational thinking. Although much derided today, the tripartite model of grammars, technical and secondary modern schools – and the infamous 11-plus exam – was an attempt at meritocracy. It was a bid to make a more academic form of schooling available to all – for free – up to the age of 15.
For some, such a system clearly worked. Many argued that the emergence of a new, aspirational middle class after the war was a testament to grammar schools’ success in promoting social mobility.
This was not a view that gained much traction in the 1960s, a more egalitarian decade in which educational selection was widely derided as elitist. The replacement of many grammar schools by new non-selective comprehensive schools (sometimes in the same building and on the same land) was to signal the slow, somewhat uneven death of the old system.
Today, only a handful of areas in the UK (including Northern Ireland) still maintain some form of selection – either because of local authority resistance to government changes or, as in the case of a vote in Ripon, Yorkshire in 2000, parental choice. In advocating the expansion of grammar schools, Theresa May is swimming against a tide of opinion over recent decades which sees selection at 11, no matter how nuanced, as unfair and burdensome.
The emergence of a new, aspirational middle class was cited as evidence of grammar schools’ success in promoting greater social mobility DR JOHN HOWLETT