Selective schools are not a step back but a modern way of fostering diversity

TIt’s not about the class war but about fitting the speciality to suit a child’s needs, be it vocational, technological or academic he case for selection in secondary education ought to be a no-brainer, so to speak. Children, even those who are raised under the same roof, are all different – in their temperaments, capacities, rates of maturing and inclinations. So the idea that one kind of school could suit them all, from pre-pubescence to early adulthood, must be wrong. Let’s start from there, rather than from the less attractive argument that is now being presented for “bringing back grammar schools”. Any political position (and this debate is highly political) that involves the phrase “bring back” is at a catastrophic disadvantage, having cast itself immediately as retrogressive and dreamily nostalgic.

In the case of educational selection, that kind of language is unnecessary and peculiarly misleading. Just imagine how much more acceptable the position would seem if it were described in the most up-to-date, fashionable terms: selective schooling is about diversity, the acceptance of difference and giving children the opportunity to develop their individual talents. There – doesn’t that sound better? And isn’t it, in fact, a truer picture of what selection would mean in a modern setting? We now live in a country that would not tolerate – and does not need – just two kinds of people: a vast army of factory fodder churned out by secondary moderns, and a smaller classically trained elite to administer its institutions. The new information technologies and the decline of manufacturing between them make nonsense of the old concept of “vocational” training.

Schooling that prepares pupils for immediate entry to working life, rather than higher academic education, will have to adapt to an entirely new global economy. At least one strand of it must involve specialist schools for those who want to go into computer engineering, digital innovation and their attendant occupations. The possibility should exist for post-14 partnership with training schemes run by the knowledge economy industries. Then there should be more traditional schools dedicated to maths and science studies for those aiming for pure research, and other schools geared to languages and the higher literacy. Certainly, as the Tory activist group founded by David Davis and Liam Fox (both working-class boys who benefited from selection) has said, there should not be a hard cut-off point at the early age of 11 for determining entrance to whatever secondary school.

If diversity is at the centre of this, then flexibility and, to some extent, reversibility has to be part of the picture, too. Of course, there could be problems: a child who had spent three years in one sort of school could not be instantly transferred to a quite different curriculum without help in catching up. But the difficulties are not insoluble. The first two (or three) years at all schools should share a thorough common core of mathematics and English, so that no one – whatever his later specialism – is incapable of acquiring as much knowledge as he wants in the area of his later preference. This may sound idyllic but it is not beyond the bounds of reasonable practice if the will is there – and that means the education establishment, as we used to call it, being prepared to make as zealous a commitment as it once made to the abolition of selection.

What matters is that the differences between children should be accepted, cultivated and valued, rather than being seen as a threat. When comprehensive schools were mooted, many of us naively assumed that they would be simple amalgamations of local schools, incorporating the grammar, technical high school and secondary modern streams on to single campuses, which would be less socially divisive and more communitybased. It became stunningly clear that this was not what the comprehensive school movement (and God knows, it was a movement in the full-blown political sense) had in mind at all.

Its objective was to eradicate any perceptible distinction between what might be construed as different levels of ability or academic predilection: mixed-ability teaching was the orthodoxy that was essential if comprehensivisation was to fulfil its intended purpose. To accept difference was to tolerate inequality. The most militant version of the ideology even opposed streaming pupils for subjects such as Maths and English, in which varying aptitudes and speeds of acquisition created almost insurmountable problems.

At its most febrile, this became a vicious kind of anti-intellectualism, in which teaching the traditional canon of Western learning was anathematised as “bourgeois cultural imperialism” and deemed irrelevant and corrupting to working-class children, generations of whom were thus locked into the limitations of their deprived backgrounds. Seriously. If you think I exaggerate look up pretty much any issue of the Times Education

Supplement from the Seventies to early Eighties in which this codswallop was propagated week after week.

Well, we needn’t go over all that ground again. I spent the last years of my academic life working with colleges of education which proselytised this stuff, and my first few years as a journalist excoriating it. The fascist equalitarianism of the true believers is mercifully out of fashion at last, as much as anything because it made teachers’ working lives impossible. But the lives that were truly wrecked were precisely the ones that were being idealised in romantic “noble savage” mythology: the children whose own experience was said to be as “valid” as the secondhand high culture that traditional schooling had supposedly force-fed to them. What use, or interest, was Shakespeare to kids growing up on a council estate whose daily existence was dominated by gangs? Make what happens in the classroom relate to their day-to-day reality, not to the antique verbiage of dead white males.

So what happened? Naturally enough, the street culture won. Theresa May’s under-achieving “white working-class boys” are the result. If even the school doesn’t promote the life of the mind and aspiration to wider horizons, why should a 14-year-old – subject to intense peer pressure – be expected to find his way through?

This is not new. There has always been a core of resistance to extended education in British working-class life. When my husband was growing up in the mean streets of the North East after the war, the expectation of most families was that their sons should go out to work and contribute to the household as soon as possible after the legal school-leaving age. But like so many of his generation, he was rescued by school selection: the possibility of “passing the scholarship” created a whole new perspective.

That common experience, which the anti-grammar school army is now trying to dismiss, was so widespread that in the Sixties, Britain had the highest proportion of university students from working-class homes of any European country. The 1944 Education Act, with its supposedly heartless 11-plus selection exam, had produced an unprecedented revolution in mass social mobility. But what is needed now is that we permit as much variation in the schooling of young people as possible. Not just because that is the best way to foster their ambitions, but because it could free them from conformist pressure and allow them to be truly themselves.

Adolescence is a painful, anxious time. One of the ways to make it easier is to allow pupils to find others who are more like themselves – computer geeks, maths whiz-kids, budding writers or hands-on mechanics. As I say, we needn’t argue about “bringing back grammar schools”. It isn’t about academic vs non-academic any more. And it isn’t about learning Latin vs an apprenticeship at the local steelworks, either. The class war is over. What should matter now are the children.