A lesson in how schools have changed
went to a grammar, her son to a public school and her grandson to a free academy. How did they fare? couple of experienced by three generations weeks ago, we of my family gives me a unique were anxiously perspective. awaiting my A grammar-school girl from eldest grandson a working-class background, I Arthur’s GCSE benefited so greatly from selective results. We schooling that I was able to afford to were not the privately educate my sons when the only ones. Arthur system was phased out. With school is a pioneer pupil at the West London fees now out of reach of all but the Free School, a new type of statefunded richest parents, however, they have educational establishment not been able to do the same. set up in 2011. These new Seeing my grandson doing so well schools, or academies, don’t among a comprehensive have to follow the national mix of classmates, I wonder curriculum, and detractors if there is a successful were waiting for them to fall third way that avoids the flat on their faces when traumatic segregation of their first results were my youth, yet delivers a announced last month. first-class education; if
Well, the naysayers high standards, rather were disappointed. than academic Arthur’s non-selective selection, are school – where there the answer. is a mix of ethnicities As my parents and abilities, and could not afford 25 per cent of pupils school fees, my are on free school meals only hope of a good – achieved brilliant education in the results, with 76 per cent Fifties was to pass the obtaining five or more 11-plus. In those days, GCSEs at A* to C grades. children who failed it, in
Arthur, too, covered my small rural town in himself in glory in Cambridgeshire, had to academically rigorous remain at the primary subjects, including Latin, school until 15, the which he is continuing to school-leaving age. A-level. He could hardly These all-age have done better at a schools were common top public school. in country areas,
As the debate over and they had no the meritocracy (or facilities; no external otherwise) of academic exams, no playing fields, selection intensifies, now outside toilets, and often that Theresa May has unqualified teachers. set out plans for a new The only future for such generation of grammar pupils was to get jobs schools, the full spectrum as factory workers or of post-war education farm labourers.
What a contrast, though, if you were one of the privileged few chosen for a place at Huntingdon
AGrammar School, as I was. All the teachers were graduates and swooshed around in dusty academic gowns. There were science labs, a music room, a library, an art room, a pottery room, extensive playing fields, tennis courts and a dining hall. There was even a quadrangle, such as you might find in an Oxbridge college.
I passed O-levels and A-levels and went to university, the first person in my family to do so. It was thanks to this wonderful gift of free education that I was able to fulfil my ambition of becoming a writer.
But the exam was a cruel lottery. My best friend, a clever girl, did not pass and she languished at the primary school until 15. Whether this experience of being denied an education influenced her decision to convert to Catholicism and become a Carmelite nun, I can’t say, but it put a huge distance between us.
The 11-plus was divisive and split families. My younger brother did not pass, and watched in mounting jealousy as I headed off to meet my posh new friends in my smart expensive uniform. A rift was created that never healed.
In the Fifties and Sixties, we new graduates could walk straight into a well-paid professional job. My husband, whom I met at university, also had parents who could not afford school fees, but he had won a fullfee scholarship to a public school. Thus, from nowhere, we became high earners, able to afford to send our sons to the best schools.
Our boys started off at the local primary school where, in the Seventies, the emphasis was on letting the children express themselves, rather than imparting the three Rs.
But then Richmond, where we lived, went comprehensive and we had to make a decision. All the former free grammar schools opted out of the state system to become independent, and the new comps were the old secondary moderns, with reports of severe behavioural problems.
We installed the boys in a poncy prep school, where they would take the Common Entrance exam. Both did well academically – Tom at Westminster and Will at Frensham Heights, an independent co-ed boarding school in Surrey – before becoming journalists and authors.
By now, though, things had changed. Whereas my then-husband and I had earned good money working on national newspapers, by our sons’ time Fleet Street had disappeared and, with it, the high salaries plus expenses. There was no way they could afford to pay school fees, so had to turn to the state to educate their own children.
Tom and his partner Victoria, who had been expensively educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School, were in despair because they could not find a decent secondary school near their home. Nor could they afford the property prices to move closer to one.
The comprehensive that Arthur was placed in, according to his father, was nice but didn’t insist on high standards, and Arthur took that as licence to muck about.
Just in time, the writer Toby Young co-founded the West London Free School in Hammersmith, with the aim of delivering an academically rigorous education, with a classical liberal curriculum, to a cross-section of pupils. There is no academic selection – pupils live in the catchment area or are drawn in a lottery – and no fees. Crucially, there are strict rules, a compulsory traditional uniform and sky-high standards and expectations.
Arthur has thrived, and has been followed there by his younger brother. Their sister is at an all-girls’ comprehensive, where perhaps the lack of distraction from boys accounts for her doing well, and there seems no point in disrupting her education.
As the grammar schools debate divides Westminster, and possibly the country, I worry how the Government can make good on its promise that schools will select on the basis of academic achievement without returning to what I feel was the cruel “pass or fail” of the past.
The new free schools, like my grandsons’, show it is possible to provide the same standard of education as the old grammars for all backgrounds and all ability levels – and with no divisive exam to pass at a tender age.