Boost grammars: they’re the engine of social mobility
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THERE have been many acts of wilful political vandalism in our nation’s history. But few have been more profound or damaging than the dogma which decreed the end of grammar schools in the Sixties and Seventies.
Grammar schools were one of this country’s proudest boasts, providing a world-class education and offering a ladder of opportunity to poor, bright pupils. In today’s educational world, private schools are often thought of as the academic crème de la crème. But it’s often forgotten that in the years following the Second World War, private schools were in severe decline. They were usually the butt of jokes as little more than boarding camps for rich thickos. The academic elite of the nation was raised in state grammar schools.
With their effective abolition in the 1970s, the number of former grammar school pupils today is ever shrinking. In the late 1940s, 38 per cent of state school pupils were at one of the 1,300 grammar schools, while today that figure is just five per cent. But the likes of Sir David Attenborough, Edwina Currie, Michael Portillo and Diane Abbott all benefited from a grammar school education. An announcement yesterday by schools minister Nick Gibb now provides a small but welcome boost to the 163 remaining grammar schools. Over the next three years, the Government will fund 3,000 extra places, on top of the 167,000 pupils who currently attend a grammar school. But the arguments will continue.
One of the usual objections to grammar schools is that they are socially exclusive. Because they offer a superb education for free, competition to get into the small number still around is intense and that can give an unfair advantage to wealthier parents who can, for example, afford extra tutoring to prepare for the entrance test.
The sensible response to this isn’t to pillory the remaining grammar schools, it’s to expand them so that their benefits can be made more widespread. In the days when grammar schools were a key part of the education system, they were far from socially exclusive – indeed their greatest achievement was to offer a ladder out of poverty.
But a law passed by the Labour government in 1998 banned the creation of new grammar schools and although the last Conservative manifesto promised to change that law, the loss of their majority means – at least for now – that the ban is not going to happen.
The only option available is to expand the existing grammar schools and that’s what Mr Gibb is doing. Last year he added 2,700 new places; this year it’s another 3,000. But the places come with strings attached. Quite rightly, grammar schools have to show that they will fill the places with currently disadvantaged children, whether through quotas, different forms of assessment or new catchment areas. The purpose is, as he put it, to show they are “returning to their original social mobility agenda” after decades of being colonised by the middle classes.
There remain many myths around grammar schools. The most potent is that by creaming off the most able pupils, the rest suffer. It’s true that in the old system, some secondary moderns were awful. But back then, there was a near universal contempt for vocational
‘They lift standards across all schools’
education and non-academic pupils were often written off. We have moved on from that now and academic selection ought to be just one type of selection, with those pupils who have other strengths going to whatever type of school is most appropriate for them.
AND the evidence of today’s grammar schools shows that they actually lift the standards across all schools. In Bristol, which like most areas has a fully comprehensive system, 59 per cent of all pupils achieved 5 A* to C grades at GCSE (including English and Maths) in 2015/16. On the other hand in Trafford, which has grammar schools, the figure across the LEA was 75 per cent. The obsession against academic selection is peculiarly British. In Australia, for example, it is entirely normal. In many US states, places at academically selective High Schools are eagerly sought after. And the selective German Gymnasiums are designed to prepare their pupils for college.
Here, one most depressing aspect of this debate is how it has become a left versus right issue. Depressing and also bizarre, because the intellectual origins of the 1944 Education Act, which enshrined the idea of a grammar school place for the intellectually able, lay in the arguments of revered socialist thinkers such as Sidney Webb and RH Tawney.
Conversely, the modern left regards academic selection as an evil to be fought. But by simply tearing down grammar schools, the comprehensive revolution destroyed much of the excellent without improving the bad. Comprehensive schools replaced selection by ability with selection by class and house price. Middle class children went to middle class comprehensives, whose catchment areas comprised middle class neighbourhoods, and many working class children were left to fester in the inner city comprehensive their parents could afford to move away from.
The rise of Academy schools has made a tremendous difference to this, replicating much of the grammar school ethos without academic selection.
Yesterday’s announcement of another 3,000 grammar school places is good news –but we are still a long way away from an education system that recognises excellence and wants to repeat it, rather than destroy it.