Destructive legacy of the grammar school-wreckers lingers on today
Shirley Williams was an admirable politician, but her education policies hurt poorer bright pupils
Iwas once tasked as political correspondent with ringing Enoch Powell to obtain a comment on the death of Harold Wilson, the former prime minister. “De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” was his classicist’s reply. I do not intend to speak ill of Shirley Williams, whose career I observed with somewhat grudging admiration as I did not entirely agree with her political views. I even covered part of her triumphant by-election campaign in Crosby in 1981 and attended the launch of the SDP, of which she was a founding member, on a cold, wet day almost exactly 40 years ago.
A few months later, the Gang of Four decided to break the mould further with a “rolling conference” which began in Perth and ended in London. They and the accompanying press pack travelled by rail around the country for the best part of a week. So much alcohol was consumed that our chartered locomotive was dubbed the “train of shame”. A songbook was even compiled, with one contribution being If You Were the Only Shirl in the World, to which Williams gamely sang along.
Lady Williams, as she became, died on Monday, aged 90, and her obituaries are testament to her extraordinary contribution to public life. She was once tipped to be the first woman prime minister, before Margaret Thatcher beat her to it. They were at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but had one strand that united them: the abolition of grammar schools.
Mrs Thatcher was education secretary in the 1970-74 Heath government and inherited the policy of the previous Labour administration to introduce a fully comprehensive system. A grammar-school girl herself, she tried to protect those that fought council closure decisions and managed to save around 90 of them. But she also approved more than 3,000 comprehensives, a point that Shirley Williams rarely tired of making.
Williams served in the Education Department from 1967 where Anthony Crosland, as secretary of state, had been evangelical in his determination to destroy the selective system of education. In her biography published in 1982, his widow Susan said he had told her: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f------ grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland.”
In 1976, two years after Labour returned to power, Williams became education secretary. During this time the grammar I attended became a comprehensive. It is one of the more galling aspects of this debate over the decades that the greatest opponents of grammar schools invariably attended independent institutions. Crosland was educated at Highgate School and Williams at St Paul’s Girls, which she considered “shockingly rigid”, but from where she won a scholarship to Oxford. Tony Benn, another opponent, went to Westminster. The list goes on.
Grammar schools’ most ardent supporters are those who went to them and especially those bright workingclass children for whom the option of an expensive independent education never existed. Tory politicians who went to private schools have never been great proponents of the return of grammars either. They never needed to be, since getting into a good school was never a problem. Neither Tony Blair (Fettes), David Cameron nor Boris Johnson (both Etonians) ever warmed to the idea. The only recent PM who did was Theresa May, who attended a grammar school until it was also turned into a comprehensive.
At the heart of this debate for more than 50 years is the question of how to help clever children from less well-off backgrounds achieve their potential. For Labour, wedded to egalitarianism, selection on the grounds of academic prowess is anathema, though they never had the same compunction about special schools for those who are talented musically or outstanding at sports.
A great deal has been written about “social mobility” and how it has stalled. Yet everyone knows that a good school offers the surest route out of difficult circumstances and, in the state sector, the best performers are the 164 surviving grammars in England. That is hardly surprising, I hear you say, since they select the brightest children. But they comprise just 5 per cent of all schools, whereas before a wrecking ball was taken to the system the proportion was 25 per cent.
The reason why Crosland and Williams disliked them so much was precisely because they were good schools and therefore gave those attending them a better start than children who didn’t (apart from those at private schools, of course). The fault with the old system was not the grammar schools but the secondary moderns, where those who failed their
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That was not an argument for abolishing the best schools, but improving the bad ones. It is astonishing to think that the creation of new grammars is actually forbidden by an Act of Parliament, with only the expansion of existing schools allowed. Only a few have availed themselves of the latter loophole.
Mrs May sought to get the issue debated once again when she succeeded Cameron in 2016. She wanted to expand the government’s free-school programme and allow them to offer selective education to some 70,000 pupils. She pledged to overturn the Blair government’s statutory ban to allow new schools to choose their entrants on academic merit. However, her failure to secure a majority at the 2017 election scuppered that plan and it has not been resurrected by her successor.
Given the disaster that the schools’ shutdown during the pandemic has been for pupils from poorer backgrounds, it is time it was revived. If one objection to grammar schools is that middle-class parents are able to get their children disproportionately into the remaining selective schools that’s because there are so few of them. There used to be two in every big town and the more there are the greater the chance that bright kids from less well-off families will have of obtaining the education they need.
Of course the education “blob” would be against it, as would Labour, which seems to me to be two good reasons for going ahead with it. But Boris (OE) won’t. Half a century on, Shirley Williams’s legacy remains a powerful influence on modern politics.