Gove’s latest lesson for parents: How to cheat the school system

LAST week the Education Secretary, who runs a school system in which selection by ability is actually illegal, got his daughter into one of the most selective schools in the world. But have no fear. No rules were broken. Of course, the Grey Coat Hospital School does not select by ability. But, like several state schools used by the London elite, it selects in other ways and continues to have many features of the grammar school it used to be.

Tens of thousands of parents, disappointed in their choice of school on National Offer Day last week, could only dream of getting such a schooling for their children.

And yet Michael Gove was not criticised for this. He was praised.

‘All credit to Michael Gove and his journalist wife, Sarah Vine, whose daughter has been awarded a place at Grey Coat Hospital, an academy school in the heart of Westminster,’ simpered the Left-wing Independent, adding: ‘He will be the first Conservative Secretary of State for Education to have a child at a state secondary school.’

Why would that be a good thing, you might ask? Why should we rejoice that Tory politicians are now taking to the same tricks that Labour hypocrites have used for years?

GREY Coat Hospital is an interesting place. It is totally unlike most state secondaries. It defies egalitarian dogma, and accepts educational wisdom, and so is open to girls only. Even without its religious requirements it is not simple to get into.

Its admissions rules go on for pages (I have posted them on my blog for anyone who wants to study them). You would have to be a mixture of Albert Einstein and St Thomas Aquinas to work out what they actually mean in practice.

Why is this sort of filtering allowed, while open, honest, straightforward selection by ability is against the law?

The school is one of several that are well-known to pushy and well-informed London Blairites, such as the Goves, who know paying school fees will damage their images. Others include Camden School for Girls, William Ellis, and (for Roman Catholics) the London Oratory and Cardinal Vaughan. It is amazing what such people will do (one New Labour power couple moved house at enormous cost) to wangle their young into these places, which more or less guarantee Oxbridge entry at the end.

Harriet Harman, now in the news for other reasons, also got a child into Grey Coat Hospital, back in 1998. Nobody praised her. ‘Harman Snubs Local Comp for Top Girls School’, said the Daily Mirror at the time and accurately called Grey Coat Hospital an ‘elite’ school.

The real question is why Mr Gove’s daughter isn’t going to a school her father has often praised to the heavens, his own local comprehensive. This is Burlington Danes Academy, a few minutes’ walk from the Education Secretary’s modest home.

AFTER all, both Mr Gove and the Prime Minister have ladled warm words over Burlington Danes and its head, Dame Sally Coates. Dame Sally, once invited to speak next to Mr Gove at a Tory conference, is shortly leaving for higher things, but surely such schools aren’t wholly dependent on one charismatic head, are they?

In 2012 Mr Gove wrote a newspaper article i n which he listed Burlington Danes among schools in which ‘excellence is becoming a universal expectation, academic study a driving purpose’. Later that same year he numbered it among ‘some superb state schools in disadvantaged areas generating fantastic results’. He said of these schools: ‘They do much better in exams than many schools, including private schools, in leafy areas. Their students win places at Oxbridge on merit. All because their heads, from the moment any child arrives, refuse to accept excuses for under-performance.’

And Mr Cameron himself, in a speech in September 2011, commended Burlington Danes, saying it was doing much better than four out of five state schools in Surrey and Oxfordshire.

Could it be that these salesmen don’t actually want to buy their own product? Could it be that they know in their hearts that their supposed school reforms, which they ceaselessly trumpet to us, are a mass of froth, oversold and boosted by dubious statistics?

Could it be that they know that single-sex selective schools, which they deny by law to nearly everyone else, are in fact better than failed, doomed comprehensives that can sometimes be dragged into shape by strong heads, only to sink back again to their former state?

If you want to know the answer, don’t listen to what they say. Watch what they do.