How fanatical utopians made Scotland less equal... by sabotaging the excellent schools that were the true pioneers of ‘levelling up’
AN incredible act of spite and folly has robbed Scotland, and most of the rest of the UK, of what was once one of the best school systems in the world. Nearly 60 years after this stupid mistake, our education establishment still has not admitted it was wrong, and persists with it. These people are like a vain and foolish driver who took the wrong exit from the M8 on his way to Stirling, has now reached Warsaw and will soon arrive in Moscow, with a petulant expression on his face, rather than accept and undo his original error.
In Scotland, ‘Circular 600’, issued in 1965, commanded the introduction of comprehensive secondary education throughout the country, a far more ruthless decree than the weaker ‘Circular 10/65’ south of the Border, which urged but did not order the change in England and Wales.
Selection for state secondary schools in Scotland took place at 12, a year later than in England, following a test and assessment widely known as ‘The Qualy’ or ‘Qualifying Examination’. This was still very much in operation in practice, though it had technically been abolished years before.
There were then two forms of secondary state education in Scotland: one lasted three years and
Accepted state pupils on merit, without charging fees to them
was known as ‘junior secondary’; the other lasted four or five years and was known as ‘senior secondary’. Many schools provided both on the same site. Only about 70 state schools in Scotland, out of roughly 750 state secondaries, provided only fourand five-year courses and so were exclusively ‘senior secondary’.
Those 70 were directly comparable to the 1,298 English and Welsh grammar schools. One was James Gillespie’s High School for Girls in Edinburgh, famously once attended by Muriel Spark and disguised as ‘The Marcia Blaine School for Girls’ in her book The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (it is now a mixed-sex comprehensive).
Roughly 400 Scottish secondary schools provided only three-year courses. These were exclusively ‘junior secondary’ and so comparable to English secondary moderns. Another 267, known as ‘omnibus’ schools, provided both junior and senior courses under the same roof.
At this time there were also 29 ‘grant-aided’ schools in Scotland. These were partly private foundations that admitted state pupils on merit for ‘senior secondary’ courses, without charging fees to them. The taxpayer met the bill. But they also accepted fee-paying entrants.
One example of this highly successful state-private mixture was Dollar Academy, now a fee-charging private school. Another was Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen, famously attended (after its return to the private sector) by Michael Gove MP.
Because their relationship with the state schools depended on selection by ability, they were forced to choose between going wholly private or merging with the new comprehensive system. Most went private. There were a few battles, in major cities, about the fate of well-loved selective schools or grant-aided schools. But Circular 600 was a direct order.
Scotland rapidly abolished all forms of selection by ability in state education. At that time there were a small number of wholly private secondary schools in Scotland, such as Fettes and Gordonstoun, equivalent to the ‘public schools’ in England. At the time of the comprehensive revolution, about 2 per cent of Scottish children attended such fee-charging schools. This share would rise to 4 per cent across Scotland, and considerably higher than that in Edinburgh.
There is no doubt about the spite involved. The supposedly intelligent Labour politician Anthony Crosland, who made the original mistake, boasted crudely about his plans, snarling to friends: ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every **** ing grammar school in England. And Wales, and Northern Ireland,’
Interestingly, he did not mention Scotland, though the 1964-1970 Labour Government to which he belonged achieved its aim most thoroughly here. It was his ideas, expressed in his book The Future of Socialism, which played a huge part in the abolition of academic selection in state secondary schools by that government. There is also no doubt about the folly.
Before Crosland began his work of destruction, there was a thing called ‘The Brain Drain’, by which thousands of British young men and women were poached by American employers because they were so much better-educated than the products of America’s democratic, egalitarian, not-very-good High Schools. Now, British examination certificates, north and south of the Border, are a bit like the Zimbabwe dollar under Robert Mugabe. There are a lot of them, and they have a very high face value. But they are worth far, far less than they used to be when they were harder to get.
There has never been a proper full-scale evaluation of the merits of the two systems. And it is now virtually impossible to make one because one of the effects of going comprehensive was a revolution in the exam system. This makes direct comparisons impossible.
But the evidence available suggests a rapid and widespread drop in standards, shown by raging grade inflation. England’s ‘O’ levels were first watered down and then abolished. Its ‘A’ levels bear little relation to the exams taken before 1965. Scotland also passed through
a total revision of its former ‘Ordinary’ and ‘Higher’ grade examinations. The present system is utterly different from the one in existence before the abolition of academically selective secondary schools and the discontinuing of the ‘grantaided’ schools.
Even so, there is strong evidence that grade inflation and lower standards have reached Scotland’s universities. In September 2004 The Guardian reported: ‘Half of Scottish universities are giving first-year students classes in basic literacy, because so many of them are struggling to construct a simple essay… Six Scottish institutions have introduced the classes in a bid to give freshers a better start in essay writing after continual complaints about the lack of basic skills new students possess.’
In October 2012 it emerged, in figures from the Higher Education Statistics Authority, that record numbers of students were graduating from Scotland’s universities with first-class or upper-second class degrees. The statistics showed that 70 per cent of students left university with a first or a 2:1. That compared to 64 per cent a decade before and 56 per cent in 1994, the earliest year for which comparable figures were available. One Scottish newspaper noted: ‘The figures support claims that university degrees are being devalued by the same sort of “grade inflation” which has seen school exams results improve year on year.’
There is evidence from his own writing that Crosland (like most of the advocates of comprehensive schools) did not know what he was doing, and did not expect to do the damage he did. But so what? He and his allies in the Labour Party should have known. He himself, like several socialist politicians of the time, had been given an expensive private education before going to Oxford. Plenty of people had warned against closing academically selective secondary schools. They predicted that it would hurt education in general and punish the children of the poor in particular.
One powerful defender of academic selection was Eric James, the former head of the superb Manchester Grammar School. He put it like this: ‘If I were a High Tory instead of a Fabian Socialist – a Tory of a type that now scarcely exists even in cartoons, one who really believes in privilege and keeping the lower orders down, one of the first things I should do would be to get rid of grammar schools.’
And one of England’s most senior school inspectors, Percy Wilson, had likewise warned: ‘In the long run (two generations?) and after the expenditure of fantastic sums of money it is possible that a number of good and very wellequipped and well-staffed comprehensive schools and/or sixth form colleges could produce between them reasonable numbers of boys and girls as well-educated as the majority of grammar school sixth forms are now. Till then – and it is a hypothetical “then” – the new policy will cause a decline in education standards at the age of 18, in circumstances more adverse in this nation than elsewhere.’
But somehow the Labour Party, whose supporters greatly benefited from selective state schools, had been captured by utopian fanatics who believed – with no real evidence – that making everyone go to the same sort of school would make this a more equal country.
The tragedy was that nobody stood up for the academically selective schools.
They have been wiped out completely in Scotland and Wales. The few which survive in isolated patches in England bear no relation to the hundreds that were lost.
They are mostly in well-off areas. They are besieged by middle-class parents frantic to avoid paying private fees of around £200,000 out of post-tax income, who will stop at nothing to get little Barney or Jemima into already oversubscribed establishments. Forget them. They have nothing to do with the many fine state secondary schools which existed before the great disaster of 1965.
The academically selective state school miracle had a profound effect on the whole of Britain. It also created the parallel marvel of the Grant Aided schools and their English equivalents the Direct Grant Schools. These superb private day-schools flung their doors open, free of fees, to state school pupils who could pass an exam.
It is often claimed that the selective state secondaries were biased in favour of the middle class. But one survey on this subject, conducted in England and Wales for the 1954 Gurney-Dixon report, found that 64.6 per cent of pupils in selective secondaries came from working-class homes. It is reasonable to guess that things were much the same in Scotland.
What really good comprehensive school can claim anything like that now? There was an explosion of talent in this country which the feecharging ‘public’ schools would never have achieved.
For example, Alan Bennett, son of a Co-op butcher, rose to become a major playwright and national treasure. Alan Rickman, whose father was a painter and decorator, became a great actor. Retired Admiral of the Fleet, Lord West, attended Clydebank High School.
During the same period grammar school products stormed the great Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, pushing aside the children of the rich by talent alone, with no special concessions or ‘social mobility’ programmes.
Look through the top people’s bible, Who’s Who, and you will find dozens of scientists, lawyers, military and police chiefs, senior academics and distinguished politicians who, in that exciting era, climbed the ladder of the academically
Nobody stood up for the academically selective schools
A new classless elite of people, who could think and question
selective state schools to achieve distinction and serve their country. These schools did not only find and lift up thousands of boys and girls who would have drowned or floundered in the vast disorderly schools of today, and give them a chance to shine as they were intended to do – they were a great national resource, giving us more talent and helping to create a new classless elite of people, who could think and question. See how we miss such people now.
How dismal this is. Of course reform is often necessary. But the selective schools worked.
Their main problem was that there were too few such schools, not that there was anything wrong with them. It is hard to see how this problem was solved by destroying almost all of them.
Has anyone ever, in any other area of human activity, set out to bring improvement by destroying something which was known to be good and successful, and replacing it with an untried, wildly idealistic experiment?
© Peter Hitchens, 2022
A Revolution Betrayed, by Peter Hitchens, is published by Bloomsbury Continuum on November 24 at £20. To pre-order a copy for £18, go to mailshop. co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937 before December 4. Free UK delivery on orders over £20.