How grammar schools can work for everyone
All too rarely in the past 25 years has the Conservative Party remembered what it is really for, but one such moment came during my recent holiday. News arrived on my iPad one morning that Theresa May and her Education Secretary, Justine Greening, were in favour of opening more grammar schools. We should rejoice: but the key to this excellent idea will be how to deliver it.
When more than 50 years ago Tony Crosland (Highgate and Oxford) said he was “going to destroy every f–––ing grammar school in England”, he exposed the Left’s bigoted hatred of these institutions. It is not because they discriminate against workingclass people, because the evidence (and, as a grammar school boy myself, I saw it with my own eyes) suggests the opposite. It is because Labour wanted the people indoctrinated in a way different to that rooted in the old public schools and copied in the state sector; and because socialism thrives when people are too poorly educated to question its precepts. A truly free society has no cause to fear educating its people to the highest possible level. It was not the least disgraceful aspect of the inglorious rule of David Cameron (Eton and Oxford) that, apparently for reasons of cynicism rather than conviction, he swallowed the Crosland poison whole.
The Left has been out in force stating why a return to grammar schools won’t work. It certainly won’t if it is badly and inadequately implemented. If the Government sincerely wants to improve our country and the future of our young people by restoring selective education, it must be done properly.
The Left says that grammar schools favour the sharp-elbowed middle classes, who use their economic muscle to move into catchment areas and have their children privately coached to pass the 11-plus. This happens because, with only 164 such schools, there are few catchment areas, schools are heavily oversubscribed, and many children who would thrive at them cannot find places.
This problem ends if every town has a grammar school or two, and if everywhere becomes a catchment area. Then it won’t matter whether a child lives on the worst sink estate: he or she will have a grammar school to go to if bright enough. The greater availability of places will make coaching less popular. What it won’t end, of course, is the bad luck of children with parents who couldn’t care less and who do not encourage their intellectual development, thereby lessening their chances of passing the 11-plus. But then the comprehensive system has done nothing to tackle that either. Bad parenting requires a wider approach.
Indeed, when every child in England has a potential grammar school place, that might just encourage parents to take a more active interest in a child’s development than they do under a system where an inevitable place in a comprehensive school awaits. Some comprehensives are excellent; some, usually through no fault of the teachers who attempt to run them, are appalling. There is too high a proportion of appalling ones to suggest this system works. It is an idea whose time, like poor old Tony Crosland, has passed.
Other objections must be met. We all remember John Prescott whining that because he failed his 11-plus his girlfriend marked him down as a failure and dumped him. Leaving aside the probability that Lord Prescott would have struggled with the 11-plus at any age, in my own experience nobody was written off at 11. Boys came into my school at 14 and 16 to do O and A-levels, so the system allowed for late developers – and boys who could not keep up were asked to leave to make room for them. New selective schools must be equally flexible.
Also, a selective school system is not just about grammar schools. It is about providing what the Butler Education Act of 1944 termed technical schools for those whose talents lay more in the sciences than in the humanities. Grammar schools can educate their share of scientists, engineers and computer geniuses, but so too could schools geared to people without allround talents, but with a gift for technological-based disciplines. It is no coincidence that politicians have complained about our failure to produce such people ever since most grammar and technical schools closed down in the 1970s.
Then, and only then, can proper attention be given to those pupils who don’t pass the 11-plus and who need a different form of teaching. Some of them will develop late, and must receive the teaching required to assist that process, and they may move to grammar or technical schools for GCSEs and A-levels. For those who do not, the idea mooted recently of leaving school at 14 and going into a four-year apprenticeship, with some element of continuing education, has huge attractions both for the student and for society. School must be about developing each child to the limits of his or her potential, and anyone who thinks the present system does this properly is living in a dream world.
I hope Mrs May and Miss Greening will not be half-hearted in their radicalism in bringing back selective schools. If done properly, such a system can create huge new opportunities for the disadvantaged of all levels of ability. It will upset the Marxists who control some of the teaching unions, but they must be confronted head-on: the opportunities for the teaching profession too under such a system are enormous, and not just in the new wave of grammar schools. The challenge of developing a cadre of teachers to bring out the best in non-academic pupils and ensure that they can have a fulfilling life is both enormous and exciting.
Mrs May knows her professed commitment to improving social mobility could have no finer vehicle than a return to selective education. And, if she pursues this policy in the properly inclusive fashion I have outlined, her idea will pay huge electoral dividends.