More grammar schools please, sir?
I don’t know if he’s doing it just to piss Cameron off, but Basher Davis has started spewing out policies like a man who’s just downed a bucket of Blue Bols. We’ve had the policy to join the Ligue communiste revolutionnaire in sticking it up Brussels, the policy to entrench inherited privilege forever, and the policy to throw weed-smokers into a pit of poisonous snakes. Or something like that. Now, we’ve got another one for the clients. The big one: Bring Back The Grammar Schools. (Or even, create 60 more secondary moderns.)
There’s a lot of it about. The logic of the critique of comprehensives is simple: they’re a sham. We still have selection, but now it’s economic and social selection rather than meritocratic. The “house for sale, one careful owner, seven years’ school fees included” argument. Worse still, we’re selecting on the basis of religion, and we all know what that really means: somewhere for your white kid to get educated without having to mix with the Pakis. Yes indeed, comprehensive education doesn’t do quite what it says on the tin…
That second criticism is bogus, of course. Any government serious about long-term community (yuk) “cohesion” could stop religious selection by lunchtime. Sadly, the first is probably valid. Three streets north of where I live, property prices jump. Why? Because you move into the likely catchment for this school. In 2004, 850 applicants for 250 places. The rest of us get the shit.
So the argument for bringing back (well, bringing back more than the current 165) grammar schools is intuitively attractive. Bright, poor kids get equal access to good schools, within their borough and on merit. The very rich can still bail out to public (i.e. private) school, but for the rest of us meritocracy reigns. It might seem harsh, but my partner (an experienced primary teacher who now works in a special school) is confident teachers can accurately select for cognitive ability at 11 (but how? now there’s a question…). And this recent study (pdf) from the London School of Economics adds evidential support:
Our results indicate that the most able pupils in the selective school system did do somewhat better than those of similar ability in mixed ability school systems. Thus the grammar system was advantageous for the most able pupils in the system, i.e. highly able students who managed to get into grammar schools. On the other hand, lower ability pupils did not do systematically better or worse in the selective school system. Many commentators have argued that the ‘comprehensive experiment’ failed in England and Wales, reducing standards and educational achievement. To some extent our findings support this. The shift to mixed ability schooling did reduce the educational achievement of the most able. From an historical perspective, our results also suggest that the dismantling of the UK selective school system played some part in ensuring that the subsequent expansion of the education system disproportionately benefited less able (but wealthier) students. In terms of the current policy agenda, our evidence is potentially comforting to those who endorse increased selection in the education system, suggesting that the most able might benefit from a more selective system and that the negative impact of selection on the rest of the school population is likely to be small.
Impressive. But Davis and his boys aren’t telling us everything  and this isn’t the 1960s. The grammar school system can be gamed, too. Middle-class parents buy tutors for the 11-plus. They can afford stay-at-home mums or dads. Grandparents don’t live nearby anymore  another leveller gone. Property prices, not in the picture forty years ago, move with good primary schools (and those without large “non-native-speaking” intakes)… and we’re back where we started. The egalitarian grammar school argument is a sham, too.
Smart cookies will have already spotted option three: marketizing education. School vouchers and the like. Let the parents decide: freedom to choose location, curriculum, religion, vegetarianism or whatever floats your boat for the little darling’s schooling. I suppose it might work, and anyone who knows LEAs would support more freedom from them. But most of us want better than might for our children, and a whole generation deserve better than to be guinea pigs in a fundamentalist experiment. And, civic concerns aside, there’s a flaw. The customer (that us, by the way, parents) has no credible threat to withhold purchase entirely. Kids have to go to school, so there will always be schools with no incentive to improve… and whose kids will end up there, I wonder? Schools might come over all public spirited and improve anyway â€â€but then, why are we marketizing education just to rely on the public spiritedness of public ex-public sector workers to make the system work? In short, the market will fail.
So, what are we left with? Two flawed options. The chances of making comprehensive education truly comprehensive without some distinctly un-British social engineering are slim. Grammar schools benefit the rich and perpetuate privilege. Like-for-like, they probably get better results (only probably) for the top 20%, but leave three-quarters underfunded, neglected, illiterate, on the scrapheap.
The solution goes like this: in a democracy, as long as no basic rights are breached in the process, we give priority to the majority. So, we press on with the comprehensive ideal. Let OFSTED do its thing with standards  whatever the press howl, teachers know it’s working. Hope freedom from the LEA straitjacket helps. Toss in fair banding. Lobby for a massive diversion of funds from pointless degree courses and targetless nuclear weapons to slash inner-city primary school class sizes. A civic culture, any civic culture, can’t survive for long without the principle that we are, on a deeper level, all equal. And that’s what comprehensive education is for.
Maybe.
“buy tutors for the 11-plus”: but the evidence points (or pointed, I haven’t looked in years) to the fact that tutoring for the IQ portion of 11+ soon saturates – in other words, an initial bit of tutoring is very helpful, but more doesn’t help. So “tutoring” could be available in every primary school.
“we are, on a deeper level, all equal”: yes, we are all equal in the eyes of the Lord. And as far as is humanly possible, we should all be equal in the eyes of the Law. But we aren’t when it comes to calculus, physics, French and German etc. C’est tout.
Grammar schools are going nowhere fast. I reckon (like dearieme) that there are distinct limits to how much the system can be gamed, and so it would be essentially meritocratic. And that’s precisely why it would be a political dead duck – middle class parents won’t want their kids to be cut out of their current privileged status, and will mobilise to fight against them. The idea might’ve (did?) work when we had a more deferential, conformist society – but those days are long since gone, for better and (here, perhaps) worse.
The more likely outcome is gradual creeping-in of selection, perhaps within a voucher-based scheme – in that that would normally mean giving schools much greater admissions autonomy (I say this because I think, within 20 years, the system will be primarily marketised). In that model, the thicker kids still have funds attached to them – so create a valuable market for schools to follow. Incidentally, I don’t see why the fact that parents have to buy means perpetuating the school monopoly – we have to buy lots of things, but that doesn’t prevent the emergence of competitive supply.
Now, where you might be right is if you put up big barriers to entry on supply. The evidence in the US (admittedly a very different society) is that religious and parochial schools have often been among the most aggressive in exploiting the expanding market. If you insist that all schools have to fit a certain model, then you will limit the potential for non-price competition (which is surely something to promote?).
Incidentally, “any government serious about long-term community (yuk) “cohesion†could stop religious selection by lunchtime.” You mean, be more like France? Interesting…
my partner (an experienced primary teacher who now works in a special school) is confident teachers can accurately select for cognitive ability at 11
Everyday experience – if your social circle isn’t too limited – shows that childhood-exam-passing ability (hereafter CEP) correlates very, very poorly with anything we’d call intelligence. But surveys show that CEP is a very good predictor of success in later life. In other words, we don’t know what those tests are measuring, but we know that it’s a useful thing to have.
The solution goes like this: in a democracy, as long as no basic rights are breached in the process, we give priority to the majority.
Being a bright, book-reading, CEP type and the father of two ditto, I must confess that this radiantly obvious point had never occurred to me. Thanks for pointing it out. (This would also suggest giving priority to the majority of kids who don’t, realistically, have a choice of comprehensive schools. Our local comp is a specialist ‘performing arts’ school, which doesn’t greatly appeal to me as an educational specialism (mutterKidsfromFamemumble…). However, it’s our local comp, meaning that we’d have little chance of getting a place if we applied anywhere else (and inconvenienced if we did); it’s also over-subscribed, meaning that we need to make it our first choice.
As for gaming the 11+, anecdotal evidence from the parents’ and teachers’ sides says it goes on, to the point where grammar school entry is – for a significant minority of kids – a straight expression of parental choice: the parents want their kids to go to a school where hard work & academic attainment is expected of everyone. The trick is to develop that ethos, or something like it, within the comprehensive system – but without branding the E-stream kids as yobs and failures from the word Go. In eight years of Labour government, you’d think that some thought would have been given to this, really.
My nice middle class parents sent me (CEP-type) to the local cr*p comp, when many others were being sent to the next town to the ‘nice’ school – and I thank my lucky stars every day that they did.
The point that gets lost in all this debate about “achievement” is that education is (or should be) about more than academic results, it is about learning – about academic subjects, but also about the world, people, society, yourself. When did our definition of “education” get so narrow?
When did our definition of “education†get so narrow?
It didn’t. As soon as kids leave school, the only thing that really counts is how many A’s they have, and more fundamentally at the present time whether they can read and write. It might be nice in some vague sense to turn out well rounded individuals, but it isn’t at all necessary. The unspoken question is ‘what is education for?’, and the answer, from a tax-paying society’s point of view as a whole, is to turn out people capable of doing work. Anything more is a nice-to-have, and arguably a costly extravagance.
J: I don’t think this is fair:
But most of us want better than might for our children, and a whole generation deserve better than to be guinea pigs in a fundamentalist experiment.
Yes, there is some element of wanting security, but I’d rather my kids had a shot at fulfilling their maximum potential than being confined to an average state comprehensive and not having that opportunity.
Besides which, we’ve already consigned at least one generation to the scrapheap after using them as guinea pigs in a fundamentalist experiment. It’s just that it was a fluffy left-wing fundamentalist experiment, where no-one would fail, all would have prizes, and every kid would be treated with respect and dignity, whatever their behaviour actually merited. So that makes it okay that the system is failing, because the intent was good, and motivated by the correct political ideology.
Whenever you write on this topic, you always seem very cautious about change and reform to the education system. If I may be so bold as to say, it’s a very conservative attitude. ;)
And, civic concerns aside, there’s a flaw. The customer (that us, by the way, parents) has no credible threat to withhold purchase entirely. Kids have to go to school, so there will always be schools with no incentive to improve… and whose kids will end up there, I wonder?
Well, there’s always homeschooling, although then the potential for fraud, and the ability for parents to set up their own schools, as in Sweden. It worked there, why not here?
As a member of that council house grammar school generation, I naturally feel very warm about them. And about DD’s proposal.
But I’m with Blimpish on this- a “marketized” (what a truly ghastly word) strategy is the only way forward. And that doesn’t really include the government deciding to set up grammar schools.
I believe we would see the growth of such schools, but it would happen gradually as the result of customer demand and individual schools deciding to select on the basis of academic ability.
“But most of us want better than might for our children, and a whole generation deserve better than to be guinea pigs in a fundamentalist experiment.”
Yes…but that is precisely what has happened to our kids in the “one-size-fits-all” post-Crosland system we have endured for the last 40 years. A marketized system gives the power to the customers, not the political/educational industrial complex.
Andrew – you say that ‘we’ve already consigned at least one generation to the scrapheap after using them as guinea pigs in a fundamentalist experiment’. I read a lot of this kind of language. Yet are you not overstating your case dramatically? The last generation to be educated by the grammar system gave us the three-day week, the IMF being called in, weekly football hoolignaism, widespread, prolonged and widescale inner-city rioting and the mass unemployment of the early 1980s.
The first generation of general comp-educated kids sees us with unprecedented levels of empoyment, the richest we’ve ever been and the economy doing very nicely. If this is what ‘consigning a generation to the scrapheap’ means, I’d say we could have done with a bit more of it in the past. Of course, I’m not denying some big problems, but there is a serious case of rose-coloured spectacles going on here. (I’m making no party-political point, Tory and Labour have followed much the same course).
There is a lot wrong with the British education system, but I see little that would be achieved from a return to the grammar schools. And politically, it would be surely very difficult. Apart from anything else, it goes against the whole ‘choice’ agenda that everyone seems so keen on. You cannot, by definition, choose to send your child to a grammar school.
Yet are you not overstating your case dramatically?
Of course I am. I’m a political animal and a partisan.
The first generation of general comp-educated kids sees us with unprecedented levels of empoyment, the richest we’ve ever been and the economy doing very nicely.
In spite of our education system, not because of it. And the stats don’t tell the whole truth. Add in the pseudo-unemployed on incapacity benefit, and we have European levels of unemployment in reality. We have to keep importing unskilled labour to keep wages and prices down and to fill the jobs that unskilled Brits won’t do, whilst importing skilled manual workers because we don’t even pretend to train up our own any more. And then we complain about it, because they’re ‘coming over here, taking our jobs an wimmin…’ Crazy world we live in.
There is a lot wrong with the British education system, but I see little that would be achieved from a return to the grammar schools.
Agreed, but the strategy is two-fold. The longer game is to introduce vouchers, and effectively privatise the provision of education while retaining the state as the guarantor of the funding. In the short term, you have to show some improvement in results to placate the tabloids, so you set up a few pilot schools to show what can be done with a different approach to education. That’s where the grammars come in, for me at least. I’m sure Davis has a higher motive in trying to break the grip of the middle classes on decent schools, but for me it’s all about strategy.
Wat:
it would happen gradually as the result of customer demand and individual schools deciding to select on the basis of academic ability.
Two words: league tables. “Individual schools deciding to select”? As against the individual schools which decide to offer that desirable low-league-table experience?
Ben Elton once said that he was a socialist because he was selfish: he wanted the best possible healthcare, free of charge, when he needed it, at the hospital down the road. Education, same same. What the rhetoric of choice does is ensure that some people won’t get the best – and it doesn’t take much thought to work out who those people would tend to be.
3A: re grammar schools and ‘choice’, see my previous comment. The kids don’t get much choice in the matter, admittedly – but then, they’re not the ones with the votes.
“The unspoken question is ‘what is education for?’, and the answer, from a tax-paying society’s point of view as a whole, is to turn out people capable of doing work.”
Andrew, as a fellow member of the tax-paying society, I disagree strongly. Why should an education system not aim to turn out well-rounded individuals – as a benefit to society this may not be easily measurably, but is certainly extremely valuable.
Is the be-all-and-end-all of society exclusively the creation and carrying out of ‘work’ or is it to further the well-being of its members (including, undoubtedly, the creation and carrying out of ‘work’ in all its myriad forms)? If it is the latter, and I would argue that it is, then surely the education system should be part of that.
This is after all what certain public schools pride themselves on – turning out a certain type of person – the putative ‘well rounded’ person? Why should that be the preserve of the mega-rich?
And god forbid that we should actually desire an education system that did both – exam results AND well-rounded people. Why on earth can an education system not aim for both?
As against the individual schools which decide to offer that desirable low-league-table experience?
Absolutely. There’s a gaping market failure here when you can’t credibly withhold custom entirely: there will be sinks that are there just to attract the LCD. And, Blimpish/Andrew, are you sure there are analogous markets that work competitively. Electricity and gas? Well, there are hundreds of thousands of people out there sitting on shit fuel tariffs because they can’t be bothered or don’t know how to get off them. Seems like a decent analogy to me – just it’ll be a whole bunch of kids on the wrong end of it.
I know some of this could be got round by removing some barriers to entry, but:
1. There’s still the capacity issue. Inner city schools have to physically go somewhere. That will always be that barrier.
2. I’m taking it on principle that there have to be barriers (aka “standards”) anyway. Medrassas in Hackney, catering to parental choice? No thanks.
(An aside: for me this is where education differs from healthcare. I’m neutral on government health provision (NHS) versus government as guarantor, like France. There’s no civic element that health fulfils. Education is quite different.)
The aim should always be this: Not Andrew’s average state comprehensive but Phil’s a school where hard work & academic attainment is expected of everyone. The old grammar school ethos, basically. That’s what I want for my daughter. For me, we need to look to primary education for the answers. If you can’t read, write and count when you hit your “chosen” secondary school, you’re screwed, probably for life. That’s a much greater driver of social (im)mobility than tertiary education ever was or will be.
I saw the other day that in Australia 40% of sixth-formers now go to “non-government” schools. Anyway, since our schools fail not only the academic brightest, but also the academic dimmest – I’m thinking of illiteracy here – we obviously need to try something else. Let it be markets rather than managers.
J: Well, there are hundreds of thousands of people out there sitting on shit fuel tariffs because they can’t be bothered or don’t know how to get off them. Seems like a decent analogy to me – just it’ll be a whole bunch of kids on the wrong end of it.
False analogy. Firstly, it’s an order of magnitude bigger than electricity and gas prices we’re talking about here. Secondly, I always find the implication that poor people don’t care enough about their children’s education to actually do something about it, given the power, to be incredibly patronising, especially given the evidence to the contrary from other countries. Isn’t the point of education reform supposed to be that being poor doesn’t make you stupid?
Phil: Ben Elton once said that he was a socialist because he was selfish: he wanted the best possible healthcare, free of charge, when he needed it, at the hospital down the road. Education, same same. What the rhetoric of choice does is ensure that some people won’t get the best – and it doesn’t take much thought to work out who those people would tend to be.
The fundamental misunderstanding here is that vouchers will not just re-allocate kids around schools with existing levels of competence. Like it or not, competition will drive up standards (I realise this sounds like an article of faith to some of you…), and so people ‘not getting the best’ will matter less because the not-best can still be better than under a comprehensive state bureaucracy. It’s the old ‘bigger pie’ type economic argument. If the worst schools under my system are better than the present best comps, what have we lost? And again, the implication that poor people won’t be able to give their kids a boost, even when given a more level playing field. What is it with the left and this attitude?
Katherine: Why should an education system not aim to turn out well-rounded individuals – as a benefit to society this may not be easily measurably, but is certainly extremely valuable.
It is in some vague sense, but not really economically, or at least the benefits don’t outweigh the massive costs. You answer your own question though later in your comment, with this:
This is after all what certain public schools pride themselves on – turning out a certain type of person – the putative ‘well rounded’ person? Why should that be the preserve of the mega-rich?
Because they’re willing and able to pay for it, obviously.
And god forbid that we should actually desire an education system that did both – exam results AND well-rounded people. Why on earth can an education system not aim for both?
For the same reason the NHS won’t give out Herceptin on demand until people take them through trial-by-tabloid. It costs money.
Whether grammar schools are the way to go I don’t know but these days I’m open to persuasion because the present system simply isn’t working. While it is probably true that wealthier parents have an advantage in relations to grammar schools, it surely wouldn’t be the advantage they have now where they can get access to the best schools simply by being able to afford a mortgage in the best areas?
We certainly need to move towards some kind of selection according to ability. Please rember that in many cases, we have mixed-ability classes as well as mixed-ability schools and it is the former that I think most teachers would say are not working. Apart from anything else, the average class is too big to give the individualised teaching that mixed-ability requires, even if that were desirable – which I seriously doubt.
For those who raise the spectre of ‘three secondary moderns in every town’, a Northern Irish student teacher who’s doing her teaching placement in the lunatic asylum I’m presently teaching in made an interesting comment to: she said she had been to a grammar school but her brother who she said wasn’t so bright had been to a school like this one. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that we already have three secondary moderns in every town. It’s called ‘dumbing up’, I believe ;-)
“For the same reason the NHS won’t give out Herceptin on demand until people take them through trial-by-tabloid. It costs money.”
Why would it cost more money exactly? It wouldn’t necessarily take more teachers, just a refocussing of energies. League tables have a lot to answer for here. The blinkered focus on results to the exclusion of all else has meant that teachers have little time other than to care exclusively about results rather than education. The two are not always perfectly aligned.
This leads nicely into the argument about teaching to results – the ability to pass an exam is not necessarily the same as the ability to think and reason. Getting zillions of A’s, amy would argue, currently does mean a guarantee to employers, parents or pupils that the end product is an ability to think, reason, research and draw conclusions, and my view is that a well-rounded person should have those skills.
Result – everyone’s a winner.
This leads nicely into the argument about teaching to results – the ability to pass an exam is not necessarily the same as the ability to think and reason.
Indeed. Which is why, in order to get a really good job, you need a decent degree as well, but that’s another topic.
Getting zillions of A’s, amy would argue, currently does mean a guarantee to employers, parents or pupils that the end product is an ability to think, reason, research and draw conclusions, and my view is that a well-rounded person should have those skills.
Not a guarantee, no, but statistically speaking, it is a better risk to hire someone with 10 A’s at GCSE than it is to hire someone who didn’t pass Maths and English, but managed to scrape a few NVQ’s together from somewhere. This is why business organisations hate grade inflation, because no-one has the time to interview every applicant for a job to find out how ‘well-rounded’ they are. Instead, we rely on proxies and indicators, like their ability to pass exams.
Why would it cost more money exactly? It wouldn’t necessarily take more teachers, just a refocussing of energies.
That’s just naive. To give the sort of individualised learning you are calling for would require much smaller class sizes, much better facilities, and certainly more and better qualified teachers. I’m not sure that just telling teachers to refocus their energies is going to cut it, but I’d love to see you take the Prime Minister’s place at his weekly press conference and tell the world that the reason our education system isn’t working is because our teachers aren’t focussing on our children’s education…
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