Political commentary

The Windsor Bypass scheme

Ferdinand Mount

Last week Sir Angus Maude wrote: 'It has always been far too expensive to im- prove the educational standard of working- class children significantly.' The Observer thought this remark either so trenchant or so

absurdly reactionary that it was included in Sayings of the Week. Yet most working- class parents would take it as a statement of the obvious. So long as the only way in which" they themselves can improve their children's education is by 'going private' and paying for it twice, they are stuck with a mediocre standard of service they would not tolerate from their garages.

The rich admire the poor less and less, partly because the poor are not as poor as they used to be, but also because the poor fritter their money on such trash — video cassettes and cars with fluffy mice that jog- gle in the back window. Yet what else have they got left to spend their money on?

The well-to-do seldom stop to reflect how they themselves have helped to impoverish

the possibilities open to the working class. 1

think the destruction of all the diverse in- dependent schools patronised by the poorer classes has turned out to be the nastiest trick the doers have ever played on the done-to. It was an all-party cause, with the esteem of all right-thinking people for those responsible — Forster and the Liberals, Balfour and Butler for the Tories, Crosland and Shirley Williams for Labour. Only Gladstone, long before the 1870 Act, warned that 'the day you sanction compulsory rating for the pur- pose of education, you sign the death- warrant of voluntary exertions.'

Generation by generation, working-class parents had been successfully scraping to provide a better education for their children.

Now that whole field of effort has been clos- ed off. Responsibility for and, correspon- dingly, power over their children's educa- tion has been taken away from them. I don't think we have yet fully appreciated the demoralising effect.

Various ingenious schemes have been put forward (including a couple in this column) to restore power and choice to working-class parents. I think they all suffer from one con- genital defect. They underestimate the ex- tent to which 'democratic' aspirations have seeped into the popular view of what schools are for.

This sort of aspiration does not interfere with, say, the sale of council houses. It is ob- viously fair to give every family the right to buy its own home. In the National Health Service, there has always been some possibility of private treatment within NHS hospitals or by doctors who also work for the Health. To extend private health in- surance can be interpreted as opening up the private sector to the skilled working class

and then democratising it — so long as the public sector does not suffer. Shorter NHS queues for varicose vein operations do morally legitimise the growth of BUPA.

If the Conservative government wishes to go any further, it will have to keep on satisfy- ing the 'Rawls test': viz, would you approve of the system if you belonged to the class least advantaged by it? I call the ques- tion after the fashionable Harvard philosopher, John Rawls, but I suppose Jesus or Kant would have asked much the same question.

Now State schools present an altogether tougher problem than State housing or State hospitals, because it is now alleged that an important part of those standards consists precisely in the fact that 95 per cent of children go to the same school. To divide children at school by class or race is in itself regarded as lowering standards, and not just by Guardian readers either. The com- petitive and independent spirit Of a schools system based on religious prejudice may have kept up academic standards in Nor- thern Ireland, as I argued recently, but at a ghastly cost which mainland parents would not wish to pay.

It is now not politically possible, even if it were desirable, to re-create the old divide between grammar school and secondary modern. Similarly, the handful of indepen- dent schools set up by dissatisfied West Indian and Indian parents are admirable, but they could not become universal. Again, the high academic standards of the public schools are to be admired for their unbending rigour in a sloppy world, but ex- am mania and the inevitable separation into alphas, betas and gammas could not be erected into a universal system.

To put it unpalatably but accurately, Bri- tain has been comprehensivised beyond recall. Comfort yourself if you like with the reflection that Winchester and Manchester Grammar School are simply comprehen- sives with the bottom streams removed. But the business in hand is to give working-class parents the power to control and improve the comprehensive schools which their children attend.

The following is a trial run. It is entitled the Windsor Bypass scheme, partly because I thought of it while driving along the Windsor Bypass, partly because its prin- cipal feature is to enable dissatisfied parents to bypass the local education authority and obtain satisfaction from the Crown.

The dodge is to do good by stealth and disturb as little of the 1944 Act as possible. The new scheme builds on the 1980 Educa- tion Act, which introduced parent gover- nors. In future, parent governors would be in a majority and would have the power to invite the parents to vote, one vote per child, whether the school should 'take the bypass'.

If two-thirds of the parents voted 'Yes', then the school would become independent of the local authority; it would be transfer- red to a charitable trust and controlled by its governors. So long as it continued to

satisfy HM inspectors and to take only local children, it would receive, direct from the Department of Education, a basic grant covering running costs and teachers' salaries. An opted-out 'bypass school' would naturally be free to raise more money, by charging (and remitting) fees or launching appeals. The LEA schools would receive exactly the same level of basic grant from the

government. And lightened by the depar- ture of bypass schools, the LEAs would not be short of cash to compete for the best

teachers and offer them the best facilities — and so hope to attract their fair share of the best pupils. This removes the overwhelming burden of education costs from the rates. I fancY that will dissipate most of the complaints about the rating system, which is a fair and tolerable tax so long as it is expected to raise

only modest sums. In fact, both the Labour Party and the Conservatives are, for dif- ferent reasons, moving towards this conclu- sion.

But the additional virtue of the bypass schools is that they would bring into educa- tion fresh revenue from millions of parents who would be entirely agreeable to paying the equivalent of a packet of cigarettes a day to help educate their children. Public

schools too might be drawn into the system by the lure of the basic grant, particularlY

now that all but a half-dozen of the most famous take most of their pupils from within an hour's drive. The former direct grant schools, in particular, would halWilY return to their original function of serving the town. But here, finally we have to meet, head on, the 'democratic' objection. Would the bypass schools not simply cream off the old grammar-school class?

The brutal but simple answer is to leave one, but only one coercive weapon in the hands of the local education authority: the

power to insist that the bypass school should take its 'fair share' of the less advan- taged (or whatever euphemism you prefer).

To qualify for basic grant, any school would have to be ready to accept a propor- tion of applicants from the lower streaals. Once it has the little victims in the classroom, it can stream them rotten for five years, cane them, and make them wear tail-coats and go to the chapel twice a daY or teach them sociology and make then, wear dungarees and call the head TimmY, Ir preferred. Does all this sound a little complicated? It isn't really. Perhaps it would be simple merely to point out that competition bet" ween State schools and State-aided in- dependent schools is the rule rather than the exception over most of Western Europe.