Cameron fails the test
The most perceptive indictment of the Blair era was delivered, in an admirably candid speech last September, by Alan Milburn (interviewed by Fraser Nelson on page 14). Describing his own rise from a council estate to the ranks of the Cabinet, Mr Milburn asked, ‘Do we think that for a child growing up today in one of Britain’s poorest estates such mobility is possible or likely? Sadly, I think not.’ That observation should inspire the core mission statement of the next Conservative government. Asked about his gilded schooling at Eton and youthful indiscretions, David Cameron has stuck to the mantra that a person’s origins should be irrelevant: ‘What matters most of all is what you’re going to do.’ That is absolutely right: to adapt Disraeli, the modern Tory party is a party of aspiration, or it is nothing.
How depressing, then, that one of the first major policy announcements of Mr Cameron’s leadership should be to rule out, unequivocally, a drive towards selection in state schools. In a speech to the CBI on Wednesday, David Willetts, the shadow Education Secretary, said that a Conservative government would not ‘get rid of those grammar schools that remain’ scarcely a ringing endorsement of the 164 such schools that survive in England — but that the party was now, definitively, ditching its support for academic selection.
John Major at least promised a grammar school ‘in every town’, even if he did not deliver such a policy. At the last election, Michael Howard — a proud product of Llanelli Grammar School — said that such schools would ‘survive and thrive’ if he became prime minister. It was encouraging that, as shadow Education Secretary, Mr Cameron himself said that all schools should have ‘the freedom to run their own admissions policy’.
It was often claimed that Tony Blair secretly admired grammar schools. If so, he had a funny way of showing it. Having kicked away the means by which less afflu ent pupils could go to fee-paying schools by abolishing the Assisted Places Scheme, Mr Blair also gave local communities the power to abolish grammar schools in the Schools Standards and Framework Act of 1998.
We expect this from the Labour party, trapped, for all its modernisation and spin, in the bleak egalitarian mindset of the Sixties and Seventies. But if the Tories were serious about social mobility, they would make the abolition of this pernicious law one of their first policy pledges. The Act’s provision to abolish a school by local ballot has been used only once, to decide the fate of Ripon Grammar School in North Yorkshire in 2000 — and parents voted overwhelmingly against. An ICM poll last year found that 70 per cent of parents would like more grammar schools to be established.
This is surprising only to those within the political class. The grammar schools were, par excellence, the postwar ladder that enabled people of humble or lower-middleclass origins to rise to the top. Their destruction — by Labour and Conservative governments — was the greatest act of institutional vandalism since the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In a particularly bleak example of the law of unintended consequences, a reform billed as an egalitarian measure had the disastrous effect of entrenching privilege and ossifying class. The middle class dug deep into its pockets and fled to the private sector which now, quite legitimately, flourishes as a consequence of scandalous state failure.
It is shocking that, in an age of allegedly expanded opportunity, Oxford now takes only 55 per cent of its pupils from the state sector, compared to 62 per cent in 1969. This, it should be stressed, is not the fault of the university, which goes out of its way to encourage and accommodate state-school applicants. The principal difference between 1969 and 2007 is that the grammar schools are all but extinct: one of the great solvents of social hierarchy has been lost.
Mr Willetts’s argument against opening more grammar schools is astonishing. ‘Middle-class parents invest far more effort in raising their kids than they did a generation ago,’ he said in his speech. ‘My parents didn’t spend time driving me around to tennis coaching or music lessons ... Nowadays, middle-class kids get all that and more, and probably extra tuition to help them do well in the exams at 11.’ On this basis, he claimed, ‘the experiences children have had by the age of 11 are so different that it is a fantasy that you can somehow fairly distinguish between them at that age’.
It is truly extraordinary that a leading Conservative can advance such a defeatist case: because many children are taught badly between 5 and 11, he suggests, and because middle-class parents want the best for their children, we dare not expose such inequalities of opportunity in a selective examination.
Mr Willetts is right about the different life chances children have as a consequence of their respective family backgrounds — how could it be otherwise? No schools, selective or otherwise, have ever served the underclass well. But all the more reason, then, for a radical overhaul of the primary-school system, especially in deprived areas, and to give those poorer pupils who have academic potential the chance to escape the cycle of deprivation through world-class, statesubsidised education. Nor does the 11-plus have to be an all-or-nothing test: there could easily be (and often have been) opportunities for teenagers, as they progress, to enter selective education at 13 or 16.
Mr Cameron is desperate to avoid the impression that the Tories are an elitist or ‘restorationist’ movement, bringing back old privileges and divisions. But the grammar schools were the enemy of such division. The best thing the Tory leader could do to head off the charge that his party is now in the grip of out-of-touch toffs is to promise to less wealthy pupils the advantages that he was lucky enough to enjoy at the most prestigious school in the world. His decision to do exactly the opposite is a bleak moment for his party and the country.
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