SOCIETY TODAY
Education
The advance of the levellers
Rhodes Boyson, MP
The country went one step further towards the collectivist non-choice society when, on March 11, Mr Prentice and the Secretary of State for Scotland announced that by September 1976 all the direct grant schools and the Scottish grant-aided schools must decide whether they wished to become state comprehensive schools or go completely independent.
Mr Ross, the Secretary of State for Scotland, said, "What we have to bear in mind when people talk of freedom of choice is that this freedom of choice is not available for 98 per cent of Scottish children." Here is the argument to end all choice. End the first division soccer league which is even more selective in its players, the Derby and Ascot races, Rolls-Royce cars, even mini cars, everything that everyone cannot have tomorrow! This is the language of drab, leveller socialism.
What choice is Mr Prentice going to offer the bright, inner-city working-class pupil from the poor home when the local grammar school has gone comprehensive and the local direct grant school has become independent? Such a boy will then be directed to the local neighbourhood sink one-class ghetto-comprehensive school which will have far less social mix than had any direct grant school. I sometimes wonder if increased council housing, the municipalisa tion of city homes, the end of city academic schools is not all a plot by the Labour Party to keep the inner city parliamentary seats as Labour rotten boroughs!
In the age of the levellers all excellence is at risk. Some direct grant schools send 70 per cent of their pupils up to university. They are buttresses and bridges of both academic excellence and independence. It is their very success which raises the envious howls of the egalitarian left.
Probably over 100 of the 174 direct grant schools will go independent. Many to increase their trust funds will sell their city and town sites and will move to the country. City educational stan dards will then fall further and we will have the movement to the suburbs of the ambitious and the concerned parents while the city centres as in the US become completely' one-class. Does the Labour Party learn nothing for history?
There is no doubt that every direct grant school which becomes independent will have no difficulty in filling its places whatever the height of the fees charged. Many parents will sacrifice everything for the education of their children especially in an age when it appears only a matter of time before the Labour Government moves to the complete confiscation of wealth! Now the only safe investment for our children is in education. I have known parents mortgage their homes, move to smaller houses, sell their car and end all holidays to pay for the education of their children. The situation in Scotland, however, is already more serious than in England because there is no fees-remission system there. In Scotland, 98 per cent of parents pay full fees for their children's grant-aided places (after the direct government subvention) as against only 25 per cent of parents in direct grant schools in England and Wales. Five hundred .'parents in Edinburgh have recently been foreed to apply to leave grant-aided schools for places in local authority schools.
What would the Conservative Party do? Norman St John-Stevas immediately pledged the party to restore and extend the direct grant list when a Conservative government was elected. Thus all direct grant schools should opt for temporary independence to keep their standards of excellence. Conservative local education authorities must take up places in these schools for poor bright children to show that the Party really believes in social mobility and the open society. They are fully empowered to do this under the 1944 Act, including the taking of boarding places.
Before the next election the Conservatives must find a means of extending choice to all parents either by the voucher or by legislating for a national and local appeals system under which all parents can demand that their children attend schools with whose values, discipline and academic emphasis they agree. The voucher can be tried in specified areas and a genuine appeals system can be brought in by an amendment to the 1944 Act.
It is a tragedy that the direct grant schools have become a prey to the in-fighting in the Labour Party. Bob Conquest holds that a man is normally a reactionary in the areas he knows something about. Reg Prentice is the exception to this rule — he is a' reaction ary on other matters and a 'pro gressive' in his own department. He has become the Benn of the educa tion system and is doing similar harm to the fabric and freedom of British society.
The Liberal spokesman, Clement Freud, welcomed Mr Prentice's statement. So much for a party that once defended local options, choice and the free society!
Dr Walter Hamilton said in 1966, "No power on earth can make all schools equally good but it may be possible to come a good deal nearer to making them equally bad." This could well be the only achievement of the levelling Labour Party.
Dr Rhodes Boyson, Conservative MP for Brent North, was formerly headmaster of Highbury Grove • School
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