Education

Comprehensive politics

Rhodes Boyson

The Government's proposed Bill to require all local education authorities to make plans for the abolition of selection in secondary schools had to come. Yet it is still a• matter of regret on both political and educational grounds.

Politically it is another step towards the totalitarian society. The end of variety in the state sector will bring increased pressure from the left for the end of all independent schooling. All independence in education and in medicine is under threat and any move to go abroad, as BUPA is negotiating for a hospital in Malta, will be met by financial restrictions and eventually, as in Soviet Russia, the prohibition of emigration and even foreign travel. The citizen or serf will then only be allowed to spend his government money or tokens on the state betting cotirse, his community workers' non-participatory pub or at the state holiday. camp.

As in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there were 'priest holes' so one can envisage in remote country districts 'tutor and doctor

holes' where a classical scholar or an old-fashioned general practitioner. or even surgeon will kid e in. the daytime until he moves at night to his next secret client. It is a forbidding but realistic prospect.

The intention of the Labour Government to compel all local authorities to obey a central 'diktat' will obviously encourage the Conservatives to take similar action when they are next in government. When a consensus or tolerance breaks down each party moves to extremes or it is destroyed. Despite the wishes of their inhabitants most Labour-controlled local authorities refused and refuse to sell council houses to sitting tenants. The next Conservative Government will now be under strong pressure to compel all such authorities to sell council houses to sitting tenants. I shall with regret, but with grim determination, add to that pressure.

Politically a totalitarian society is not only repressive but it is generally stagnant in ideas. If an earlier government had insisted that all local authority schools had to be bipartite — grammar and secondary modern — then no one would have been able to experiment with comprehensive schools which in their first conception in Anglesey and the Isle of Man seemed to have been successful. The dead hand of Labour non-variety is the dead hand of decay.

It is a pity that the discussion of comprehensive schools ever came to take place on party lines. They are simply a form of secondary school organisation which could be better, worse or equally effective as previous forms of organisation. It is even possible that in certain circumstances they are successful and in other circumstances unsuccessful. Russia, Eastern Europe and the US have tried them but have returned to highly specialised schools for their more able children.

In this country there has been little or no measurement of how successful comprehensive schools are or whether they work with different success in different areas. Results coming out of Manchester and other large cities seem to indicate that they lower academic standards. They may also reduce social mobility. The results of Inner London schools are not collected and published but the information one gains from individual schools indicates that the London results are nothing short of a public scandal. I think it is also likely that the increasing illiteracy of the less-academic pupil is a result of comprehensive school reorganisation.

The Labour Party is not interested in an objective assessment of academic results on which some form of inter-party consensus as to future policy could be developed. The comprehensive school is now part of the millenarian doctrine of the Labour Party. It is simply a case of justification by faith and not by works and one hammers at their brains in vain with facts and figures.

It is a pity that the Conservative view on comprehensive schools was for long so muddled and apologetic. Guilty that they had been schooled in private education and that their children were in such schools many Conservative leaders were controlled by officials and the trendy left. They really had little idea from first-hand experience of what went on in state schools and how good many of them were. Many Conservatives were and some still are prisoners of the left and even where their views were sound they could be stopped in their tracks by the cry of the left, "What do you know about state schools?"

Mrs Thatcher did not come into this category and she did a remarkable job in changing the view of the Party. Over the last eighteen months of Labour government the Conservative Party as a whole has also begun to listen to the educational views of its grass roots whose votes it must also hold if it is to win a general election. It is to be hoped that it is not too late.

The Conservative Party was also mealy-mouthed about comprehensive schools since 80 per cent of state scholars went on the bipartite system to secondary modern schools and these were rarely popular. Thus the party concluded with some justice that it could not win an election where 80 per cent voted against it.

The new political factor which has not yet been grasped is that

comprehensive ideas and the com

prehensive school are often least 'popular where they have been introduced. Few comprehensive schools provide the results, the

atmosphere and the mobility which parents were promised. The Mil

lennium is again retreating and the parents and public are becoming disillusioned. It is also a fact that most parents with children in

comprehensive schools now believe that on the old system their chil

dren would have been in grammar schools, so they compare their children's comprehensive not with the secondary moderns but with highly-respected grammar schools. They thus feel doubly cheated. Thus the supreme irony is that comprehensive schools are often most popular where they don't exist and least popular where theY exist. This could bring surprising election results. The future path for the Conservative Party is plain to seek. The party must demand and promise a Commission to examine

and compare the results of cornprehensive schools with those of

bipartite schools: it must meanwhile defend all good schools from further change and it must work out a policy to improve existing comprehensive schools.

The Labour Party doesn't yet realise what a mess it is in bY becoming completely identified

with a secondary school systent which could be both politically and educationally disastrous. It is the

one straw of comfort in a haystack of concern. Time is, however, running out.