Grammar schools are liberal, Mr Cameron
Robert Yates, a self-styled ‘north London liberal’, says he cannot vote for the Tories until they propose a return to selection: only the 11-plus guarantees social mobility Listening to messed-up thinking about education was, I used to assume, an occupational hazard of being an adopted north London liberal. It was part of the deal, I figured, to hear out friends and acquaintances — all otherwise good, sane, clever folk — as they rehearsed their arguments in favour of the comprehensive system and against selection on academic ability. That they might then dance around this commitment when they became parents — through moving house, rediscovering a long-buried faith or by going private — only seemed to point up the absurdities of the chatterers’ evangelising for the comprehensive system.
So my favourite party trick (at slow parties, you understand) has been to utter the dread words ‘grammar school’ — especially since the state system under Labour has become ever more balkanised, with dozens of different types of schools catering, it seems, for all sorts apart from the academically able. ‘Might even make me vote Tory,’ I’d add, ‘if they committed to bringing back grammars.’ And so ‘Dave’ Cameron fetches up, all nice and green and smiley, and decides to join the tired consensus. ‘I want to say absolutely clearly, the Conservative party that I am leading does not want to go back to the 11-plus, does not want to go back to the grammarschool system,’ he said soon after becoming leader of the party.
But why? Surely it’s not because Cameron has decided that grammar schools work as lazy, wrong-headed shorthand for ‘bad old Tory ways’? That supporting grammar schools would be seen as anti-egalitarian or some such nonsense?
Perhaps we should try to escape from this dogma. Why not entertain the possibility that grammar schools might have been one of the last century’s most effective engines of social change and could be so again? And how about the thought that elitism in education is not the same as social snobbery? On the contrary: what else does a bright working-class child have going for him apart from his brains? He begins with few strings to pull, few connections.
Let’s entertain these thoughts because they carry plenty of weight: certainly, social mobility was at its height when grammar schools were flying. We now live, by comparison, in a more static society. The late Anthony Sampson, in the final update of his magisteri al The Anatomy of Britain, published in 2002, described us as ‘New Edwardians’ — the futures of many Britons, both high-born and low, are mapped out at an early age, destined, in huge part, to live out the lives of their parents.
It used to be different. Beyond the headlines of post-war liberalisation, beyond the swinging Sixties, a more substantial shift was taking place. This one was shaped by those clever working-class and lower-middle-class grammar-school pupils succeeding through a first-rate education.
But why would you resurrect the old divisions, say the liberal — and now, it seems, conservative — dogmatists? Why return to a system where the secondary-modern losers are cut off from the grammar-school winners? The reality, in fact, is that schooling is now more divided than ever — not only in terms of the state/private split but within the comprehensive system. Attend a comprehensive in a leafy suburb, and the chances are you’ll benefit from a de facto grammar; attend one in an inner city, and think de facto secondary modern. (There are good innercity comprehensives, but the pattern is clear — check out the league tables and the addresses of the leading schools.) In 2006 the division is determined by social background, not by academic ability. Which is preferable?
The truth is that the comprehensive system never really took account of how Britons live. If social inclusion was one aim — bringing together, in a classroom, children of very different backgrounds — it was destined to fail. People of similar economic clout tend to live together — postcodes reveal plenty about income and profession, certainly outside London.
Take the school I left in the mid-1980s, in inner-city Liverpool. In many ways, this was a comprehensive working in a model fashion — nearly 100 per cent of those in the catchment area attended the school. But our parents’ ‘profile’ tended to an overwhelmingly blue-collar uniformity. There were no children of the professional classes, because the professional classes chose not to live in the area. So, yes, ‘everyone’ went to the school, but this was a uniform everyone.
Things could have been different in London — especially in those central areas which have been gentrified over the past 30 years — because the rich and the poor do live cheek by jowl. In Islington, where I now live, council estates stand alongside the homes of delicate types like myself. But it’s precisely these areas where the professionals in large numbers have long found ways of not sending their children to the local state school.
Sociologists tend to agree that, in terms of aspiration, familiarity breeds ambition. So if your friends’ parents, or indeed your parents’ friends, are doctors, lawyers, bankers or (heaven forbid) journalists they, and by extension their jobs, will hardly seem out of reach. So while apologists for comprehensives say that the intake in grammar schools was disproportionately middle-class — doubtless true they provided a greater social mix than the average comp where like mixes with like.
What’s more, aspiration to better yourself was not only part of the grammar-school ethos; you could also see what aspiration might bring you. The son of a factory worker might get a taste for some of the finer things in life while visiting his wealthier friend’s house.
A teacher at my old school — a grammar turned comprehensive — would tell me how he missed the sense of ‘specialness’, of privilege that came with the old system. A privilege open to a minority, sure, but one acquired through intelligence and effort, not depth of pocket. The grammar pupils were more cocksure, he’d add, but righteous pride in getting on need not be unattractive; it works like a charm among the bright northern grammar school pupils in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys. Privilege aside, the grammar school system struck me as full of common sense, certainly when compared with the attempts to teach, in the same classes, those aspiring to Oxbridge and those struggling with basic literacy.
But common sense long lost out to rhetoric in chatter about education. Now our leading political parties appear to agree that there is something fundamentally wrong with telling a bunch of ten-year-olds that some are more academically able than others at the moment. Elsewhere, selection on ability seems simply logical; whether you’re learning to ski or taking classes in bricklaying, you find your level. But schooling, it seems, has a logic all of its own, one that would have amused my old teacher. ‘It might make sense in another world, young man,’ ran his favourite putdown when our thoughts were a little scrambled. ‘But it makes no sense in this one.’ Robert Yates is assistant editor of the Observer.
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