“To suggest that grammar schools will address equality of opportunity defies logic”
Theresa May's recent policy shake-up will increase the educational opportunities available to some children but squander the potential of many more, warns Jon Berry…
- by Jon Berry
According to the traditional maxim, those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I’m not casting aspersions on the memory of the Prime Minister, who I’m sure had a wonderful experience of secondary education – but the return of the secondary modern? Really?
In the interests of avoiding repeat mistakes, let’s remind ourselves of the history of the grammar school idea…
‘Give the people reform’
By the end of WWII, people in Britain had endured 30 years of deprivation and bereavement. The marvellously named conservative MP, Quintin Hogg, summed up the anxiety of the nation’s then rulers by pronouncing that ‘We must give the people reform, or they will give us revolution.’ From this came the welfare state and the NHS – as well as universal free education until the age of 15, which was ushered in by the Butler Act of 1944.
20% percent of 11-year-olds were to attend free grammar schools, which would provide the scientific and managerial skills required in the new post-war world. Interestingly, the Butler Act was vague about how children should be selected, but its original intention was that this should not be via a simple intelligence test.
Nonetheless, it was the 11-plus exam that soon emerged as the mechanism for such selection. Successful children went off to grammar schools and the rest to secondary moderns. A commitment in the Act to a third tier of technical schools fell by the wayside.
Waste of potential
Now, think about it. What this meant was that your educational opportunities were dictated by your performance in a test, sometimes taken at 10 years old. Grammar schools were better funded and attracted more highly-qualified teachers. With the promise of a fully funded place at university – along with a maintenance grant – at the end of school, the future for these grammar school children was rosy indeed.
Meanwhile, a lack of educational achievement – particularly for those with few or no skills – didn’t automatically mean condemnation to a life of poverty at was then a time of full employment. The waste of potential, however, was enormous.
Theresa May suggests that grammar schools will address equality of opportunity. To do so defies logic. Although one fifth of us (yes, I passed the test) were beneficiaries of the system, the rest – despite the best efforts of some wonderful secondary modern schools – were most definitely not. How does creaming off a layer of 11-year-olds adept at taking tests create a more equal society?
Holding all the cards
Let’s be clear about who will be doing the selecting here. In an age of self-governed, quasi-privatised schools, all desperate to generate the results needed to maintain their profiles, it is the schools themselves that will hold all the cards.
Imagine the armies of private tutors required to coach, rehearse and drill our Year 6 children. Which families will have the social and economic capital needed to navigate such selection systems? Who will have the means and know-how to use an appeals process when selections don’t go their way?
The idea of grammar schools is popular with those who think their children will gain entry to them. But May would do better to encourage all parents to support their local comprehensive, and take an interest in the welfare of that school, rather than seek a return to a non-existent, falsely nostalgic notion of the old school tie and all it represents.
It goes without saying that it would also help if she turned her attention to the ongoing teacher shortage and cuts to schools’ budgets. Less of headline grabber, maybe. Less of an appeal to mythical ‘Middle England’. But that’s where the real priorities lie. And who knows – maybe that’s how she’ll make her mark on history…
Jon Berry’s book, Teachers Undefeated available now via Amazon. To order multiple copies, contact the author at j.berry@herts.ac.uk
