Civitas Blog

Even in a perfectly mobile society, in which everyone had an exactly equal chance of reaching the highest positions, only a small minority would do so, since there are only relatively few positions of power, status or wealth at the top. Nevertheless, the amount of intergenerational mobility in a society is a major index of the degree of its ‘openness’, and many commentators and political parties link mobility and the education system. Confirming studies such as that by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which have shown that the expansion of higher education in the UK has benefited those from richer backgrounds far more than those from poorer backgrounds, the LSE report found that while the proportion of people from the poorest fifth of families obtaining a degree has increased from 6 per cent to 9 per cent, the graduation rates from the richest fifth have risen from 20 per cent to 47 per cent. ‘The strength of the relationship between educational attainment and family income,’ it says, ‘is at the heart of Britain’s low mobility culture’.

What’s not clear, of course, is the extent to which it is the money or what comes with the money – such as parental education, motivation and other aspects of family culture – and this complicates the causality. So it is still reasonable to ask what is going on in British education. According to the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (which at the end of last year showed that in 3 years UK pupils had gone from seventh to eleventh in reading, from eighth to eighteenth in maths, and from fourth to eleventh in science), in the UK, education at an independent school offered greater advantages than anywhere else in the study apart from Brazil and Uruguay. What has proved decisive for fee-paying schools is their independence from government meddling in the forty years following the Plowden Report. Ineffective teaching strategies have dominated against all the evidence for such old fashioned methods as synthetic phonics-first. Now, several years too late, the House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Skills has severely criticised the establishment, and the traditionalists might reasonably hope their time is about to come again.

There are many other issues too, of course (bursaries and maintenance grants are needed for university applicants, as well as wider provision for the early years than the government is currently planning and free school buses for primary school children), but Britain did once have a bridge between the state and private sectors. Grammar schools may be a dirty word for some, but the system of selection at eleven years old, abolished during the years under review, offered quality schooling that was accessible on demand rather than affluence. In last year’s tests for 14 year-olds, 9 out of 11 government city academies were among the worst performing 200 schools in England. By contrast, 31 of the 32 schools adding the most value between the ages of 11 and 14 were grammar schools. Reading Girls Grammar School was the top performer and Dr Challoner’s Grammar was the best school on the value-added scale. In getting rid of them, Britain replaced academic selection with social selection. As Stephen Machin, part of the LSE research team, has said, it is ironic that the elitism that so-called progressives attacked, ‘probably got more people through from the bottom end than the system we have today.’

It would be nonsense to blame New Labour for all problems that have accrued under successive governments, but if this administration gets in after the next election, it will have its work cut out. Creating an upwardly mobile society, with more space at the top, will require (much better) education, education, education.