I remember so clearly rugby training in school games lessons. It was invariably cold and wet, and the first slide in the mud was like diving into a cold pond, all breathless and invigorating. If you liked that kind of thing, then rugby was fun. There were, of course, those who hated it, because they were fat, or lazy, or because they thought, with good reason, that rugby was a barbarous sport. For the first term or so, everyone played together, and the athletic and strong soon showed themselves to be better than the rest of the group. Skills – I promise there are skills in rugby – developed rather more gradually, but even still there were those who learned from scratch quickly, those who got better over a longer period of time, and others who were just plain useless.
In order for the school to produce a sports team, it made sense to siphon people off at different standards, some immediately going into the top group, some into the B, C and D squads. The categories were flexible. As some proved better or worse than initial thought, they were moved around, but what the squad divisions fundamentally enabled was people of similar strengths and abilities to progress at the speed that suited them most. Those that were bad mucked around with their coaches and had a good deal of fun; those that were good were sculpted into an efficient working team and had a good deal of fun. Early in the second term, the first team played and won their first couple of matches.
During the next four years, players in the different groups shifted around and permutated. At the same time, those who showed no interest in rugby were welcome to find out what they might instead be good at, and they tried out football, basketball and hockey. It turned out that some of the most uncoordinated on the rugby pitch were brilliant footballers, and some of the most club-footed footballers excellent hockey players and so on. By streaming people, everyone was able to excel. The natural rugby players did well at that sport. Those who had been rubbish at rugby were not forced to play alongside those that were good, to be danced round, and trampled over and generally humiliated, but instead were able to show their abilities at other games.
It seems to me self-evident that with discretion the same principles apply to academic and intellectual pursuits. So it says something about the prevailing orthodoxy that scientific and sociological research papers are needed as evidence to prove what any intelligent person should be able to comprehend immediately. The evidence for the failure of comprehensive education and the success of selective education has been rehearsed here before, in findings by the London School of Economics, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and Andrew – now Sir Andrew – Adonis, head of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Now David Jesson of York University has found that when bright pupils are put with twenty or more other bright pupils they do better than they would if they were with less able students. ‘Such clusters exist in the state system,’ says the leader in The Times, ‘in grammar schools and in the best comprehensives. They stimulate academic achievers and offer some defence against the corrosive peer pressure that leads some to mask their abilities for fear of teasing.’ Once again, the implications for comprehensive schools are not great; but the advantages of various forms of selection are so obvious that this is almost difficult to credit as news.