Ruth Kelly has admitted that Labour has failed to close the achievement gap between the rich and the poor. ‘We need to think about why children from more deprived backgrounds do not always have the opportunity to access the better schools, and what sensibly, we might be able to do about that,’ she said at the IPPR. The government has actually been aware of this for some time, at least since 1998 when Andrew Adonis – the same Andrew Adonis who wrote in Class Act that the comprehensive school system has replaced selection by ability with selection by income – entered the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, but it has for a long time denied it and now begun to frame the discussion in terms of the need for choice.
However, it is not clear how choice is possible in the current environment without reducing the regulatory burdens that make it so difficult for new start-up institutions to flourish, without therefore opening up the educational market to all and any providers, and without bringing in something approximating to vouchers for parents.
But this government doesn’t really believe in free choice. Otherwise, how could it be going ahead with the closure of the 70 or so remaining grammar schools in Northern Ireland (despite the region outperforming the rest of Britain in exams) despite the fact that two thirds of parents over there want to retain the system, as The Times reports today?
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, an executive member of the Governing Bodies Association, said: ‘The grammar school has been a wonderful escalator for children from backgrounds where in England they find it difficult to succeed. It’s not perfect but I can’t believe that by removing the most successful bit, that we are improving it.’
In Britain, those few grammars that remain after the educational equivalent of the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1950’s, the BBC reported in 2003, are not just successful in terms of ‘raw’ results but also the best on the ‘value added’ scale. Last year’s the OECD’s PISA study of an enormous range of countries found that the gap between private and state education in Britain is greater than in any other country bar Paraguay and Bolivia. Grammar schools were once the bridge. In the past fifty years, Oxbridge entry from the state sector has gone down, from 60 per cent to 50 per cent.
Peter Morris, a teacher, said on this morning’s Today programme that he will be appealing to the Professional Association of Teachers at its annual conference in Buxton to vote to bring back ‘the most successful type of school that Britain has ever had’. There, to argue against him, Margaret Tulloch, secretary for Comprehensive Future, regurgitated the standard mantras.
Grammar schools don’t exist in Finland, she said, which is held up as the paradigm of comprehensive schooling. Yet the demographies, immigration patterns and educational traditions make it so different as to be inadmissible evidence. Grammar schools are hugely socially divisive, she said. Yet they are not as divisive as comprehensive schools. Grammar schools make those who don’t get in feel like failures, or ‘deferred successes’ in the newspeak. Yet the current policies of social inclusion, as Baroness Warnock recently admitted, have been a complete deferred success. Grammar schools are elitist, she said. And that really is the point. She's quite right they're elitist. For the very notion of excellence is redundant without a scale from worst to worse to bad, through good and better, to best.
Until the government is willing to provide parents with real options in the state and private sectors, which includes grammar schools, 'choice' will be nothing more than a myth.
Comments (1)
Opponents of grammar schools continue to miss the main issue that needs addressing. A society needs better educated people to function and advance and the grammar is by far the best proven platform for implementing the selection that this necessitates. The only aspect that ever needed addressing was how to enable those who do fail to make the most of their life. The "failure" to grasp this simple point as a result of being clouded by the emotive or inappropriate talk of failure and inequality has meant this argument is being dragged out over the decades whilst rising countries forge ahead without any such qualms.
Posted by AW | July 28, 2005 10:47 PM
Posted on July 28, 2005 22:47