Grammar schools – another step back to the 1950s
Paul Clarke writes
The proposal by Theresa May and her Brexit cabinet to substantially increase the number of grammar schools is a further step towards entrenching class privilege – despite their false claim that grammar schools increase social mobility. It is a part of a series of measures aimed at refocusing working class education on vocational courses and eliminating courses that teach students to think critically.
The idea that there was a ‘golden age’ when grammar schools enabled social mobility children is a myth. The Crowther Report in 1959 showed that just 10% of grammar school pupils came from working class backgrounds – and two thirds of them left without getting three ‘O’ Levels. The report noted that 81% of working class grammar school students left before age 17. Grammar schools, in other words, did very little to promote social mobility.
A snapshot of statistics about grammar schools now gives strong clues to what’s going on. There are 163 grammar schools as against more than 3000+ non grammar schools, a big majority of which are comprehensive schools, now known as community schools.
In secondary schools overall 14% of pupils are ‘pupil premium’ students – students from poorer backgrounds who get free school meals or have special needs. Only 3% of grammar school students get the pupil premium, which unsurprisingly means poorer students are a tiny proportion of grammar school intake.
An appalling 74% of grammar schools are single sex (as opposed to 11% of community schools) and they are much more likely to be academies – ie independent of local authorities and run like a business.
For the really wealthy, for the capitalist and upper middle classes, this is a side-show. They send their kids to fee-paying private schools (‘public schools’), and get a massive pay off from that in terms of educational outcomes and life chances (see chart below). The extension of grammar schools by contrast is aimed at a broader section of middle class parents who can be convinced that exam selection at 11+ is a surer way into a ‘good’ school than the present postcode scramble, and crucially where their offspring can be educated alongside other mainly middle class students.
At the general election only one party advocated a return to grammar schools – UKIP. The Tories adopting the grammar school cause can perhaps help them reclaim a section of the middle class UKIP vote, something they will be hoping to do post-Brexit anyway.
Middle class parents will have a significant advantage in getting their children into grammar schools. They will be able to afford private tutors to coach students for a new 11+ exam (and prep schools will do the same for wealthier families). At 11 years old, students from middle class houses with lots of books and highly educated parents have a massive leg up in formal education, with much better literacy and numeracy.
Education minister Justine Greening and the Prime Minister say that new grammar schools will have to help local non-selective schools and take a minimum quota of poor students. This of course is fiddling round the edges of an entirely regressive proposal.
Before comprehensives were widely introduced in the 1970s, the division between grammar schools, secondary modern schools and technical schools mirrored the expected lifetime outcomes. Teachers, local bank managers, senior clerical and factory administration staff, more responsible local government and non-medical NHS staff, laboratory and research staff – all these jobs that needed higher order literacy skills – were the expected province of grammar school students. At this time only around 8% of students went to university and many jobs that today require a degree then needed ‘just’ A Levels.
Grammar schools, about 25% of students, had a more academic curriculum, geared to getting ‘O’ Levels and ‘A’ levels and potentially getting students to university. Secondary modern schools were heavily biased towards technical and vocational subjects and these were rigidly enforced according to gender. One woman told a History Workshop project on secondary modern schools:
“In my last year at school we had to choose whether we wanted to go in the class that led us onto a nursing career or a class for those interested in office/secretarial work. The two other streams were for the least able pupils. I neither wanted to be a nurse (we had been shown around the local hospital to see tape worms in jars, etc) or work in an office. I suppose I must have plumped for the office option as I remember sitting at a desk with a typewriter. I left school in 1967 at the tender age of fifteen years and three months without any qualifications and got a job as an office junior.”
Working class young men expected to be in a factory, mine, warehouse, shop or have a lowly office job, be a farm labourer or join the armed forces. At age eleven the future for most pupils was set. Of course if grammar schools become more widespread, present day community schools will be stripped of their more academically gifted students, and they will revert to being de facto secondary moderns.
This fits in with changes to further and higher education and the curriculum decided under education secretaries Michael Gove and Nicky Morgan. The system whereby most pupils go to sixth form colleges or FE colleges to do A Levels is being abolished. Secondary schools are being encouraged to establish their own sixth forms and an area review is seeing the merger or closure of many sixth form and FE colleges. Sixth form colleges have been a particular Tory target because most of them concentrate on getting working class students to university and teach a range of subjects that schools, with less resources, don’t offer – and the Tories don’t like anyway.
The list of subjects being abolished at A level is revealing – Science in Society, Critical Thinking, Film Studies, Communication and Culture, Applied Science, Creative Writing, Citizenship, Polish, Modern Hebrew, Punjabi, Turkish and others. The Tories falsely claim that some of these subjects lack academic rigour, but they really want to close down anything with a critical content and also prevent students getting A Levels in their spoken-at-home languages. All this makes things simpler for school sixth forms that don’t have the resources to teach a wide curriculum.
There must be questions about whether the government can get its grammar school proposals through parliament, and even if they do the process of switching to grammars would be enormously difficult. But such a change fits in with another change that’s very real but not much heralded – the retreat on the 50% target for getting students to university.
All the evidence is that producing more and more graduates has enormous cultural benefits, but doesn’t transform the economic prospects of capitalist economies very much. Often the result is graduates on zero hour contracts and people with doctorates working as baristas. A new de facto grammar/secondary modern system would likely lead to substantially fewer students going to university and a cutback in university courses and numbers – and this will hit working class students hardest. This is only reinforced by the £9000 a year fees which has led to many universities struggling to recruit at clearing this summer.
At the same time Britain sorely lacks an extensive and high level apprenticeship system. Only 5% of students go on apprenticeship courses because of the lack of relevant and high level provision, which needs much more government investment. Too often it’s a short period of cheap or free labour for employers. The job prospects for students forced into the new secondary moderns but unable to get on useful apprenticeships would be grim. The number in low paid and on zero hours contracts is growing, not shrinking.
Along with grammar schools the government aims to allow faith schools to recruit as many as they want on the basis of faith alone, rather than maintain the 50% quota of admitting local children regardless of religion. This is particular is aimed at allowing Catholic schools to prioritise Catholic students irrespective of where they live, at the expense of non-Catholic local pupils.
Post-1960s comprehensive education and widening access to universities opened up a new realm of educational opportunities for working class students, now under threat. But socialists need to be a bit hard headed and realistic about what education can achieve by way of social change.
“Social mobility” has become the holy grail of politicians from Theresa May leftwards and Tony Bair’s “education, education and education” a key goal in improving Britain’s economy for many of the same people.
But social mobility as the key way of transforming the class structure or ending poverty and social exclusion is nonsense. Britain is one of the least socially mobile advanced countries, and that won’t end soon. There are only so many lawyers, doctors, dentists and other highly paid professionals that a society needs or capitalism can pay for. British universities know the numbers doing law or medical science is ridiculous, few of them will be lawyers and doctors, but it gets bums on seats.
Class privilege cannot be educated away. The real capitalist class, families worth many millions in stocks and shares, are impervious to educational change. In the best-paid professions the advantages for people with a public school education is dramatically shown by the following chart of public school alumni produced by the Sutton Trust.
This chart doesn’t include bankers, but:
“Just 7% of all UK children attend fee-paying schools but 34% of new entrants to the banking sector who were educated in the UK had attended a fee-paying school, rising to almost 70% of new entrants in private equity. More than 50% of current leaders within the banking sector who are from the UK were educated privately.
“Oxbridge entrants to the City are more likely to be privately educated than Oxbridge graduates who go elsewhere: 42% of all Oxbridge graduates went to private schools but 65% of Oxbridge entrants to the banking sector went to private school.” (1)
Note the chart figures for rugby union internationals, England cricketers – and pop stars! The performing arts are packed with class privilege. And one not on the list, which school do you think Damian Lewis, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie went to? All of them went to Eton, except Benedict Cumberbatch who went to Harrow.
The fight against grammar schools has a good chance of success. But the fight for an overall more equitable education system depends on making advances on many other fronts of working class and progressive struggle.
Notes
- https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/01/top-graduates-missing-out-on-banking-jobs-for-lacking-polish
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Grammar Schools to be Introduced – John Tummon
Introduction
The Guardian says that this brainchild of Theresa May will cause yet more middle class flight from the state education sector, because of the risk their children might fail the 11-plus or whatever exam is used to re-create Grammar Schools throughout the land:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/10/grammar-schools-middle-class-boost-private-education
Yes, further social segregation is again on the march! Says something about what the rest of the kids (who don’t have parents who can opt out of the system) can expect. Even now, under the so-called comprehensive system, unless their parents can afford to buy education, go to live in an affluent area in the catchment area of a good Comprehensive or pretend with some credibility to follow the true faith of the nearest C of E or Catholic School, kids get a secondary education that has not changed much since the old secondary moderns. Some of these schools are mere holding pens for future welfare recipients, prison inmates and zero hours workers.
Education has, for several decades now, failed dismally to act even as a counterweight to the neoliberal order putting social mobility into reverse, let alone act as the agent of upward social mobility so many hoped it to be. The Comprehensive system said goodbye to any sense of egalitarian mission some time ago and is nowadays a bit like the EU; something that looked mildly progressive in the past but has itself since become a vehicle for driving inequality. Who is going to have the nerve to defend it (and with what politics) against the middle class populism that May is riding in her campaign to restore Grammar Schools to a major role in British education?
The poorest people in society are now more segregated than ever before; so very different from pre -Thatcher council estates, in which the ‘respectable working class’ rubbed shoulders with all sorts of people known to many 20th century Marxists by the pejorative term lumpenproletariat and exerted a strong influence on them. The 1970s ghettoisation of so-called problem families within these estates, followed in the following decade by Thatcher’s privatisation bribe to the ‘respectable’, better-off tenants in the nicer parts, has produced a cross-generational problem of poverty, ignorance and casual attitudes to childcare in what is now more often called the precariate.
If people want to learn, they will. If they don’t get encouraged in this direction by their carers, they won’t. A lot of that comes down to how they’re treated by their parents, and on how well they’ve been brought up, made to understand boundaries, acquire confidence and accept fair and necessary discipline and advice: how they have been socialised.
The best way of tackling this problem of socialisation was New Labour’s Surestart Programme, which set up centres and outreach initiatives in deprived areas helping parents to help their children. It worked very well in the Bangladeshi community of Oldham, where I worked in the noughties. Many parents who, for a variety of reasons were disconnected from and had not inherited information-based parenting skills, became confident, aware nurturers. That community’s educational attainment has improved since.
Cameron closed down the programme, just like he closed down the supply of extra funds to communities being disproportionately impacted by new wave migrants.
These Tories really don’t care about poverty and disadvantage or about being systematic about tackling the causes of rampant inequality and, unless this is done, no school system is going to do more than paper over the cracks. The government have just spent 6 years systematically destroying vocational education, so the quaint notion that May is at war with social inequality and is taking it on in education in just doublespeak. On the slimmest of justifications she argues that Grammars will help working class kids; it will only help token working class kids, leaving 90% or more stuck in schools that only cater for them. These tokens will do what the old Grammar Schools did with them – use their realised talent to replenish the stale stock of the comfortable middle class.
The other main contextual reality is that if you take away the best-educated, more affluent, loudest and most influential parents from any contact with the schools left behind by all these elitist developments, there will be no-one with any local, let alone national clout, to fight their corner in the competition for scarce resources and funds that modern capitalism foists on the public realm. Only when these parents (and their political contacts) are made to look for their own aspirations within the same state system as everyone else, will that system ‘lift up all boats’.
This sordid piece of chicanery from May & Greening is not about lifting up ‘all boats’, but continuing to mould a society in which the Tories will have an automatic majority the other side of Scottish independence, by creating vested interests as broadly as possible within the lower middle class.
Books have been written about my generation of baby boomer working class Grammar School pupils, but very few have the inside story. You are always a cultural oddity in the eyes of teachers and many other pupils and come under continuous pressure to ditch your family & community values for those of the school. So long as kids from less advantaged backgrounds are under 10% of all pupils at Grammar Schools, socially mobile working class young people will be tokens meant to replenish the ranks of capitalism’s middle managers, which is what the local Landowner made quite explicit at a speech at my school before I left that I will never forget – “You boys will become the managers in the firms owned by the boys from public schools”. Social Mobility of this kind is a deceit!
The Unravelling of Comprehensive Education (‘Grammar Schools for All’)
The central problem remains – how does the educational system grapple and deal with the clear differences in potential to learn between those who’ve been and are being socialised in ways that facilitate this and those whose socialisation militates against it? This is a long-term political question and remains such, irrespective of the level, speed or type of technology or employment patterns that continue to change with each new phase of capitalist society.
In a capitalist system, this difference in potential correlates with social class and with relative affluence within wage earners as the majority, mass group within capitalist society.
“By the 1950s and 1960s inequalities in the social distribution of educational opportunity became the main target of a generation of British social scientists (e.g. Glass, 1954; Halsey, 1957). They convinced the 1960s Labour administration that grammar schools were attracting a disproportionately high number of children from middle class homes and therefore disadvantaging working class children. As a consequence, the neighbourhood comprehensive school was adopted as the most effective model of educational equality, even if under the slogan ‘grammar schools for all’. Despite these shifts towards more egalitarian schooling, however, the early 1960s saw class barriers remaining intact at the level of higher education with the proportion of working-class children entering universities actually decreasing (Ainley 1993)”. (New Era or Old Times: class, gender and education; Gaby Weiner South Bank University (1997).
Largely forgotten today, there was also significant middle-class hostility to Grammar Schools in the 1950s, especially from those whose children had failed the 11+ or were thought likely to do so.
One problem running through this whole discussion since World War Two is the widespread assumption throughout the political spectrum, but particularly on the Left, that education holds the golden key to social mobility; it doesn’t. Other, more fundamental aspects of socio-economic reality in class society determine education!
Foremost, nowadays, is the pernicious influence on educational opportunity within the comprehensive system of the financial ability of ‘middle class’ parents to move into and out of catchment areas, which has done more than anything else to remove any remaining sense of egalitarian mission from those working in or for the Comprehensive system. My local area’s “Property News” leaflet asks ‘Did you know that for some house-hunters, the search for a property begins on the OFSTED website, rather than on the local estate agent’s? … Some local councils also publish information on schools listed as outstanding, giving the names of streets that fall within the catchment area … there is growing evidence of a strong link between a good school report and the demand for housing close to it … We found that on average properties that were within 1 km of a good secondary school sold for 8.4% more than the rest of the housing stock over the last decade”.
The following 2010 report by the Sutton Trust states in paragraphs six and seven:
http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Worlds_apart.pdf
Considering the 100 most socially selective comprehensive schools in England (out of 2,679), the analysis reveals that, on average, 8.6% of children are from income deprived areas – despite being situated in localities where 20.1% of children are from income deprived homes. Meanwhile in the 100 comprehensive schools in England with the least advantaged intakes, 38.9% of children are from income – deprived areas – despite being situated in localities where 30.3% of children are income deprived. This has to be see in the context of a range in which the least deprived comprehensive in the country has 1 in 25 (4.2%) of pupils from homes on income benefits compared with over 16 times as many (68.6%) in the most deprived comprehensive.
These two very different groups of schools are associated with starkly different educational performance, as one might expect. In the least income deprived, 67.2% of the pupils in 2008 obtained five good GCSEs including English and maths compared with only 26.3% in the most income deprived. Of the 100 schools in this group, 67 were involved in the National Challenge tackling schools where 30% or fewer obtained good GCSEs, but none of the 100 most socially selective were included. These differences stem, at least in part, from the different levels of attainment on entry.
The best-educated, more affluent, loudest and most influential parents will always manage to find ways of securing their own children’s educational attainment, whatever the system, so long as the playing field is allowed, (nay – encouraged) to be uneven and open to their influence. They already have their ‘public’ schools and their ‘free’ schools, as well as the good Comprehensives only they can afford to live near.
However, this same catchment-based catch 22 also applied to the old Grammar Schools; to go to the Grammar School I went to you had to live in Staffordshire LEA and the only reason I went there was because 3 1950s council estates had been built in the village of Bilbrook as part of Wolverhampton’s slum clearance and my parents moved out of the inner city onto one of them. In short, more fundamental socio economic forces than education determine educational opportunity. You could, of course, cite the public schools as further proof of this connection between wealth and educational attainment.
Harold Wilson’s comprehensive system was, in any case, fatally flawed because his party had lacked the political will to abolish the public schools under Clement Atlee, when it had the best chance it would ever get to grapple with the key institutions of class rule and the effect this flawed design therefore had on middle class parents who had previously been happy to use the Grammar Schools was to push them towards the public schools (doublespeak again). The % of children at public schools increased from 5.8% in the late 1970s to 7.4% by 1990 and has stayed above 7% since.
But this development only properly worked through as a result of the socio economic policies of Thatcher and Blair, as I will explain.
It was Blair who then killed off technical colleges by selling the country the pup of 50% going to University, thereby creating the market forces that persuaded college governors to follow the money and apply for University status. It was Thatcher’s prohibition of council house building that combined with Blair’s 50% target and Atlee’s failure to abolish public schools to create the conditions in which middle class parents, in response to Blairite ‘parental choice’, increasingly opted to use their higher incomes to move into and out of catchment areas in pursuit of educational advantage.
May is leaving it open for schools to apply to become Grammar Schools and which schools do you think will be queuing up for this? I think we know it will be the Comps with the best exam results in the more affluent suburbs. And, it will cause a massive increase in private tuition: In Ulster, where Grammar Schools are widespread, they initially had the situation whereby the primary schools were not supposed to teach for the test, so parents simply started using tutors instead.
The so-called public schools
By his own admission, Attlee failed to appreciate that the decision to leave the private and public schools in place in the education system (they were to be abolished under the Education Act 1944) which he saw implemented in the first few months of his premiership, after the general election of 1945, meant that the intention to create a level playing field for all children and young adults, so far as learning was concerned, could not be achieved. Ever since that decision, made by Attlee against strong advice, the state education system has played second fiddle to the privately funded system. This – the public schoolboys’ domination of financial capitalism, the civil service, the privy council and successive cabinets remains the central reality of British society and British education.
Increasingly known nowadays by the euphemistic misnomer ‘independent schools’, these have gone from strength to strength under neoliberalism. They were subsidised by the state up to 1975 anyway through the direct grant system. When the direct grant was abolished in 1975 local authorities were ordered to cease funding places at independent (public) schools, which, by then, accounted for over 25% of places at 56 of these schools, and over half at 22 of them. The direct grant was partially revived between 1981 and 1997 in the Assisted Places Scheme, which provided support for 80,000 pupils attending public schools.
Tory education reform from 1988 to 1994 sought to restore the tripartite system of educational privilege through a mix of policy strategies: the promotion of diversification in schooling (e.g. the creation of semi-private forms of schooling), marketisation (e.g. competition between schools for pupils) and deregulation; expansion and restructuring of further and higher education; and increased powers of the central state to the detriment of locally elected education authorities (LEAs). (New Era or Old Times: class, gender and education; Gaby Weiner South Bank University (1997). This, together with the means-tested bursaries made available, consolidated the popularity of public schools with the aspiring middle class.
These schools are a regional, rather than an ‘English’, let alone truly ‘British’, phenomenon. In Scotland and northern England, the proportion of children in private education is well under one child in 20; In London the figure is 1 in 10, largely because the state system has become so dysfunctional in terms of the aspirations of ‘middle class’ parents, but in the South East, where this does not apply, it is 1 in 9.
Nowadays, they increasingly attract fee-paying pupils from the middle class in China and some other BRIC countries; the number of UK-domiciled pupils remains lower than before the financial crisis hit, with the overall total boosted by a 33% increase since 2008 in the number of non-British pupils whose parents live overseas – a very telling reflection of the growing City State nature of the so-called capital of the UK and its immediate hinterland.
Are the Grammar Schools going to change this pattern of educational inequality?
So Grammar Schools will be superimposed on the top of a system that has grown so unequal anyway and, unless these high-achieving ‘comprehensive’ schools grow in size, they will recruit almost exclusively from these same suburbs they do now once they become Grammars, with middle class parents spending their money on private tuition to get their kids through the 11 plus. There will be no more working class tokens than the last time around, probably even fewer.
The 1950s were the high point of the grammar schools. About a quarter of pupils went to them and received, on the whole, an excellent academic education. Although primarily middle-class institutions, a significant and noticeable minority of working-class children also attended them. For some this meant cultural liberation and social advance; for others merely social alienation.
The nostalgic view of Grammar Schools in the 50s and 60s ignores the different socio economic conditions of the 2010s. They are not some magic ticket out of what has become of the ‘Comprehensive’ system and the huge increase in socio economic inequality that has accompanied the rise and development of neoliberalism. Social mobility has ground to a halt because neoliberalism has re-structured society on a profoundly more unequal basis.
We can’t pretend that these Grammars produced more than token upward social mobility; technical colleges were the institutions that enabled secondary modern kids to acquire the higher vocational skills and qualifications that won them decently-paid, rewarding, skilled work with protected terms and conditions. They did this for many more working class young people than ever the Grammar Schools did. But, post-school technical education for the working class was rendered less relevant by the destruction of so much of manufacturing industry employment from the 1980s onwards.
The left made a historic mistake decades ago in seeing education as the key to social and economic progress; it was seen as the way of reforming capitalism and the place of the working class within it. It never was. The relationship is entirely the opposite way round.
It’s so old hat to still have the same ‘Comprehensive versus Grammar’ debate as if it represents a Left v Right argument. The failure of any government to tackle the so-called public schools lies at the heart of the ongoing influence of class on educational opportunity.
517,000 pupils enrolled in 1,500 public schools in 2015, the highest number since it began keeping records 40 years ago. Some of the country’s most famous boarding schools, including Eton College and Wellington College, attract 15 per cent of their students from foreign countries.
Conclusion
If the Left, using its Bedouin compass (‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’) ends up just supporting the Comprehensive system against May’s Grammar School populism, it will be as progressive and as successful as the Remain ‘Another Europe is Possible’ campaign.
As part of building a new politics, the Left should, in my view, use this opportunity to argue clearly for the abolition of the so-called public schools and, following that, for a re-founding of comprehensive education based on modern educational theory. I am no longer in LU but hope it will realise the mistake of yet more misty-eyed nostalgia for the original comprehensive system, let alone the present one.
John Tummon
September 2016