Nothing better illustrates that it’s time to call a halt to decades of politically motivated change masquerading as educational reform - and to start seriously seeking ways to remove education from the political sphere of influence - than grammar schools.
The slightest hint of a whiff of their return sent some individuals flapping to the barricades, with nothing more than personal prejudice and ignorance on their comic sans placards. Ironically, in the case of grammar schools, some people clearly aren’t going to let a little thing like ignorance get in their way.
No one, not even the most unscrupulously mercenary researcher, could argue that taken in isolation, the less than 200 grammar schools we still have in the UK fail to deliver a high-quality educational experience. That they are not, to lapse into the banal metrics of Ofsted, “good” schools. Arguments about their impact on other types of local schools, on housing, parental attitudes and on staffing are a different matter but they are political arguments, not educational ones. If education is about good schooling then grammar schools, with one exception I will turn to later, do a good job. If what you sincerely want is for more children to experience high-quality schooling then why on earth wouldn’t you accept more of them?
Perverse incentives
Because of course that isn’t what those obdurate, anti-grammar school voices want. They show little interest in historically great schools. In fact they often despise them. All they care about are the thousands of children they imagine must fail an entrance exam. They start with perverse incentives.
The almost universally successful assault on grammar schools was always deeply rooted in political, not educational thought: in equity not excellence. If intelligent, objective educational thinking had been foremost in the 1970s, then secondary moderns would have been regarded as a serious and shameful problem to be dealt with, not grammar schools. Grammar schools then did a largely admirable job of educating a minority of the population who had been selected on the basis of academic testing.
Crude, inflexible, tripartite streaming had its problems, but, oh the irony, grammar schools provided precisely the kind of education champions of social mobility and equity today rushing to the barricades can only dream of. The issue of course was that the bulk of the nation’s children were treated as industry fodder and left to tread water educationally until, ideally, they entered the workforce. I can recall a close friend at the time telling me how everyone at his school either went down the pit, or worked at a local pipe factory. He didn’t much fancy either.
Today some seem determined to keep us mired in precisely the same blinkered thinking of the 1970s. All the most powerful and influential educational lobbyists in the UK have no interest in education whatsoever that doesn’t simultaneously address social disadvantage. They are trapped by their perverse incentives, ideologically and systemically incapable of separating the two. The idea that the sole purpose of education is to provide better life chances for disadvantaged children has become absolutist dogma. That’s why politicians of all shades have slavishly signed up to it.
Writing in TES recently, history teacher Thomas Rogers made an outstanding case for a redistribution of responsibility from schools to parents that was a stark reminder of just how far such naively politicised thinking has taken us. I wasn’t at all surprised his piece received so much support from skilled, professional teachers. It’s time all those with a political agenda who appear to regard schools as their personal plaything, staunched their bleeding hearts on their own sleeves, not on those of teachers.
We need honesty, not certainty
Today we have an educational landscape in the UK that is no longer one rule for the academically able and ignore the rest. There are academies, maintained schools, faith schools, free schools, university technical colleges, special schools, independent schools. Even studio schools have recently been thrown a lifeline. Reintroducing grammar schools into this complicated picture need not condemn every child who fails an entrance exam to the educational dustbin. If anyone is going to suffer, it’s academically mediocre schools in the private sector. Just look at the pressure they are already under in areas where there are strong grammar schools.
In fact, my most significant concern about grammar schools as they now stand is something their critics never mention. The most sought-after grammar schools, those that could fill the places on offer six times over, are often unacceptably complacent. There is a tendency for some of their teaching staff to do the absolute minimum required of them because they know the children will work incredibly hard, whatever they do. Telling children never to approach you during lunchtime because it’s the only free time you get, is just one example of this I’ve seen. I have also observed the head of one such school deliver the most desultory, complacent speech imaginable to prospective parents. If a child I’d been teaching had spoken like that in a classroom, to their own peers, I’d have stopped them short and made them start again.
If we are to successfully depoliticise education, then any new educational reform proposed needs to be challenged openly by educators who are able to think objectively. We should demand relentlessly that politicians identify precisely what the educational benefits will be, and where the evidence comes from sufficient to convince any apolitical, professional teacher having to deliver the changes, that they might work. I don’t expect certainty. But the least we can all expect is honesty. Grammar schools offer the perfect test case. So I’m issuing that challenge.
Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author
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