There is no such thing as a wholly new question in education policy. Every generation grapples with the same conundrums. What are the best forms of teaching? What should be taught? What are the best ways to learn? Yet, these old questions sometimes need new answers.
For the past few weeks, I have been in the eye of a storm about one issue that never dies: academic selection. Should different pupils be offered - or forced onto - separate pathways, such as academic and vocational? Ever since the mass closure of grammar schools, Establishment opinion has deemed most selection to be wrong. But public opinion backs it.
At the Higher Education Policy Institute, we dipped our toe into the debate by publishing the pro-selection thoughts of Iain Mansfield, recently a senior civil servant in the Department for Education, in The Impact of Selective Secondary Education on Progression to Higher Education. His paper shows that the proportion of children progressing from state schools to Russell Group universities is much higher in areas with grammar schools. A state school pupil with a black or minority ethnic background is, staggeringly, five times more likely to progress to Oxbridge if they live in a selective area.
The edu-Twittersphere was predictably outraged that anyone could find something positive to say about grammar schools. Publishing the report was like pouring petrol on smouldering embers. My former GCSE history pupil and one-time adviser to Michael Gove, Sam Freedman, described the research as “obviously ludicrous”.
Stephen Gorard, professor of education and public policy at the highly selective Durham University, went further, calling on us to “disband” if we didn’t learn to understand the difference between wanting something “to be so” and evidence. It’s a shame he didn’t look in the mirror first, given his Department has long housed the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM), which charges large sums to set and mark 11-plus tests.
One reason why the response was odd is that the report accepts grammar schools do some things badly - like giving places to children on free school meals. Our goal was to broaden the debate while our critics wanted to shut it down.
To those who were angry at what we found, I say: duh! We have one of the most selective university systems in the world. It is not surprising that universities with tight entry processes want pupils from selective schools. Grammar schools were set up in part to help people enter the older universities, so it would be odd if they failed at it.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We could reject selection at 18. In some countries, if you do well at school, you are automatically entitled to pop along to your local university to obtain a degree. You don’t travel halfway around the country to live at the most prestigious university that will let you in.
Professor Tim Blackman, vice-chancellor of Middlesex University, has called for just such a system to be introduced in the UK. He says: “The narrative of ‘leading’ and ‘top’ universities has marginalised the transformational potential of higher education, which lies in adopting comprehensive principles.”
But such arguments have fallen on barren soil. Campaigners against selection at 11 tend to accept, or even support, selection at 18. They have even been known to justify comprehensive education on the grounds that it levels the playing field for university entry.
In fact, the campaigns to kill off the remaining 163 grammar schools have failed for half a century in part because they refuse to acknowledge tertiary selection is a driver of secondary selection. Anyone who seriously wants to pull the rug from under selection in schools should start by opposing the hyper-selection at many of our universities.
The current decade may come to be remembered for the use of overblown and one-sided rhetoric on issues where nuance is more appropriate. For me, this sums up the grammar schools debate, too. The simplistic binary division that implies grammar schools are bad and comprehensive schools are good hampers proper debate.
In particular, the vehemence of those expostulating the case against selection at age 11 has squeezed out discussion of other important issues. This is regrettable because, if selection at 11 is wrong but fine at 18, then we need to know the point at which it becomes unacceptable. Very few people have wrestled with this challenge.
Among those who have, the firm consensus is that selection is appropriate only from age 16. The former Tes columnist, Jonathan Simons, notes “a clear distinction in the English state education system between compulsory one-track education pre-16 and optional multitrack education post-16”. It is true that the system changes then. For example, widespread academic selection is allowed, whether or not there are local grammar schools. This helps explain the success of Brampton Manor in London’s Newham, which is being celebrated because 41 of its pupils have received offers from Oxbridge. Brampton is highly selective for entry at Year 12.
But the argument that selection becomes educationally sensible at 16 because the system happens to say it does is thoroughly unpersuasive. It is policy-based evidence rather than evidence-based policy. If such arguments for the status quo had been used when selection at age 11 was common, most grammar schools would have survived.
Some people support a move to selection between ages 11 and 16. Independent schools assume a move between Years 8 and 9 after a 13+ Common Entrance exam; university technical colleges (UTCs) recruit at 14. But when discourse is dominated by the idea that everyone should go to the same type of school between the ages of 11 and 16, it is difficult for other routes to be integrated successfully into the mainstream school system. Look at the mixed history of the UTCs. Yet, variety and choice may fit better with the characteristics of different students.
The education debate is nearly always harmed when we talk of ladders. If selection means plonking people on different ladders that will determine the rest of their lives, of course it is unwelcome. But we could engineer climbing frames with multiple bridges between different routes, so sorting becomes a better reflection of learners’ needs.
Another important question opponents of selection at age 11 are reluctant to discuss is: why have the remaining grammar schools managed to survive every attack on them? The answer is that the debates have been going round and round in circles, rehashing the same old arguments, for years. To make progress, you need to go in a straight line.
If I were a campaigner against selection,I would start with an issue at the very heart of our politics: communitarianism versus individualism. If you tend toward the former and think individual urges are less important than community priorities, the idea of an all-round comprehensive for everybody is logical; the evidence suggesting that overall academic outcomes get a boost in non-selective areas strengthens your argument.
But many people take a more individualistic perspective. They regard the needs of each individual as more important than average achievements across society. To them, selection is rational because it helps some people thrive. If the result is slightly worse outcomes for society as a whole, the solution lies in directing more resources to the struggling institutions and pupils.
Most of us are neither wholly communitarian nor wholly individualistic. That is why, electorally, so many people flit between our two biggest political parties. The Labour Party tends to worry a little more about society, while the Conservatives are a little more concerned about individuals. Government swings between the two.
If comprehensive campaigners could convince more people to take a communitarian perspective, they might finally start making progress. But it will still be a tough call. As every teacher knows, schooling is the fostering of individual talents within a community environment. So the tension between the community and the individual is ever-present.
It is hard to prove that the best way to foster individualism is to mix everybody in the same pot until they end their compulsory schooling. Diversity among institutions may be as valuable as diversity within institutions. After all, other countries, less obsessed with class, manage to run selective school systems that are much less toxic or controversial.
It is even tougher to prove that you can make poorer schools better by making the better schools worse. No one wants to see excellent schools disappear - and the inspectorate, Ofsted, says that nearly all selective schools are outstanding. Education is not a zero-sum game, where the only way some can do better is if others do worse.
Indeed, quality may well suffer when you remove an institution’s raison d’être. The old direct-grant grammar schools, which sat between the state and independent sectors, understood that. That’s why most of them joined the independent sector when, as secretary of state, Shirley Williams made them choose between comprehensivisation and their historic role.
Sadly, the debate on grammar schools, which should be passionate and lively, has become a shining example of intolerance. Although perhaps we all display some prejudice on the issue; mine is a tendency to discount the anti-selection arguments of anyone who sends their own children to schools that select by ability or wealth (or both). The hypocrisy of many of the most fervent opponents of academic selection - “do as I say, not as I do” - deepens society’s divides just when they need healing.
Any serious opponent of selection needs to walk the walk, as well as talk the talk. Wearing a guilty conscience on one’s sleeve does not a policy make.
Nick Hillman is director of the Higher Education Policy Institute
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