Your comment that those children who went to secondary modern got a third rate education whilst those who went to grammar received an excellent education high a different view than my own on what constitutes an “excellent education”. My view is that an “excellent education” is one that maximises the potential of the individual but also prepares him or her to their future life after school although not in a prescriptive way but in a manner that recognises both the aspirations of the students coupled with a dose of reality. There needs to be a reality check, your 16 year school student may want to be an astronaut but if he or she is struggling with the new combined science GCSE then possibly his/her career aspirations needs to be, diplomatically but firmly, adjusted. Basically my belief is that an excellent education is not one based on how many A grade the individual obtains but how much educational intuition(s) the individual has attended has maximised their potential. The idea that an “excellent education” is based purely on academic achievement is both narrow and a slur on those excellent teachers who over the years (earlier in secondary moderns but now in our comprehensives) turned a pig’s ear into, if not exactly a purse, at least into individual with the basic skills that allows them to be productive and fulfilled members of society.

I am not sure I agree with your statement that the majority of children now “enjoy vastly superior educations” than previously which seems to be based on the “5 or more grade A*-C” statistics you quote. This does not seem to jell with comments I have heard in the media from employers’ federations, university admissions etc. regarding falling standards of basic literacy and innumeracy.

I am also struggling to understand your position regarding the “working class struggle to get into grammar school” which according to you were “then dominated by the middle classes”. I do not want to get into a nature v. nurture argument; but my recollection from the 1960s of why my eldest brother failed to get into the local grammar school was nothing to do with any perceived class domination but to the fact he failed his 11 Plus, incidentally the excellent secondary modern he went to did not seem to stop him from becoming an officer in the armed forces and subsequently an airline pilot (although I suppose airline pilots are just gloried bus drivers so maybe his secondary modern education did stifle his future professional life).

Lastly, as my day job is interfering with this interesting and important argument, why cannot “working class” (I am personally uncomfortable with these class “badges” which seem to be perpetuated into all discussion in t his country with regards to education – what does working or middle class really mean today?) parents be “pushy” or is a parental desire to do the best for one’s offspring purely a prerogative of the “middle classes”?
Regards,
Simon W

:)

I’m afraid I don’t agree on a number of points.

But let me prefix what I’m going to say by remarking that I used to agree with you, and in fact used to hold the exact same position. However, numerous conversations over a course of about 3 years with a tutor of mine at Oxford have convinced me that the story about grammar school decline and brining them back just doesn’t fit right. here we go.

You say that secondary moderns were fine. The evidence is that actaully, they weren’t. They were pretty hopeless. At the age of 11 kids were packed off to one of the three options; those that ended up in secondary moderns got third rate educations. Those in grammar schools indeed got excellent educations.

By introducing the comprehensive system, two things (broadly) happened:

The more average kids benefited from vastly improved educations at comps BUT the brighter kids did indeed suffer because post-1992 especially academic decline at the top end of standards has been rife.

But note that this academic decline is more to do with the itnroduction of league tables and incentives for government to manipulate stats by making tests easier and teachers incentivised to teach to the test. It’s not obviously linked to the decline of grammar schools. My dad says that when he taught O and A level French at a comp in the 1980s the standards were fine; it was post-introduction of the National Curriculum that fucked the standards at the top end.

But in the middle, for the average kids, comps have been a blessing. The majority of kids – not the best and brightest, i’ll admit – now enjoy vastly superior educations than previously. for example look at the 2008 states for the comps in my home town of Southport: in 2008 for the basic “5 or more grades A*-C at GCSE” stat, we have 91% getting this at Christ the King Catholic High School, 77% at Greenbank High School, 63% at Meols Cop High School, 73% at Birkdale High School and 56% from Stanley High School Sports Complex.

91% at my old school getting 5 A*-C GCSEs! That’s amazing. And my comp had a *lot* of discipline problems. The others aren’t doing quite so well, to be sure, but here’s the rub: 5 A*-C GCSEs for your average kids is a lot better than what they would have gotten under the old seconary modern system, where they were effectively abandoned and prepared for low-grade but non-manual work.

Yes, standards have fallen at the top end. There is no denying that. But they seem to have risen in the middle – so there’s no straightforward story about the death of grammar schools destroying education. League tables have been far more destructive.

As for your points about social mobility, there’s a massive blind spot in your position: that the grammar schools were always, if not monopolised, then dominated by the middle classes. Working class kids struggled to get into grammar schools, with the result that it was the middle classes who got the best educations and had their kids packed off to Oxbridge and the top universities to cement the social stratification.

For a while, comps threatened to reverse that social stagnation…but as you point out we have gone back to massive levels of private school and grammar school kids dominating e.g. Oxbridge admissions (I think that stats are 7% of UK students independently educated, but making up 48% of Oxford places or something insane like that).

But is it the decline of the grammar schools that did this, or the assault by successive administrations upon standards at the *top* end, whilst improving the middle? It seems to me that private and grammar school kids get more Oxbridge places because they have teachers who are specialists in getting them into Oxbridge by focusing on all sorts of extra-curricular activities, backed-up by very pushy parents. Over-worked, over-tested and over-scrutinised teachers in the comp system cannot compete – but not because they are at comps, but because the league table culture drowns the teachers in work and pressure, whilst the kids at the top end are left unchallenged and thus don’t develop at the rate of their private/grammar counterparts…thus fair less well at Oxbridge interview etc.

But again, there story seems to be one about a meddling government obsessed with targets, measurement and manipulting statistics, rather than the decline of the traditional tri-partite model per se.

I don’t wan’t to go back to the old system. I want to ban private schools and grammar schools, completely overhaul the comp system, take government’s meddling hand out of educational attainment, completely overhaul the GCSE and A level standards by making them hard and in-depth again (particularly the latter), but abandoning the insanity of league tables.

I think that will do far more for social mobility that returning to a system that wrote kids off at age 11 and entrenched the dominance of the middle classes and the expense of the poorer.

Even if there’s no absolute change in the quality of comprehensive education (eg. PTAs are made up of the same quality parents etc) but middle class kids do better at free schools, this might still amount to a depression of the position of working class kids. This is because, as Adam Swift takes pains to point out in his excellent little book HOW NOT TO BE A HYPORCRITE: SCHOOL CHOICE FOR THE MORALLY PERPLEXED PARENT, education is a positional good. So free schools, even if they don’t make comps worse, might have the effect of shunting comp educated kids down the queue for good university places etc. That’s a bad thing, imo.

What the solution for British education might be though, I do not know.