Some of you may have been a little puzzled by headlines yesterday, including in the Guardian, proclaiming ‘Soaring state schools threaten private sector.’ It is not often that a Guardian lead story risks sounding like a Tory press release or a Toby Young blog but, as I argue in a post on today’s Local Schools Network, this is certainly one report that begs rather more questions than it answers: Who or what was the source of this lead story? The chief source is the much quoted Ralph Lucas, owner of The Good Schools Guide ( available on subscription), the education bible of the upper-middle classes. While many newspapers and the BBC report that Lucas is an Eton educated hereditary peer, fewer mention that he is a Conservative and that according to the UK Parliament website he is listed as a member of the Tory group in the Lords – a rather crucial omission given the underlying politics of the story. Henry Stewart of the Local Schools Network has written previously about the political leanings of the 12th Baron. Which schools is Lucas talking about? Safe to say that Lucas is not referring to schools in the AET chain, many of which have been recently criticised by Ofsted, nor indeed to some of the excellent comprehensives in impoverished areas around the country. Media discussion of the new, improved state sector concentrates on those in wealthy, urban locations, such as my old school Holland Park or Toby Young’s West London Free School ( which has yet to produce a single set of GCSE results), schools which operate in highly favourable circumstances in relation to everything from admissions to resources to government support and, of course, media publicity. Are private schools really on the run? Soaring fees, in a time of austerity, have produced a lot of grumbling about the burden on parents who choose the private sector. But this is nothing new. Exactly the same stories were run in 2009 but without the pro-government gloss. Then as now, those private schools most affected are small and medium sized establishments outside London, forced or welcomed (take your pick) into the state sector under the free schools and academy programme. Soaring fees have clearly not affected the sector as a whole, particularly at the elite end. According to William Richardson, general secretary of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, which represents leading independent schools, ‘pupil numbers are currently at record levels in private schools.’…
Author Archives: Melissa Benn
Under the hammer and sickle: David Aaronovitch’s Party Animals
Anyone brought up in a left-wing family gets used to a particular joshing, voyeuristic line of questioning (“I expect you spent your whole childhood on political marches”, “Did you call each other comrade?”). This is not just an everyday nosiness about an unconventional upbringing; at its worst, it can feel like a discomfiting, albeit disguised form of spite. The question is, in other words: what’s it like to have been raised in a family that had the idiocy or courage (take your pick) to believe it might be able to change the world?
So, one can imagine the glimmer in the publisher’s eye when the idea for this book was first mooted: an authentic portrait of a much-diminished species, the British communist, through the eyes of a red-diaper baby who grew up to be a Times columnist; a tale of quaint habits with serious questions at its heart (despite that corny subtitle echoing Gerald Durrell). According to Aaronovitch, Danny Finkelstein, the Tory peer and his colleague at the Times, keeps asking him when the book is going to be out, because “I want to understand why they did it”. There it goes again – that end-of-history smugness, that needling curiosity.
The trouble is that Aaronovitch knows too much and is, in his intelligent, irritable way, too interested in the multiple backstories involved to reduce his tale to one that will satisfy sceptical, bemused Middle England. Any half-decent account of British communism and the people who made it is bound to yield a long, tortuous, multilayered narrative, and this one is no exception, although it’s a story Aaronovitch never feels fully in charge of, in either theme or tone, for reasons that become clearer by the end.
As a result, Party Animals reads more like a series of extended columns on a number of loosely connected topics. No bad thing. There is a great deal of fascinating material along the way. So we are treated, inter alia, to an early set piece on the visit of Yuri Gagarin to England in 1961, one of the few times when communists were “once again, the people of the future . . . [and] briefly touched the golden face of fashion”; a short history of the rise of the Communist Party in Britain; an account of its relationship to Soviet communism; an anthropological look at the life and habits of CP activists; a long, excoriating feature on show trials of the 1950s; an intriguing case history of domestic political surveillance; and some highly entertaining stories about Aaronovitch’s early political and romantic adventures.…
The slow revolution that makes learning fun
It’s hard to feel like a covert revolutionary when hovering around a reception class on a chilly Thursday morning. But within minutes of arriving at St Silas’ Church of England Primary School in Blackburn, it is clear that I have stepped into a bold educational experiment that daringly flies in the face of much current accepted thinking. All around, four- and five-year-olds are playing energetically with water, building things or writing stories. So far, so normal, except that – compulsory phonics instruction apart – pupils are allowed to concentrate on one activity all day if they want to. Equally, they are free to wander from task to task.
I am not often in touch with my inner Nick Gibb but at first this “free play” approach leaves me feeling a little at sea. Don’t children need structure? I mean, what’s the plan here? Moving up through the school, my Hirschian jaw begins to relax. All parts of the national curriculum are being covered, in depth and, apparently, with huge enthusiasm. Some nine-year-olds show me the Anderson shelters they have built before reading from their spirited reimaginings of aspects of the Second World War. It is abundantly clear that by Year 6, St Silas’ has created a room full of independent learners, deeply engaged in what they are doing.
This is reflected in steadily improving Sats scores, despite the school losing many high achievers to two newly opened local free schools. This year’s cohort are the first to have spent their entire primary school life using the Slow Education approach.
Over at Matthew Moss High School in Rochdale, an 11-16 comprehensive, a similar revolution is in progress. A mix of independent project work, detailed feedback and group work, and an emphasis on genuine research skills, produces 12-year-olds who can talk articulately about whether we are at risk of running out of electricity, while sharing details of their ongoing correspondence with postgraduates from the University of Manchester.
The well-resourced music department is full of pink- and blue-haired teenagers playing loudly in studios, mixing tracks or creating promotional material for upcoming concerts. Senior leaders at Matthew Moss, under a new headteacher since 2013, are currently wrestling with the implications of the English Baccalaureate, reluctant to force students into taking subjects that don’t engage them. The school, in the top quintile for measures of deprivation, is keen to improve on its 2014 GCSE headline results (49 per cent of pupils achieved a C or above in five or more subjects, including English and maths).…
Vivian Gornick: one of the most significant writers you have probably never heard of
Vivian Gornick is one of the most significant writers you have probably never heard of. A biographer, journalist and memoirist, she is among the supreme essayists of the past 50 years, a writer who bridges the worlds of Joan Didion and Meghan Daum, Susan Sontag and Leslie Jamison, without ever having achieved the cultural glamour or worldly success of any of these figures.
In a recent interview in the Paris Review, Gornick, now aged 80, was candid about her marginal status for a large part of her writing life and how often she longed to be part of “the uptown parties, the New York Review parties . . . And then I’d have to recover from that nonsense and forget about it – really forget about it. And I did – over and over again.” These last emphatic admissions are typical of Gornick, redolent of the frank self-examination and literary and professional toughness that run through all her work, her ongoing dedication to the only thing that matters: the writing life, the process of turning “neurotic necessity into literary virtue”.
For all these reasons, perhaps, we Gornick enthusiasts are a distinct, fierce tribe, each with our own favourite well-thumbed books and essays, proselytising to anyone who will listen about her brilliance. Recently, making contact with some other devotees through Twitter, I even discovered a couple of new books, recognising from the first page Gornick’s distinctive approach to her craft, her determination “to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say”.
Raised in the Bronx by Jewish, communist, immigrant parents, Gornick began her writing life as a reporter on the Village Voice, where she worked from 1969 to 1977. Her early books, such as The Romance of American Communism (1977), chart the emotional dynamics of left-wing politics and she has more recently produced a biography of the great anarchist Emma Goldman.
But it was Fierce Attachments, a more personal work of non-fiction, first published in 1987 and now reissued by Daunt Books, that made her name. The personal essay was not then the ubiquitous form it is today but Gornick – even though she emerged from such a political background – was one of its early pathfinders, developing, in unique fashion, the less formal narrative voice pioneered by the “new journalism” of the Sixties and Seventies.
The book tells of her growing up in the Bronx, a childhood dominated by “Ma”, her frustrated and hypercritical mother, plunged by sudden widowhood into years of histrionic mourning.…
Grammar school plan makes Kent a national battleground
Sevenoaks in Kent, a quiet, affluent commuter town, is the most unlikely site for a teeming political drama. But as the county – and the country – waits for Nicky Morgan to make a final decision on whether to open the first “satellite” grammar school in 50 years, the profound political implications, either way, are beginning to sink in.
The original proposal, for a new co-educational annexe to the Weald of Kent girls’ grammar school in Tonbridge, a full 10 miles away, was rejected by Michael Gove in 2013 and a revised single-sex proposal submitted in November 2014. No one was surprised that the Conservative party fudged the issue in the runup to the general election. But nearly four months on, with no decision forthcoming, there is impatience on both sides, although Roger Gough, cabinet member for education at Kent county council, which is backing the plan, declares himself “hopeful”.
A government insider says: “The department knows it’s not watertight legally. They know it’s going to be subject to judicial review. My soundings suggest that they think they have, say, a 60% chance of winning. Essentially the decision is political.”
If the annexe is approved, it will open the floodgates to similar expansion plans from grammars from around the country. It will also mark a significant retreat from the Gove years, when there was a strong commitment to the principle of non-selective education and rejection of old-style Tory claims that grammar schools promote social mobility.
Gove’s departure, the regrouping of some backbench Tory MPs in defence of grammar education, and the fact that local MP Michael Fallon is in the cabinet, have shifted the balance of power within the party. It’s possible, says one policy expert, that a “few new grammars” are to be offered as a sop to rightwing backbenchers in the long-rumbling row over the European referendum. “Six months ago I’d have said that Gove settled the question of the grammars inside the Tory party and it wouldn’t come back. I was wrong”. However, if Morgan stays firm and rejects the proposal, it will “probably settle the question of the grammars for a generation. The government will make noises about legislation to allow new grammars but it will probably be like foxhunting. It will never happen.”
[wp-svg-icons icon=”camera-3″ wrap=”i”] Mary Boyle, above, head of Knole academy, Sevenoaks, says: ‘An annexe is an outbuilding or a shed on the school property.…
What would Keir Hardie Say?
If a week is a long time in politics, a century can seem surprisingly short. With uncanny timing, the centenary of the death of Keir Hardie, Labour’s first leader and arguably its most towering figure, falls at the end of this month, on the very weekend that Labour delegates will gather in Brighton for this year’s annual conference, the first under the party’s new leader.
Hardie has long been claimed by all wings of the party. Possibly the most unlikely endorsement came from Peter Mandelson who suggested, back in 1992, that Hardie would have felt “rather pleased” with New Labour’s changes. In his failed bid for the Labour leadership in 2010, David Miliband made a far more cerebral case for Hardie as a self-help, rather than a statist, socialist. And earlier this summer, in this paper, Alan Johnson invoked the “pragmatism” of Labour’s first leader in support of the candidature of Yvette Cooper and New Labour’s record in office.
Read the rest of the piece here.
NB I am about to launch a new website later this month – please watch out for it. …
Harry’s Last Stand by Harry Leslie Smith and Austerity Bites by Mary O’Hara – reviews
Big Society? More like Battered Society. Melissa Benn on two books that expose the ‘war on the weakest’ in Cameron’s Britain
In a manner suggestive of Ken Loach’s magisterial 2013 film The Spirit of ’45, Smith sees the postwar era as Britain’s finest moment destroyed a half-century or more later by neoliberal economics and unrestrained finance capital.
Right now, some inventive literary festival programmer is probably trying to set up a staged discussion between Harry Leslie Smith and Mary O’Hara. If not, they should – it would be fascinating. Smith, a mere 91 years of age, is boiling with anger at what he sees as the UK’s return to the indignities of his Great Depression childhood. O’Hara, an experienced reporter, brings a cool head to her story of the impact of the cuts over the last four years.
Yet for all the difference in age, experience and literary voice, these writers, both of whom began their lives in poverty, speak of remarkably similar things. And both books add to a mounting body of work on the growing economic divide in modern Britain: “an emergency”, according to Smith, “as dire as the economic crisis of 1933”.
Only a few pages in, I decided that the best way to read his unusually structured book was to approach it as a kind of epic poem, one that moves in circular fashion from passionate denunciation to intense autobiographical reflection. Smith’s early childhood – he grew up in Yorkshire in the 1930s – was one of almost Dickensian deprivation: his older sister Marion died aged 10 of tuberculosis in Barnsley’s old workhouse, and his unemployed miner father of alcoholism and loneliness. Wartime service in the RAF at least brought Smith regular meals and a reliable wage, and he met his German wife, Friede, in the ravages of postwar Berlin. The couple moved to Canada where moderate economic prosperity and ordinary family contentment rescued him from the bitterness of his early years.
In a manner suggestive of Ken Loach’s magisterial 2013 film The Spirit of ’45, Smith sees the postwar era, in particular the creation of the welfare state, as Britain’s finest moment, a compact between industry and labour, the middle and working classes, destroyed a half-century or more later by neoliberal economics and unrestrained finance capital. (Unlike Loach, he also puts a bit of the blame on what he sees as the over-mighty trade unionism of the 70s.)…
Man-Made: Why So Few Women Are in Positions of Power by Eva Tutchell and John Edmonds – review
In the topsy-turvy world of British politics, with Labour seeking the centre ground and the Conservative party projecting itself as the party of the workers, Man-Made feels heaven sent. With an unerring lucidity, it lays out the multiple ways that inequality continues to frustrate the aspirations of half the population. Given that its female interviewees include the chief executives of the Association of Drainage Authorities and Yorkshire Water, the vice president of (environmental) Upstream BP and the chair of the Civil Aviation Authority, as well as a range of top lawyers, journalists, arts administrators and politicians including Harriet Harman, this book not only covers the centre ground but all that runs beneath, or flies above, it.
Tutchell and Edmond’s starting point is the gross imbalance of power in contemporary Britain, with women still heavily outnumbered at the top of public, corporate and political life. (The exceptions are primary school headships and chairs of magistrates.) The dismal figures on women’s representation are the direct consequence of three decades of stagnation since the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination acts, the implementation of which has been “patchy, uncertain and incomplete”.
The Conservatives place their faith in voluntary action, particularly in relation to the low number of women on company boards, and, while more women are elected to parliament and appointed to senior ministerial positions (particularly in the runup to general elections), we have achieved nothing like the near parity of the devolved parliaments of Scotland and Wales, which have also, incidentally, promoted strong female leaders.
Man-Made is a mix of tough empiricism, sound analysis and human storytelling. Through its extensive interviews (admission of interest here – I am quoted on a couple of occasions) the authors pick their way through the minefield of contemporary working life. How depressing to be reminded of the many pitfalls that still exist from the subtle and not-so-subtle pressures around dress (“avoid dowdiness, flamboyance and sexiness”) and behaviour (a strong woman is still considered a hard bitch; a more consensual female dismissed as weak) to the kind of shocking sexual discrimination that seems particularly rampant in Britain’s orchestras, of all places. It is interesting to learn that the informality of the new media companies masks some very old practices and prejudices.
Beware of wearing black and white, successful women are still advised, or you will at some point be asked to refill an empty glass or find a coat draped over your arm.…
Finding vindication: on the intertwined lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley
Charlotte Gordon has managed to produce that rare thing, a work of genuinely popular history.
Romantic Outlaws: the Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley Charlotte Gordon Hutchinson, 649pp, £25
This ingeniously constructed double biography tells the story of a mother and a daughter, two writers, who did not know each other. Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, died of septicaemia ten days after giving birth to Mary Godwin, later best known as Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Very different in character and interests – Wollstonecraft was more political, Shelley more scholarly – both women demanded a rare romantic and intellectual freedom that cost them dearly but pushed the boundaries of possibility for later generations.
Wollstonecraft was probably the greater pioneer of the two. Born the second of seven children to a drunken bully of a father and a passive mother, she felt keenly the absence of formal education for herself and her sisters, an injustice that inspired works such as Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and Vindication. A resourceful woman, she not only earned her own living from a young age but cared for her younger sisters for long periods of time.
Godwin had potentially more stable beginnings, as a daughter of Wollstonecraft’s grieving husband, the philosopher William Godwin, the author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Thanks to her father, the young Mary received a better education than did many of her male peers. Yet her dead and already notorious mother haunted her. Throughout her life, she read and reread Wollstonecraft’s work and she and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley often met and talked at her mother’s grave in St Pancras. They may even, Gordon speculates, have first made love there. Gordon later suggests that Frankenstein is best interpreted as a story of the horrors that follow when a mother’s love is absent.
The profound perils of sex, romance and motherhood resonate throughout these pages. Wollstonecraft travelled alone to revolutionary Paris, at first enthralled and later horrified and threatened by Robespierre’s reign of terror. Here, she fell in love with a charismatic American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, and became pregnant with her first daughter, Fanny. As a lone mother, she was a social outcast but went on to publish perhaps one of her greatest works, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
Her daughter also suffered as both a lover and a mother.…
Radio 4’s Two Rooms shows how Labour is getting it right
Last night I took part in BBC Radio 4’s soft focus pre-election programme Two Rooms, along with Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator ( which now, rather amusingly, calls itself ‘ the oldest continuously published magazine..’) The basic premise of the programme is that two groups of people – one broadly optimistic about their lives , one much less so – sit in two separate rooms debating the same issues. You could call it the Two Nations – Sort Of. Very post-ideological, very Radio 4.
In the first programme, which broadcast some moving stories of terrible poverty in Britain 2015, the Two Rooms talked about personal finance; last night the group discussed education and opportunity.
it was an interesting, if frustrating experience. (Recording took four hours – so the programme was heavily edited.) Many in Room A, to which I was assigned, were older and had come out into a (relatively) buoyant job market, where qualifications had some meaning and provided them with a ladder of opportunity. One participant had re-trained, via an access course, to become a physiotherapist. One quiet mid-life woman described how she had gone from her comprehensive to Cambridge, where she was very unhappy, but said that her education had opened up all sorts of opportunities as a result. There was only one privately educated person in the room. From Northern Ireland, he lacked the air of entitlement that so often surrounds his English counterparts.
What these stories showed, I argued, was the impact of recent, and often dramatic, cuts in everything from access courses to career guidance, not to mention well paying jobs; hence the experience of Room B, where those in possession of a degree could not even get any employment, even at the minimum wage. One younger member of Room A spoke at length, and very movingly, about how, at every stage of his life, it was the welfare state that had saved him: free secondary education, help with council housing and social services.
Interestingly, we were there to discuss education but hardly anyone mentioned it, except in the briefest and most personal terms (‘my history teacher really helped me’). There were few complaints about state schools and no mention at all of the last five years of upheaval in our schools under the Coalition. Nor, I am sad to say, did the Radio 4 include my report on the findings of a recent LSE/Manchester University study, by Dr Ruth Lupton among others, that the end result of the Coalition’s prolonged experiment in marketisation has been a marginal increase in the results of the brightest, and a corresponding dip in the results of children from more deprived families.…
Latest writing
THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY
The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War
PETER MANDLER, 2020
Oxford: Oxford University Press
361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145
Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.
In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.
On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…
Latest news & events
A Cold War Tragedy
Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’
Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.
More information here.
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