Tag Archives: grammar schools

There’s still a lot of work to do – but let’s hear it for the NES

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There could well be at least a couple of years before another general election, certainly if the beleaguered and divided government has anything to do with it. And while Labour has committed itself to continue to campaign over the summer, there is an equally important job to do in the months and years ahead, which is to build on some of the bolder ideas to emerge during the election.

The crisis in school funding was at the heart of last June’s campaign but, as we see from concessions made by the government in the weeks since, and the re-appointment of the sensible and emollient Justine Greening as education secretary, the Tories now recognise that they urgently need to do something about the pay and conditions of public sector workers. Besides, it is highly unlikely that the next election, whenever it comes, will be fought on the same issues in the same way. Context is all.

All the more reason, then, to develop one of the most potentially significant proposals to be floated by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, that of a National Education Service (NES): the joining-up of disparate elements of education from nurseries through schools to universities and adult education, free at the point of use. Corbyn himself has trumpeted the idea since his election in 2015 but not much solid detail emerged during those two years; nor did it over the course of the election campaign itself, with commentators concentrating on the headline issues (the Labour plan to abolish tuition fees) or giving the entire Labour offer short shrift on the grounds that it was not radical enough.

Whether this last claim is fair (and I would argue both that it is and it isn’t) there is room for a much broader, bolder vision. During the Adonis-Gove years official ideas about ‘education, education,education’ have dangerously narrowed, with government increasingly focussed on the secondary years where it has trumpeted a diluted version of the grammar school/public school curriculum to be implemented by dangerously under-resourced state schools, harried professionals and, indeed, non-professionals. In higher education, the values of business have come to dominate and distort the business of learning to the benefit neither of students nor academics. More broadly, I also wonder whether progressives have become so desensitised by years of Gove and co. that they now self-censor even their own best hopes and dismiss out of hand this idea of a cradle-to-grave education system, animated by a richer, deeper purpose, to be run in a different way?…

Grammar schools don’t help social mobility – we need to start earlier

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So now we know for sure, thanks to the permanent secretary at the Department for Education, who really ought to order in some document folders pronto. Jonathan Slater slipped up outside No 10, accidentally revealing a briefing note, and thereby confirming that Theresa May’s government does indeed intend to open new selective schools – although this is only to be pursued “once we have worked with existing grammars to show how they can be expanded and reformed”.

At one level, this is building on David Cameron’s ambiguous stance on selection. Last October the then education secretary Nicky Morgan gave the go-ahead for a new grammar “annexe” in Kent a full 10 miles from the main school. May’s strategy, with its further pledge to open new grammars, and possibly seeking to overturn the 1998 law banning them in order to do so, is even more radical, and will face correspondingly greater resistance. “I simply can’t see any way of persuading the Lords to vote for selection on any other basis,” the note concludes.

Condemnation came swiftly from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the National Union of Teachers; but opposition to an expansion of grammar schools has united leading figures in education and on the political left and right, including the influential thinktanks Policy Exchange and Bright Blue, and the outgoing Ofsted chief, Michael Wilshaw.

Yet a vital dimension is missing from the debate already raging within and beyond Westminster. The government is proposing a fresh crop of grammar schools as a way of boosting so-called social mobility, but May and her advisers seem to have forgotten that the government already has a social mobility strategy, produced in 2011, and it doesn’t make a single mention of grammar schools. In fact, though it identifies four “critical points for social mobility”, age 11 is not one of them.

The evidence on grammars is by now crystal clear. The educational advantage received by those selected for these schools is more than outweighed by the drag effect of the remaining secondary modern pupils, who perform disproportionately badly. Only 3% of grammar school pupils receive free school meals, and even these will gain only a marginal uplift in GCSE grades. As the Daily Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner says, grammars offer “segregated education for the middle class”. They are elitist institutions that entrench, rather than disrupt or disperse, privilege.

But the evidence is equally clear on what does improve educational outcomes: high-quality support in the early years.…

Well, that didn’t take long did it? Responding to Theresa May on grammar schools

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Melissa Benn, Chair of Comprehensive Future, annotates Theresa May’s supposedly ‘One Nation’ speech on the steps of Downing Street on July 13th in the light of announcements that she looks likely to lift the ban on the creation of new grammar schools.

I have just been to Buckingham Palace, where Her Majesty The Queen has asked me to form a new government, and I accepted.

In David Cameron, I follow in the footsteps of a great, modern Prime Minister. Under David’s leadership, the government stabilised the economy, reduced the budget deficit, and helped more people into work than ever before.

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Perhaps the most significant aspect of Cameron’s ‘modernity’ as PM was his recognition that the traditional Tory support for grammars had to be ditched. Over the past decade, an influential section of the party studied the evidence on grammars and social mobility and came to the considered conclusion that selective education hindered the life chances of poorer children. In the words of David Willetts, then Tory front-bench spokesman on education and employment, in his seminal speech on the issue, in 2007,‘ we must break free from the belief that academic selection is any longer the way to transform the life chances of bright poor kids..’ and that ‘ there is overwhelming evidence that such academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it.’

But David’s true legacy is not about the economy but about social justice. From the introduction of same-sex marriage, to taking people on low wages out of income tax altogether; David Cameron has led a one-nation government, and it is in that spirit that I also plan to lead.

Cameron’s government recognised that it could never appear serious about ‘social justice’ as long as it continued to back selective education, which so clearly hinders the educational and later life chances of the majority of the working class and less well off. International data is clear: the earlier selection occurs, the greater the effect of socio-economic background on results.

Because not everybody knows this, but the full title of my party is the Conservative and Unionist Party, and that word ‘unionist’ is very important to me.

It means we believe in the Union: the precious, precious bond between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But it means something else that is just as important; it means we believe in a union not just between the nations of the United Kingdom but between all of our citizens, every one of us, whoever we are and wherever we’re from.…

Upcoming debates – part 1

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I will be taking part in a few debates and discussions over the next few months.

First up – see below…..

MANCHESTER DEBATING UNION

This House Would Reintroduce Grammar Schools February 5 @ 5:00 pm / 6:30 pm This House Would Reintroduce Grammar Schools Grammar schools, dominant in the UK until the 1960s, ran under a system of selective education. At age 11 all school students would be given a general intelligence exam. If a student passed they would gain entrance to a more academically based grammar school. If they failed they would be sent to a school focusing more on practical skills. There’s an increasing minority within the political establishment who argue that grammar schools should be reintroduced, including the resurgent UK Independence Party, believing that it offers an opportunity for the brightest students to thrive regardless of socioeconomic background. Critics argue that it creates segregation in our society, and only removes a few children from their troubled backgrounds rather than tacking the root causes of deprivation. This week the Manchester Debating Union asks: should we reintroduce grammar schools?

Facebook event page: www.facebook.com/events/1610632269165849/

Speakers:

– Proposition —

– Robert McCartney QC Barrister and Former Leader of the UK Unionist Party and founder of the National Grammar Schools Association. http://www.ngsa.org.uk/

– Graham Brady MP Conservative MP for Altrincham and Sale West, former Shadow Secretary for Europe and Chairman of the 1992 Committee. http://www.grahambradymp.co.uk/

— Opposition —

– Melissa Benn Journalist and author, founder of the Local Schools Network which campaigns in favour of a totally comprehensive schooling system. http://melissabenn.com/

– Professor Bernard Barker…

Latest writing

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

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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

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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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