| Pure Politics |
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| A visceral hatred of educating children according to ability is burnt into Labour activists' souls. |
You thought old Labour was a shattered vessel, ground ruthlessly beneath the heel of Tony Blair's post-modern jackboot? Think again. Destroying the grammar schools is Labour's real clause 4. Equality in schools - interpreted as uniformity - is Labour's defining creed. A visceral hatred of educating children differently according to ability is burnt into its activists' souls. It's the radical ribbon pinned to their lapels. It's the last thing they have left that tells them they aren't Tories. It's why the ballots on grammar schools announced last week are intended to destroy them. Of course the prime minister doesn't want to axe the grammar schools. Why should anyone in their right mind want to destroy schools that work, in a country suffering from disastrous educational standards? But the prime minister is not master in his own school house. "Read my lips," said David Blunkett, famously, "no selection by examination or interview." He meant it. Pre-election reassurances that the grammar schools were "safe in Labour's hands" were conspicuously false. The party's fury at Harriet Harman sending her son to a grammar school cannot be overstated. This hatred of diversity extends, of course, beyond the grammar schools. Sending a child to an independent school is a crime against the party. Such zealotry is not confined to its wilder fringes but suffuses it throughout, reaching into the prime minister's inner circle. Close friends of Alastair Campbell came to despair of standards at the primary school where they jointly sent their children. These friends were astonished to find, when they finally moved their son to an independent school, that Campbell immediately cut off all contact with them and never spoke to them again. | Sending a child to an independent school is a crime against the party. The grammar schools are to be lined up and shot by Blunkett's proxies. Ministers will claim to have clean hands, having handed the weapons to parents. But the rules of engagement have been rigged. Since most children wouldn't get a place at a grammar school, parents are a natural constituency of the resentful. And the ballot question itself is shamelessly loaded, asking if the school in question should admit all children, which clearly invites the answer "yes", rather than if this grammar school should be destroyed, which might well get a different response. | The education authorities will campaign covertly through their patsies in the Campaign for State Education, peddling propaganda playing on envy, resentment and ignorance. It will be Lord Hattersley's finest hour. It will also be the 1960s all over again. Harold Wilson claimed comprehensives would deliver a grammar school education to every child. The real motive was crudely disclosed by Anthony Crosland, who told his wife he would destroy "every f****** grammar school" in the country. The Blunkett ballots are Crosland's unfinished business. The animosity is justified by the claim that creaming off the brightest children dooms other schools to failure. But these claims fly in the face of the evidence. They are excuses for failing to address the one thing that makes the difference to any school, whether it is a grammar, comprehensive, secondary modern or independent: appointing an excellent head - and teachers who know how to teach. It isn't true that children do better when an area becomes fully comprehensive. In a paper for the Social Market Foundation, the education researcher John Marks showed that in the grammar school haven of Buckinghamshire, secondary moderns did better at GCSE last year than secondary moderns nationally. Far from the presence of grammar schools crippling the rest, the opposite would seem to be the case. | It isn't true that children do better when an area becomes fully comprehensive. The even more startling fact is that many comprehensives do worse than the secondary moderns that take the least able children. In Barnsley, where grammar schools are extinct, the comprehensive schools did worse than secondary moderns nationally. Other studies by Marks reveal that secondary moderns did better in maths and English at GCSE than 900 comprehensives, or a third of the total. And they had a better percentage of pupils getting at least five A-Cs than 700 comprehensives, or a quarter of the total. This blows out of the water the patronising argument that poor results at comprehensives are explained by the lower social class of pupils. Birmingham's comprehensives achieve GCSE results that are on average no better than secondary moderns nationally. Its grammar schools are its only state schools performing as well as or better than state schools nationally. No surprise, then, that its chief education officer, Tim Brighouse, the key Blunkett adviser who is on the wrong side of every educational argument, is gung ho for the abolition of his city's grammar schools. | Northern Ireland, which has retained a selective system, achieves overall results considerably better than Britain's. This explodes the myth that the most able are as well served by comprehensives. On the basis of GCSE and curriculum test results, Marks has estimated that if the same proportion of British children went to grammar schools, pupils' performance would improve overall by at least 25% at GCSE and by the equivalent of 18 months' progress in test results. | All children are let down by a uniform system, but those at the bottom of the pile are utterly betrayed. If we were creating an education system from scratch, we might not choose rigid selection at age 11. But the evidence strongly suggests that if parents vote to abolish the grammar schools, they will reduce standards for all their children, whether able or not. All children are let down by a uniform system, but those at the bottom of the pile, who rely so much on the schools to lift them out of poverty and deprivation, are utterly betrayed. Those middle-class parents who sanctimoniously boast that their children got into Oxbridge from comprehensives are deluding themselves. Their privileged children would thrive anywhere. It's the poor who suffer. Grammar schools were a meritocracy's leg-up out of deprivation for poor children. The claim that they place children at a disadvantage is specious special pleading by egalitarian ideologues. | Why should mere facts matter to these people? This is their holy war. Educational egalitarianism was never about the interests of children. It's about posturing adults wanting to feel moral and radical. It's about class hatred, guilt and spite. It's about an attempt to recast human nature. It's about Lord Hattersley's sentimental view of himself as a crusader for social justice. But an even greater thinker of the left than Hattersley, R H Tawney, wrote in 1922: "Equality of education provision is not identity of educational provision, and it is important that there should be the greatest possible diversity of type among secondary schools". When people prate about new Labour and about the "third way", and about education being the government's top priority, and how Tony Blair is really a Tory or a control freak or Gladstone reincarnate, let them look at the fate of the remaining grammar schools to see how ideals once central to the British progressive tradition are being discarded in ignorance and folly. |
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