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Did you go to a grammar school? And if you did, did you get a good
education?
If the answer to both those questions is Yes, you may very well have
welcomed the government's pledge in the budget this week to make extra money
available for new schools that will be allowed to choose their pupils according
to academic ability.
So here's another question: Do you believe that encouraging the
establishment of more grammar schools gives parents more choice about where to
send their children to school? If your answer is Yes again, I fear you are
sadly mistaken.
Because the whole point of selective schools is that it is not the parents who do the choosing.
It's the schools. And that -- as those of you with long memories will recall --
is why grammar schools were abolished: too many parents were left angry and
disappointed when their 11-year-old children were labelled 'failures' and
shunted off to secondary modern schools.
It also explains, as Simon Jenkins pointed out in The Guardian, why even Margaret Thatcher, as education secretary in
1970, knew better than to halt the move away from selective schools. Tory
voters did not like the idea of going back to a system in which their children
risked being written off as 11-plus failures.
In a speech last September, Theresa May said: 'For far too many children
in Britain, the chance they have in life is determined by where they live, or
how much money their parents have.' That comes close to being an 'alternative
fact' of Trumpist proportions. (Trump believes he won the biggest electoral victory since Ronald Reagan, and
that Barack Obama bugged his phones, but that's not true either.)
Good schools that offer children good life chances do not exist only in
leafy suburbs or where parents are able to pay for the privilege of a private
education. Good schools exist wherever good, motivated teachers are given the
resources they need to educate, encourage and inspire the children who come
through their doors every morning. And there is no evidence whatsoever to back
Mrs May's belief that selective schools offer bright children better chances in
later life. It is dogma, pure and simple.
There is, however, plenty of evidence that providing government money to
encourage more selective schools is an extravagant misuse of scarce resources. What
possible sense can it make to allocate £320 million for the establishment of
110 new free schools, some of which will be selective, and only £216 million
for the 20,000 existing state schools? (Declaration of interest: both my
children were educated at a state comprehensive school.)
The budgets of mainstream schools are still being cut, year after year.
According to a survey of 1,000 school staff in England published in January, 80%
said their school either had made cutbacks or was planning to, a third said
their schools were not replacing teachers who leave, and 14% said that teachers
at their schools were being made redundant.
That is the current reality in the state system: fewer teachers, fewer
support staff, fewer books, and morale at rock bottom. Little wonder that this
week the head teachers of more than a thousand schools have sent out letters to
parents and MPs warning that their budgets are at breaking point.
In last year's budget, the then chancellor George Osborne -- the one who
is now being paid £650,000 a year to work one day a week at the asset manager
Black Rock -- announced that all schools would be forced to turn themselves
into independently-run academies by 2020. Less than two months later, the idea
was scrapped in the face of near-universal opposition.
Now, his successor, Philip Hammond, is in hot water over his proposal to
increase national insurance contributions for the self-employed. So I have the
perfect solution for him: scrap the NI increase, and fill the hole in the
accounts by also scrapping the free school cash allocation.
