Sir Chris Woodhead Blog: Equality for all children? That means the more able too
Men may be born equal in the eyes of God and the rule of the law, but, as we go about our everyday lives, we know that this is not the case.
Some of us have the good fortune to have been born with a craggy jaw and gleaming eye; others of us would prefer to avoid catching a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror. Some of us, lean and lithe, can pound the pavements as we train for our sub three hour marathon; others struggle to elevate our obese bodies from the sofa when we have the misfortune to have mislaid the remote control. Some of us can do The Times crossword in half an hour; others peer in bewilderment at the indecipherable squiggles on the packet of our supermarket fast food. It is a fact of life which the political elite would prefer to deny, but it is a fact, nonetheless. Men are not born equal.
It is two years since Ofsted last published a report on the education of talented pupils. Last week’s latest update reveals that nothing much has changed. Clever children are still set ‘ridiculously easy’ tasks during their first few years at secondary school. There are pockets of good practice, but across the secondary sector as a whole there is insufficient challenge and thousands of pupils who performed well at primary school are failing to realise their early promise.
Two thirds of pupils at comprehensive schools who achieved top grades in their end of primary school tests in fact failed to achieve A and A* grades in GCSEs, though it is interesting to note that 57 per cent of the children who did well at primary school and went on to grammar schools secured these top GCSE grades.
It is the same old, sorry story. Week after week, the column inches dedicated to the needs of the less able mount up. Millions, no, billions of pounds are spent on remedial initiatives of various kinds. We all want, it seems, to believe that if government spends enough on the less able then the basic truths of inequality can be, if not eradicated, ameliorated to a point where we can all sleep comfortably in our beds.
But what about the more able? Would not a truly just society, which was genuinely committed to the notion of equality of opportunity, be devoting equal sums of money to the needs of those whose talents are exceptional? Why should we assume that bright pupils can swim on their own? However bright you are, you can benefit from teaching which takes you from where you are to where you should, given your talents, go.
It isn’t just a matter of individual initiatives designed to realise the potential of the ‘gifted and talented’. Indeed, it isn’t mainly a matter of such initiatives. Some have been tried over the years and, by and large, they haven’t worked. They have not worked because the real problem is the culture. Everybody deserves a prize, so the academic expectations of examinations and, therefore, teachers have been dumbed down. The society in which we live is keener to narrow the gap between the haves and the have nots than it is to ensure that those who have exceptional gifts have the education to develop their potential and, in the fullness of time, to make the contribution to society they should.
We will neither, as a country, prosper economically, nor will we achieve the social cohesion we all rightly want, until we stop trying to achieve the impossible and concentrate on what can and must be done.
Professor Sir Chris Woodhead was formerly Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools from 1994 until 2000. He is author of Class Wars and A Desolation of Learning. His areas of expertise are education and leadership, accountability and the drive to raise standards; his research interest currently is the involvement of the private sector in raising educational standards. He retired at the end of 2013 from the chairmanship of Cognita, the international schools company he established in 2004.