Sir Chris Woodhead Blog: The Virtues of Grammar Schools
‘Grammar school revival harks back to 50s’. So what? Maybe the 50s had it right.
I am quoting from an online article in the Times on Friday. Apparently Jonathan Simons, the head of education at the think-tank Policy Exchange, believes that there is ‘a wealth of evidence showing that grammar schools benefit middle class children’ and, by implication, therefore, damage the prospects of working class children. David Cameron’s former policy director, James O’Shaughnessy, agrees. He thinks that ‘proponents of more grammar schools are deluded’ because ‘as extensive research …. has shown, grammar schools are not and never have been engines of social mobility’.
In 1979 the sociologist, Frank Musgrove, wrote in his beautifully astringent book, School and the Social Order: ‘The English working class has been betrayed twice my lifetime: first in the General Strike of 1926 and then forty years later when the grammar schools ‘went comprehensive’’. He continued: ‘The Labour Party did not abolish the great Public Schools, the obvious strongholds of upper class privilege; with unbelievable perversity they extinguished the only serious hope of working class parity … the upper classes kept their Public Schools, the working class lost theirs’.
The political decision in 1965 was driven by three arguments: that clever working class children found it difficult if not impossible to win places in grammar schools; that if they did get in they failed academically; and that selective education had done nothing for social mobility. Frank Musgrove’s chapter on selective education in School and the Social Order has clearly not been read by Jonathan Simons. It systematically demolishes each of these assertions.
Grammar schools may now be colonised by the middle classes. In the 1940s and 50s they were working class institutions. Musgrove examines historical data, studies of particular grammar schools in south west Hertfordshire, Middlesbrough and Manchester, together with national surveys to show that by 1953, ‘using a very stringent definition of working class as manual workers’, two thirds of grammar school pupils were working class. His statistical analyses similarly puncture the myth that the few working class pupils who made it into grammar schools failed to progress as well as their middle class peers.
It is quite clear, moreover, that grammar schools did make a very impressive contribution to social mobility. Anthony Sampson points out in his The New Anatomy of Britain, that four out of the 21 heads of major civil service departments in the early 1970s went to ‘Clarendon’ schools (Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse and St Pauls), seventeen were ex grammar school pupils. But, as Musgrove writes, the impact of grammar schools on social mobility is perhaps most evident when we look at men in mid career. In 1967, for example, only 7 per cent of Admirals had been educated in grammar schools, but when we move down the ranks to Lieutenants, nearly 60 per cent were grammar school educated as opposed to 30 per cent at public schools.
Sampson thought that the public schools would only survive if they became more like grammar schools. Michael McCrum, then head of Eton, agreed with him. Public schools had become less dominant and their influence, he thought, was set to decline still further. It has not, of course, happened. The majority of grammar schools were closed down, and, at a stroke, the competition was removed.
Now, in 2014, we have Mr Cameron and his Eton educated cabinet. When Cameron declared that the Conservative party no longer supported grammar schools, I wrote that the institutions which had done most for social mobility had been sacrificed on the altar of compassionate Conservatism. Right wing think-tanks are now joining ranks with those on the left who have been seduced by the utopian dreams that drive supporters of comprehensive education.
Secondary school students have different abilities and aspirations. Some will win scholarships to Oxbridge; others have the skills which the world of industry continues to tell us are in desperately short supply. The challenge is to develop curricula and organisations which meet these different needs and offer all students the chance to fulfil their potential.
I applaud the current interest in initiatives to develop serious vocational education. But Robert Hill, a former adviser to Tony Blair, who is also quoted in The Times article, is wrong to say that: ‘the problem with English education is a disproportionately large tail of underachievement – not with top performing students’. The tail is too long, but we should be doing more for our most academic students, particularly, of course, those from deprived backgrounds.
Simons and his fellow advocates for the comprehensive school should read Frank Musgrove and think again.
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.
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.