Magdalen College School in Brackley is providing an ‘inadequate’ quality of education. Behaviour and attitudes at the school are also ‘inadequate’. Personal development ‘requires improvement’, while leadership and management are ‘inadequate’. The school’s sixth form provision also ‘requires improvement’.
So runs the latest damning Ofsted critique of standards – published last summer – at the comprehensive school I attended between 1998 and 2005. MCS is a typical British secondary school serving a rural area in Northamptonshire, with a genuinely comprehensive intake. Even in my GCSE year, 2003, a full half of all pupils left without five good GCSE passes at grade C or above.
Combined with a secondary modern and a girls’ grammar school in 1973, MCS should be a model for the comprehensive ideal. It was founded in 1548 and to this day is still partly governed and part-owned by Magdalen College Oxford, one of the wealthiest and most illustrious colleges of the best university in the world. MCS serves an affluent area whose economy is tied closely to the nearby Silverstone race circuit.
Hundreds of thousands of young adults continue to reach the age of 16 with inadequate schooling
As a grammar school, it was a leading regional centre of education. The original MCS site, with its vast mediaeval chapel, resembles an Oxford college. If there was any school in Britain set to benefit from providential circumstances in fulfilling the comprehensive ideal of equal access to academic education for everyone, it would be this one. Yet the school gradually abandoned its old culture and standards. It has become one of the many excellent British grammar schools to become, de facto, a secondary modern school.
I am not the first to say this. It was the Labour peer and former minister for schools Lord Adonis who, in his 2012 book Education Education Education, stated that the introduction of comprehensive education in the 1960s and 1970s simply rebranded thousands of secondary moderns as ‘comprehensives’, whilst concurrently terminating free, high-quality academic education for the nation’s high-aptitude children.
I would go further than Adonis. Instead of the grammar schools imposing their standards on the secondary moderns, secondary moderns imposed their standards on our grammar schools. Harold Wilson’s quip that comprehensive education meant ‘a grammar education for all’ has actually resulted, for the most part, in a secondary modern education for all. I looked up the Ofsted reports for the grammar schools my parents attended in the 1960s – one on Merseyside and the other in affluent Berkshire: the former is also in special measures and the latter recently left them.
Hundreds of thousands of young adults continue to reach the age of 16 with inadequate schooling. The objective of social equality and inclusion has been defeated by selection into the better comprehensives by house price, where catchment areas for the best schools bring a hefty premium. Worst of all, the national strategy, pursued by successive governments, of substituting mediocrity for excellence in our schooling system sacrifices the ability of the most able to fulfil their potential. These young people are the innovators and striving personalities of all successful economies.
As a scholar of British public policy, I have seen how few important questions of national interest are answered by our universities. To this day there has been no rigorous, balanced analysis of whether comprehensive education fulfilled its promise to create a seamless meritocracy. The research that exists relies on the axiomatic principle that ‘selection by ability’ is bad and that all other indicators of a school’s performance are secondary.
These researchers, foremost among them the late Caroline Benn (wife of the politician Tony) have manipulated the public debate by ownership of the words used to engage in the discussion. In their preference for the word ‘selective’ to describe a secondary schooling system, especially one with a high-stakes pass or fail exam in the form of the 11+, they imply this model of education is of benefit only to the lucky few chosen into the higher-performing institution; everyone else be damned.
Critics of comprehensives fail to advocate for grammar schools in a broader system containing a plurality of styles of education because they are too committed to defending those grammar schools that already exist. Instead, campaigners for ‘plural schooling’ should advocate for a secondary education system where each child receives education and training appropriate to their needs and wants: grammar schools, technical schools and modern schools. Each would be well-funded and well-resourced to provide for a future curriculum that grapples with the needed adjustment to the economic forces shaping our country and the world.
Any area retaining a grammar school is inundated by middle-class parents with strong elbows
Naturally, for education policy researchers working predominantly in higher education institutions, educational success means ‘academic’ success; the traditional suite of academic subjects taught in the abstract, slavishly aiming for the now much-derided Blairite target of sending at least half of all young people to university. Britain never needed half of its population to attend university, and it certainly did not need to indebt them to that end.
This is a broader British disease which succeeding generations of politicians seem unable to cure; ‘success’ only means achievement of the academic form. For Oxford intellectuals like Tony Crosland and Shirley Williams, the education secretaries responsible for imposing comprehensive education on British schooling, it was the only success they knew.
England’s surviving grammar schools – just over 160 of them – remain under constant threat. Policy actors in British education, from managers in the academy chains right up to those in the Department for Education, are either actively hostile to the principle of selection as we know it today or are generally resentful of the grammar schools’ survival. They disguise policy activism as ‘education research’, which ‘proves’ grammar schools undermine ‘equality’ because they are monopolised by the middle classes.
Most local authorities no longer have intensely academic, unashamedly high-achieving secondary schools within their boundaries. This means that any area retaining a grammar school is inundated by middle-class parents with strong elbows. This should not surprise anyone, but it is not an argument against the reintroduction of nationwide plural schooling.
It is telling that, out of the four UK nations, it is Northern Ireland’s secondary education system which has the highest percentage of children in grammar schools and also the best GCSE results: 32 per cent last year achieved As or A*s. Wales, which has no grammar schools, has the worst: only 20 per cent achieved the same top grades last year.
For some years now, policy wonks have agonised deeply about the British ‘productivity crisis’. There is no factor more important in creating highly-skilled human beings than a country’s schooling structures. At this stage, given the failing former grammar schools all over Britain, is it perhaps time to accept that comprehensive education has failed?
Comments