The rise and rise of England's state schools

Moaning about private education is an ancient British tradition; how can there be fairness in society when the rich can afford such great schools? Let’s count how many privately-educated judges there are, or Olympic athletes, or MPs! Open a cupboard in Cameron’s No10 and an Old Etonian falls out! What, is then asked, should be done to the private schools hoarding all of this excellence? It’s well-known that Britain’s private schools are world-class. But what’s less well-known is that our best state schools are, actually, better. I look at this in my Daily Telegraph column today. I started off looking into Grey Coat Hospital School, in which the Prime Minister’s daughter, Nancy, will enrol next month. Cameron is making much of this, saying things like ‘if you have children at state school, as I do’. This struck me as a bit of a cheek; you basically have to be the Prime Minister to get your child into Grey Coat; it’s one of our elite state secondaries with hideously complicated admission rules. I suspected it was as probably as good as a private school. I looked up the Department for Education’s data for ‘points per pupil’ for A-levels. This is a pretty fair metric because it factors in the iBacc and Pre-U exams sat by private school pupils. As I suspected, Grey Coat Hospital was in the top 10 per cent of schools in the country – Cameron is not slumming it any more than Nick Clegg was by sending his children to the London Oratory School. But to my amazement, next to Grey Coat on the league table stood Mossbourne Community Academy – formerly Hackney Downs, the worst school in Britain. Under (incredible) new management the kids from Hackney can now go a school as good as one to which the PM sends his children. This is wonderful, and a vindication of the reforms started by Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis. Or, more accurately, a vindication of the faith that they placed in British teachers – and what they could do for their communities, if freed from local authority interference. But something else leaps out from the league tables: 16 of the top 20 schools are state schools. We’re used to hearing how the best private schools, the £35,000-a-year Etons and the Harrows, sit on their own planet of hyper-achievement which is out of reach to the state sector with its £7,000-a-year funding per pupil. In fact, Eton doesn’t even make the top 100 when it comes to A-level points per pupil. Colchester County, Dover Grammar, Liverpool College, Reading School, Wolverhampton Girls’ – none are as famous as Eton, yet all outperform it in the A-level league tables. But is the comparison valid? I was upbraided this morning by Charlotte Vere from the Independent Schools Council who suggested it was a trick comparing the 521 best schools in the state sector against 521 private schools.

https://twitter.com/CharlotteV/status/634622440400908288

But the below chart shows, the number is irrelevant. Compare the top 50 schools in each sector, the top 300 – any number you pick, state schools come out on top. The government only has data for 521 private schools, and if you compare them to the 521 state schools then the same result emerges. [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/q4SCF/index.html”] Charlotte then changed tack, saying if you compare the best 30 per cent of state schools (630 schools) with the best 30 per cent of private (156 schools) then the picture will change. She’s right. And as the Education Editor of the Sunday Times pointed out on Twitter, you can certainly get different results using different metrics (as her newspaper does with its league table). You can compare at GCSEs, which include the cohort who leave school age 16, and put state schools in a more negative light. But when it comes to the provision of elite education, my overall point holds good: our best state schools are just good, if not better than private. If each brilliant teacher and brilliant headmaster were a unit of excellence, there’d be more of that excellence in the state sector. And we should remember that next time someone bangs on about a ‘two-tier’ education system. The phrase is not just wrong, but a slur on thousands of state-sector teachers who get better results on a fraction of the resources. And it is these state-sector teachers who are now driving the change; it is teachers, not politicians, who turned Hackney Downs into Mossbourne Community Academy. They are driving England’s education revolution, and what they are doing for their pupils – people who had been written off – is amazing. Anyone who thinks Mossbourne is a one-off should look at the below results from Harris Federation, released yesterday. Compare its academies’ GCSE results to those achieved by the same school under local authority control. And remember, at Harris schools, almost half of all pupils qualify for free school meals: [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/fc4r5/index.html”] Note that Harris has taken its time; and proper school reform does. If you expand too quickly, you can lose control – and the Academy chains which have expanded too quickly don’t have so much to boast about with their exam data this week. The school revolution is a slow-burner, but its results are simply amazing. What’s made the difference at Harris are things like more discipline, with Saturday detentions; having head teachers prowl the corridors rather than hide in their offices; and cutting overheads for catering and maintenance to deliver more cash for classrooms. They’re the kind of innovations that teachers have always been capable of making better than any local authority bureaucrat could. There are not many things that Britain genuinely does better than anyone else in the world, but education is one of them. Reforming politicians – Baker, Blair, Adonis, Gove – simply gave our educators freedom. What our teachers are now doing with that freedom is nothing short of extraordinary.