Schools

The yearly scramble for school places is about to start and, as all British parents know, trying to find a school for your children can be an all-consuming business. When searching for a decent state primary for my own children, I was faced with intense competition for places in London along with soaring house prices. So I did what plenty of other middle class parents have done before me and moved out of the capital. For better or worse, my children's education has dictated everything: from where I live to my choice of career. On this week's Spectator podcast, Leah Mclaren takes issue with mothers like me. Isn’t the British obsession with schooling all about status anxiety and paranoia about our children’s life chances, she asks.

One thing I love about my adopted country is the widespread cultural contempt for dullness. Unlike North Americans, intelligent British people rarely drone on in a witless or self-aggrandising manner. They deflect, make jokes and generally aim to please. But there is one boring subject no one here ever seems to tire of and that is schooling. ‘So where do your kids go?’ I’ve learned is just as loaded and inescapable a London dinner party question as ‘What do you do?’ or ‘Where are you on Brexit?’ If you choose private, you’d better have a plausible explanation (e.g. ‘We just didn’t want to make our child the social experiment’).

According to data released by the Department for Education today, free schools have topped the league table when it comes to Progress 8. This metric, introduced three years ago, tells you how much progress children have made in a particular school between the ages of 11 and 16 relative to the progress other children have made with similar starting points. It’s a way of controlling for the fact that children enter secondary school with varying levels of prior attainment. If you just look at raw GCSE data, those schools that get the best results might not be the most effective; it could be that they’re attracting children of above average ability. Indeed, it nearly always is due to that.

It was a dark afternoon in November, and the wind was rattling the casements of the bare schoolroom. My small but enthusiastic class of Greek students nibbled chocolate biscuits and listened politely as I ploughed through yet another list of irregular verbs. Suddenly, standing by the electronic whiteboard, I had a sort of minor epiphany (Epiphany: from the Greek term for a god’s manifestation to undeserving mortals). Why, I asked myself, were these bright teenagers devoting so much time to studying a difficult language which they would never be able to use to communicate, whose native speakers died two millennia ago, and in which it would take years to reach fluency? Twenty years ago, when I was learning Greek and Latin, this question would never have occurred to me.

Public schools are the jewel in the crown of the British education system. Across the centuries, they have educated our elite across government, law and the arts. They are as synonymous with England — golden, verdant, timeless England — as scones with cream and jam, cricket (played in whites, please) and The Queen. Their allure is partly myth, partly nostalgia, partly cold, hard commercialism. Of course, there is the romanticised ideal, cemented in our best fiction: the public schools of Jennings and Darbishire; of Billy Bunter; of devoted, beloved Mr. Chipping. Harry Potter is, though JK Rowling may not admit it, the ultimate scholarship boy made good. Our best comedians and raconteurs play on the stereotypes.

When I was 16 I failed all my O-levels, bar a grade C in English Literature, and concluded I wasn’t academically bright. Instead of retaking my O--levels, doing some A-levels and trying to get a place at university, I decided to pursue a career as a tradesman and enrolled on a residential work experience course. It was a bit like a boarding school, except it offered students a technical and vocational education rather than an academic one. It was a miserable period of my life. The stench of failure hung over the institution like a toxic cloud and my fellow students and I were treated as if we were semi-delinquents who might at any moment go off the rails.

Is it all right for the Muslim parents of children at British state schools to prevent their sons and daughters from being friends with non-Muslim kids? And is it sensible? These questions have been knocking around my head like a pair of trapped moths, unable to find a way out. Quite by coincidence and on separate occasions, in the past month I’ve met two (non-Muslim) women whose children have had trouble at Muslim-dominated state schools. The kids made friends easily in their first term, said the mothers, but as the months went by it became harder to stay pals. Their schoolmates never invited them home, nor would they come round for playdates or parties. The friendships faded away and the kids were left confused.

Monday was ‘national offer day’, which means that more than half a million parents across England were notified about which primary school their child got into. For most, the news was good, with nine in ten parents securing a place at one of their top three choices. But for some — particularly in London — the offer letters brought disappointment. In Kensington and Chelsea, for instance, just 68.3 per cent got their first choice of school. Not surprising, then, that parents have been resorting to fraud. In some cases, desperate parents end up spending so much money to game the system it would be cheaper to go private.

A paper published last week in an academic journal called npj Science of Learning attracted an unusual amount of press attention. It looked at the GCSE results of 4,814 students at three different types of school — comprehensives, private schools and grammars — and found that once you factor in IQ, prior attainment, parental socio-economic status and a range of genetic markers, the type of school has virtually no effect on academic attainment. Less than 1 per cent of the variance in these children’s GCSE results was due to school type.