I went to a Grammar School, but don’t think they should exist any more. Am I a hypocrite?
With the advent of a General Election campaign, Keir Starmer’s education background as a former grammar school student is being mentioned again. Starmer passed the 11-plus to get into Reigate Grammar School in the early 1970s, and then stayed on as a direct grant student in the Sixth Form after it converted to an independent school in 1976. Many people accuse Starmer and Labour’s education policy in general as ‘pulling up the drawbridge’, denying children access to the high quality education that he himself received, by, for example, removing the charitable status of private schools and therefore likely leading to massive increase in tuition fees. Similarly, many on the right have historically been fearful of the prospect of a Labour Government abolishing the remaining 163 English grammar schools (state-funded and therefore with no fees to pay, but selective), even though Labour have not (yet) committed to such a policy.
I also attended a state grammar school for my 11–18 education in south Warwickshire — probably one of the most prestigious non fee paying schools in the country as it happens. However, after over 15 years of working in state education (including my NQT year as a teacher in an all-girls selective school in Birmingham), I do believe strongly that we need to move on entirely from selective education. As someone who used that education to attend a good university and get an academic degree and have since parlayed that into a reasonably successful career as a teacher and school leader, am I also in favour of pulling up the drawbridge? Can I also be labelled a hypocrite?
I would say, tentatively, no.
I think the way of reconciling this apparent contradiction is as follows. The remaining grammar schools do a lot of things extremely well which make them desirable for lots of parents, especially if they know their child has a good chance of getting in (of course, one reason why there isn’t a groundswell of support for more of them is most parents are afraid of what happens if their child fails the 11-plus). My general view is that lots of children would benefit from more exposure to those things grammar schools do — it’s just that it’s a lot harder to deliver those things often for socio-economic reasons.
I was extremely fortunate to benefit from the following experiences:
· A rigorous academic curriculum with a high probability I would get at least decent, if not very good outcomes in exams — although I would argue now that I might have done just as well in a good comp because of some of the factors that were ‘baked in’ even before setting foot in a secondary school — such as a good upbringing in a stable household, being in a word rich environment, being pushed to read and engage with the world around me at home etc etc. Teachers who really liked and were good at their subject and were enthusiastic about it was another aspect here.
· Generally good behaviour for learning in lessons with clear consequences for students who made poor choices (although a class of 32 too-clever-by-half and pretty arrogant boys can certainly be a handful for an unsuspecting teacher as was often the case — and bullying was certainly a thing that happened as well). Certain aspects of good behaviour were taught as well (holding a door open for someone else is a thing that springs to mind as being a big deal at my old school).
· A wide range of extra-curricular activities including sport and drama (lots of music on offer too if that was your thing — not my bag though).
· Overseas trips to the USA, Italy, Germany/E. Europe and Ghent that I went on, plus residentials to Ross-on-Wye and Lilleshall. These were hugely important as ‘socialising’ experiences as well as the opportunity to travel.
· Work Experience in Year 10, plus loads of Careers stuff in KS4 and Post-16 — I remember one big Careers day we had with lots of sessions from some pretty big name employers that was quite interesting as someone who had no idea what he was going to do as an adult at that age (I certainly never thought I’d be doing this!)
· Lots of opportunities to gain confidence in some of those intangibly beneficial soft skills like public speaking, which (being a bit gobby) I did a lot of at school in public events like Speech Days or Christmas Carol concerts or whatever.
It is worth noting at this point that there were definitively some things missing that I think would have been beneficial — although I daresay that my old school may do this better now than it did in the late-1990s/early 2000s! I really hated practical subjects at school, but had I had the chance to study something like Food Technology rather than the traditional Resistant Materials offer, I probably would have appreciated that. I think probably lots more engagement about positive role models of masculinity might have been useful as well.
Now, there are lots of factors that make it hard to deliver some of the stuff in the bullet point list above in a comprehensive school in an economically deprived area, as I know well from my current experience.
Take trips for example. We can put on all the trips we want at my school, but the cost to go anywhere exciting is often prohibitive for most families, and we lack the resources, like most state schools, to pay for these opportunities for the children out of our own tightly squeezed budget. Extra curricular activities are often not so appealing for our young people and families when there are other things competing for many of our students’ time after school. We could run a much longer lunchtime but then that becomes a significant behaviour management and duty rota staffing challenge. Facilities are another issue. My school in Bradford, located on a former refuse collection site, is sandwiched between a highly prestigious private school with astroturf and extensive sports facilities and a Catholic state school with ample grounds as well — ours are ‘developing’ shall we say (and, fingers crossed, in line for significant improvement in the coming years).
I think work experience opportunities are something we can look to make more of — although again it’s much harder to secure high quality, world-expanding experiences in a poor area of Bradford (where even getting to Leeds is a stretch for some of our families) than it is where I grew up — let alone if you live an isolated coastal area with poor transport infrastructure, for example. The work of charities like The Brilliant Club has done a good bit to raise aspirations around university education for disadvantaged young people. As I have said before, education alone won’t transform opportunities for young people in a country with significant geographical and social inequality and appalling rates of child poverty and the idea that schools alone are a silver bullet for this has been a hugely pernicious development in my adult lifetime. Similarly, parachuting in private schools like Eton to educate the highest attaining 2% of children in Middlesbrough with the likely consequence that more intellectual capital is funnelled to London, away from where it’s needed, is also a significantly faulty solution in my view. We have a good ambitious academic curriculum delivered in conjunction with our trust, but recruiting high quality subject specialists is at the moment extremely challenging in our area, which makes implementation of that a lot harder (as I say a lot in my school, we have to ‘love the teachers we’ve got’ and work hard to keep them through good CPD and career development opportunities because there isn’t a queue down the street coming to work here — as is the case for secondary schools up and down the country in challenging contexts).
So I guess my overall point is to say that Keir Starmer maybe shouldn’t worry about supporting a more egalitarian education system while himself having benefitted from educational inequality earlier in his life. But instead we should look to harness the desirable features of what those types of school — as many comprehensive schools already do and have done for years (take Liz Truss’ own high school in Leeds as a good example) — are perceived to offer and say that these should be the entitlement of every child, not just walled off to those in the top 10% of academic attainers while it’s a postcode lottery for everyone else. The education debate is persistently stuck on the fate of the highest attaining students and not nearly as much on those in the middle and at the bottom (don’t get me started on the need to properly resource and develop high quality Alternative Provision and Special Education), and I’m arguing for a rebalancing of that debate. It’s going to take money and resources to do it, but a Labour Government shouldn’t be shy about being ambitious in this area.
