BY JOE NUTT
Centuries of Accumulated Soft Power is Being Trashed by a Single Spite-Fuelled Politician.
In 1964 a Labour Party minister for education whose name is largely forgotten and truly deserves to be, so he’ll remain nameless here, instructed local education authorities to reorganise secondary schooling along comprehensive lines. Like dutiful sheep, they mostly did.
Our current minister for education, Bridget Phillipson, is now up to her neck in an equally catastrophic rearrangement of the nation’s educational deckchairs.
By the time she is finished, if she is allowed to continue, and that is far from certain given the astounding level of ignorance about the schools landscape she has exhibited so far; her predilection for lavish birthday parties and misuse of laughably politicised research; UK State schools will be reduced to walk-in therapy centres and cafes, delivered by technology instead of skilled teachers.
There is a small mountain of international research that demonstrates the positive educational benefits of selection at numerous stages in a child’s development, and in all kinds of educational settings. There is a handful of UK based research that argues against selection and especially grammar schools. This research compares GCSE exam results between school types and always relies on exactly the same, entirely political justification, literally and with a rather wicked irony, “For the many.” They even build everything on the same absurd proxy measure for educational disadvantage, free schools meals data. They might as well use children’s weight.
That sixties Labour minister’s personal spite destroyed hundreds of the best schools in the country and his equally venomous successor is busy doing the same. The UK’s private schools sector is the best in the world, which is why parents from all over the world send their children to school here and why our most famous schools have been able to export their brands so successfully. Our private schools represent perhaps the last thing Britain still leads the world at. And that does not mean simply the famous names. The majority of the sector consists of small, little known schools, serving very localised communities, yet these rely on precisely the same types of parents as the most famous; people who dedicate considerable resources and time to thinking hard about the best choices for their children. So little surprise then that the Labour Party is the one intent on putting an end to that admirable situation.
Centuries of accumulated soft power: wasted by soft heads.
Only the most naive socialist campaigner would argue for a moment today that the near eradication of grammar schools was an educationally wise decision for the nation. Like the Beeching Report, it was a comprehensive act of self-vandalism to what was really vital national infrastructure. Imagine what life would be like today, had we kept all those perfectly functional travel routes between our towns, cities and even villages, and those hundreds of schools which educated the brightest of our children, from all social classes, to a genuinely high standard.
Northern Ireland, where grammar schools were largely retained, is one of the best performing regions in the UK and in England, where they do survive, the competition to gain a place today is ridiculously intense. Try parking anywhere near Tiffin Girls School in Kingston on entrance exam days. The idea that the thousands of parents who use the private sector, or who enter the competition for grammar school places each year are not acting in the best interests of their children, is just garbage thought, or as the online conversations about this issue show so starkly, ugly envy or childish spite.
The next few months will be crucial ones for the future of the country. If you have children, prepare to home school them now. If Phillipson remains in post, like her predecessor, she will sacrifice the best for nothing more admirable than personal spite. For the country as a whole, this is a truly shocking “fool me twice” situation. My sincere hope is that like her infamous predecessor, she will very soon be an entirely forgotten name.
Joe Nutt is the author of several books about the poetry of Donne, Milton and Shakespeare and a collection of essays, The Point of Poetry. His latest book, Teaching English for the Real World was published by John Catt in May 2020.