The role of education

For many people, if not most, education is thought to be the chief way by which those from a disadvantaged group may achieve something very significant in their lives. Channels by which people may migrate to success, achievement and influence are many, but education is surely a prime means.

Everyone agrees that social mobility has not increased over many years, in fact it has gone down since the 1970s. The Labour government has tried all sorts of policies, has resorted to threats and inducements to educational institutions and has pumped huge sums of money into the education system, it has to be said with no conspicuous improvement. Rather our education system is slipping down the international ladder of educational achievement, with devalued standards and non achievement.

Educational achievement has many contributory factors, including marital and home circumstances. This is true for many countries in the world. But to return to the subject of social mobility, are there any explanations? I offer you some reasons advanced by Janet Daley in a recent Telegraph Blog.

She offers these facts to consider:
In the 1960s Britain had the highest proportion of working class university students in Europe.
This was entirely due to the 1944 Education Act, which created grammar schools which reflected the best traditions of our historical public schools, including discipline, willingness to study and a positive attitude to learning. Admission was by selection, the so-called "11-plus" and junior school recommendation.

In the early 1970s, unbelievably in pursuit of social mobility and equality of opportunity, most of the grammar schools were closed or re-organised as comprehensives. The problem with comprehensives, apart from the obvious one of becoming very large in order to accommodate all subjects at all levels of ability, was that students were trapped in their neighbourhoods, so called catchment areas. In some vast council estates where there was little interest in learning, a bright and would-be achiever was submerged in a mass of disinterest, and didn't escape from his own poverty. He became frustrated and even delinquent.

I was brought up in a humble working class family, and I was part of 1960s working class presence at university. I shudder to think how my energies could have been directed if I had found myself in a reluctant mass of disinterested students. I owe everything to the grammar school I attended - values, abilities, interests, opportunities.

In the 1970s, by now a lecturer in higher education, I went as part of our extra-mural lecture programme to a recently established comprehensive in Birmingham. On arrival I was warned that sixth formers to whom I spoke would be unlikely to ask questions afterwards. The teacher explained that a few who would be interested would fear to ask questions because the mass would verbally abuse them. It was, he said, part of the ethos change which had come about when the former grammar school was made a comprehensive.

I can imagine that dedicated teachers do their best to prevent the mass of disinterested students, many with 'attitude', hindering the process of the more able or committed. Unfortunately, with the great disruption and difficulty of exclusion in our schools at present, in and out of the classroom, the few enterprising students are frequently held back.

I readily concede, from my own observation, that secondary modern schools, the repository of 11-plus "failure", were underfunded often. I also concede that a single exam at age 11 should not separate "sheep and goats" for life.

These two criticisms are easily overcome, the first by increasing funding to non-grammar schools, the second with something like the German system which aggregates marks over four years at junior school, and by allowing later transfer from one school to the other according to progress or interest.

I am with Janet Daley completely in her assertion that comprehensivisation " was one of the most retrograde social policies in modern political history even though most Labour supporters are probably prepared to accept that academic selection would make it easier for able children from poor families to gain access to higher education and the professions."

It is to the discredit of the present Conservative policies which seek to portray them as progressives, that their attitude to grammar schools is at best condescending and luke warm. They, following Blair, seem to accept that schools can specialise, - in music, art, science, sport, in fact almost everything except ability.