Extol The Virtues

Roy Greenslade writes:

Melissa Benn is concerned about the creeping return of the grammar school. Thirty years ago I would have been nodding vigorously in agreement. For a considerable time now, however, I have been in the process of changing my mind: did people like me, both a beneficiary of a grammar school education and also a vociferous critic of it at the time, make a grave error?

My thoughts coalesced when I was questioned while taking part in a BBC4 documentary, The Grammar School – A Secret History (to be next screened on Thursday at 9pm). This was a much more difficult U-turn for me than many because I wrote a book in 1975 about my former school, Dagenham County High (now defunct), entitled Goodbye to the Working Class. I was extremely critical of the school specifically and grammar schools in general. Though I do not recant everything, including the book's overall thesis, I now concede that I totally underplayed the value of the education itself.

Indeed, when I bump into old boys and girls, the majority of them extol the virtues of the school and the education system which gave them – the sons and daughters of largely blue-collar workers – the chance to take a step on the ladder to a better life.

Part of the baby boom generation, we did have the advantage of leaving school in the mid-1960s, when new job opportunities were opening up. But the relative ease of entry was down to our education. The social mobility "narrative" that Benn scorns was a reality, as my study of my 120 peers illustrated. Although only 6% went direct from school to university, the overwhelming majority of them entered office jobs that led to stable, well-paid occupations in academia, advertising, banks, stockbroking and the upper echelons of various police forces.

Let's make it clear: selection at 11 was wrong. Consigning people at that age to a second-class education in secondary schools was also wrong. I do not wish to see us go backwards.

I supported the transformation to comprehensive schooling in the egalitarian belief that we should dispense with a two-tier state system (the third tier, technical schools, never worked anyway). But I now accept that we should not have rejected the educational ethos of grammar schools. As the testimonies in the documentary illustrate, they did a fine job. In phasing them out, we dumbed down instead of smarting up. And those grammars that have managed to survive prove the point.

Benn is right when she quotes from the 1963 Robbins report that only 1% of the children of semi-skilled or unskilled workers went on to higher education. But the figures are a misleading snapshot. The full picture, more clearly drawn from my interviews 10 years after we left school and from my annual meetings with old pupils, reveals a much more complex result.

There were economic reasons for many not going on to university, allied to the fact that obtaining a place was difficult because there were fewer universities at the time. Most significantly, the schooling itself provided a springboard to the professions and led many to go to university later, as mature students.

Benn is wrong to cite another set of statistics, from a Sutton Trust report, because she has been overly selective. It showed, she wrote, that the existing 164 grammars are "among the most socially exclusive schools in England".

In fact, the report argues that Britain's top 164 comprehensive schools are much more socially selective than the grammars. The top comps only take 9.2% of children from income-deprived homes while the grammars take 20%. They are more inclusive, says the report, because they admit 13.5% of children from poor homes.

I am not pleading for the return of the 11-plus, though at least its form of selection was transparent. Today, there is both academic and social selection by stealth.

We who still believe education to be the best ladder up from the bottom know that grammar schools – and particularly the disciplined culture they cultivated – worked. The trick is to reinvent them, not to dismiss them altogether.

Ministerial defence of the grammar schools came from “Red Ellen” Wilkinson of the Jarrow Crusade, and from her successor, George Tomlinson. Their academic defence came from Sidney Webb, author of the old Clause Four, and from R H Tawney. Their vigorous practical defence came from Labour councillors and activists around the country, not least while Thatcher, as Education Secretary, was closing so many that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled. They were protected in Kent by a campaign long spearheaded by Eric Hammond, the veteran leader of the electricians’ and plumbers’ union, who was a lifelong member of the Labour Party. They were restored by popular demand, as soon as the Berlin Wall came down, in what is still the very left-wing former East Germany. And the public successfully defended them in, again, the Social Democratic heartland of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Within and around the very academic Labour Government of the day, there was great concern that the events of 1968 would lead to a loss of State funding for universities, and thus to a loss of academic freedom. C B Cox and A E Dyson were Labour supporters when they initiated the Black Papers, and Cox was vilified by the Thatcher Government and its apologists when he resisted its, their and her Gradgrindian philistinism. As much as possible of the anything but Gradgrindian, anything but philistine grammar school tradition was maintained at classroom level by individual, often very left-wing teachers until they themselves retired. To say the least, they would have had no objection to the inclusion of Latin in the English Baccalaureate, any more than Andy Burnham, with his English degree from Cambridge, could really have shared the view of those who objected to that inclusion.

Full employment, workers’ rights, strong trade unions, municipal services (including council housing), public ownership and the Welfare State made possible the civilised and civilising world of the trade unions and the co-operatives, of the Workers’ Educational Association and the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, of the pitmen poets and the pitmen painters, of the brass and silver bands, of the male voice choirs, of the people’s papers rather than the redtop rags, of the grammar schools, and of the Secondary Moderns that were so much better than what has replaced them.