Education: The Next Clause IV?

John Whitting writes:
 

In the last week we have heard complaints from not one but two cabinet ministers about the insidious and unfair advantages that the privately educated enjoy in our society. As a state school boy myself, I richly enjoyed the irony of this lecture coming from two privately educated members of a Cabinet whose membership criteria appears, with the very odd exception, to comprise not only being a white male but also significant personal wealth and an education at one of our most prestigious public schools. And yet what they said will have struck a chord with many. The grossly disproportionate number of those at our top universities and in the senior ranks of politics, industry, finance, the law and media who were educated not just independently but at one of only a handful of such schools, belies our pretensions to live in a meritocracy.

What is even more depressing is that the breaking of the mould by the post war grammar school generation was, in retrospect, no more than a temporary blip in the status quo. Successive governments have recognised the criticality of education to equality of opportunity but have done little to address the problem. Parents justifiably feel that the state has abrogated one of its fundamental responsibilities: to give every child a fair chance to realise his full potential regardless of class or wealth. A small minority simply opt out and go private. A sizeable majority tell the pollsters that they would do the same if they could afford it. Some spend the extra tens, or hundreds, of thousands needed to buy a house in the right catchment area. A few just lie about where they live. Others feign religious devotion and the Toby Youngs of the world start their own school and get the rest of us to pay for it. Meanwhile every place at the remaining grammar schools is oversubscribed tenfold and desperate parents are funding an industry of private tutors. This pantomime is a damning indictment of our governance.

Few issues evoke such a visceral response as education. Why wouldn’t it, when the quality of a child’s schooling will determine the rest of his life? How rich, then, would be the political rewards for the party which seized the agenda and offered a radical restatement of the aims and methods of our educational system. Not just tinkering around the edges with the promise of one micro initiative or another, but a recognition that our educational system is not fit for purpose in the 21st century and the offer of an alternative. Something that will convince the politically critical successors to Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman that their state schools will make their children the best that they can be and take them as far as they can go. A strategy that would outflank the Tories and show that Labour had left behind the tired dogma of the past.

For Labour to take the initiative, and to reap the political reward, will require another Clause 4 moment since they are going to have to confront the shibboleth of selection. I am not proposing a return to the 11+, with its awful segregation of such young children into successes and failures on the basis on a single test and the slow death of hope at a hopelessly underfunded and demoralised secondary modern. But the reality of life is that we are not all the same. We all have different strengths. To pretend otherwise, and to make the same educational offer to each child does none of them any favours. I am the youngest of four brothers. I loved school, did my A-levels and went to Oxford. The other three were thoroughly miserable, left at sixteen feeling that they were failures and took years to find a vocation at which they could each excel. Our experience was hardly unique.

I have my own ideas about the right way to go. I think that a form of selection is inevitable: but one based on a student’s whole career, not just one IQ test, and later, say at 14 rather than at the end of primary school. I wouldn’t be frightened of a choice at that stage between a more technical or practical education of the type that my brothers would have enjoyed and the more academic that suited me, so long as both were equally well funded and there was the ability to transfer between the two, should the original choice prove a mistake. A modern technical college could offer courses and qualifications in subjects like engineering, IT, production management and media as well as the more traditional vocations. Things that the bored teenagers currently staring out of the schoolroom window counting the days until they leave might actually want to learn.

There should also be a properly funded, structured and monitored system of apprenticeships that was comprehensively tied in with the technical colleges to provide a coherent stepping stone between education and employment. And I would want those schools that specialised in the more academic disciplines to do so with unashamed ambition for their students and to instil in them the belief that no university’s or profession’s door was closed to them. Such a system would echo the best elements of the German model that has served their society and economy so well.

Those that advocate the status quo not only overlook its manifest failure but forget the effect of peer pressure on the teenage child. They need to be in an environment where their particular talents are appreciated and respected not only by the teaching staff but by the other children. A place where working hard, at whatever it is, is the cool thing to do. Where nobody can coast, because they are so much more academic than the others, or give up because they don’t have the same aptitude for, and are anyway uninterested in, the subjects they are being taught.

Labour needs to face up to the fact that the pretence that one size fits all is gifting the future to a privileged minority. We are deluding ourselves and, more importantly, our children if we pretend that our entire educational system isn’t already based on the principle of selection. The tragedy is that the current criteria are wealth and class rather than ability and aptitude. If we, as a party, can offer a bold and compelling alternative, then the future is ours. If we cannot, then we should not be in the business of politics.

The old Clause IV did not mention nationalisation, although it certainly allowed for it; it had been framed so that people who already had nationalisation in mind could read that presupposition into it, even though no one could have read that presupposition out of it. But Tony Blair and his fan club thought that it was about nothing else.

So, in repudiating it, they repudiated public ownership in order to repudiate everything that public ownership delivered and safeguarded, notably national sovereignty, the Union, and the economic basis of paternal authority. Likewise, in repudiating trade unionism, they repudiated controlled immigration and the moderating influence of the wider electorate in the affairs of the Labour Party.

Mercifully, that latter, at least, reasserted itself in the victory of Ed Miliband over the Blairite candidate. But it still needs to be emphasised that requiring the production of a union card is no different from requiring the production of a British passport or a work permit, while the closed shop was as important for that as it was for giving the Tory 45 per cent of the industrial working class a moderating influence in the selection of Labour candidates for the safe Labour seats in which they lived.

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 IV, 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, epitomised by her replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, her worst ever domestic policy, right down there with Blair’s reclassification of cannabis.

As much as possible of the anything but Gradgrindian, anything but philistine grammar school and O-level 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.

A new educational charity should elect to Associateship those pupils in all schools who, on leaving the Sixth Form at 18, had attained since beginning Year 10 examination results at or above the average in the remaining state grammar schools, both in terms of the marks themselves, and in terms of the range of subjects studied. It should also elect to Fellowship those teachers whose pupils attained such results over 10 consecutive years.

Associateship would be automatic, so that hostile schools or whoever else would not be able to deny it to anyone. The most prestigious universities would be contacted in order to make the Associateship an admission requirement. And this charity would be called after a Labour politician who fought to defend the grammar schools as the ladder of working-class advancement. There are plenty to choose from: Ellen Wilkinson, George Tomlinson, Sidney Webb, R H Tawney, Eric Hammond, to name but a few.

That would be a start, anyway.