Right Mind

The Daily Mail's new RightMinds site is interesting, but it could do with being more paleocon, as the Mail itself increasingly is.

Alex Brummer's conservative critique of global capitalism is welcome, as is the inclusion of Peter Hitchens's blog. But where is Peter Oborne, or the Mail's own Stephen Glover, Peter McKay and Andrew Alexander? Where is Geoffrey Wheatcroft, or Stuart Reid, or John Laughland, or Freddy Gray, or Anthony Daniels/Theodore Dalrymple, to name but a few?

The crowd around The American Conservative, and perhaps especially around its Post-Right blog currently in abeyance while it pursues other projects, would also have been a lot, lot, lot better than Nile Gardiner.

But still, Peter Hitchens writes:

If the English middle class will not fight for the return of grammar schools, then they should be given fully comprehensive schooling, hot and strong and unavoidable. Two years of that, and they’ll all be whimpering for grammar schools.

For far too long, a clever minority of smart left-wing parents have found loopholes in the horrible egalitarian state school system, while preaching its virtues to others. The last thing we need is any more such escape hatches or safety valves. After a long mental drought when the thinking classes would drone that ‘you can’t turn the clock back’ or ‘grammar schools can’t be restored’ or ‘we couldn’t have the eleven-plus again’, the country is turning.

There is a great weight of opinion which now favours new grammar schools in large numbers – and those who say it cannot be done need only look at the former East Germany, where dozens of new grammar schools have been successfully established since Communism (which was fully comprehensive, of course) collapsed. Germany, in all its states, also tells us that you can have selection by agreement, and late switches between schools. with no need for a rigid exam at age 11.

The other need that has still to be addressed is providing good secondary schools for non-academic pupils. One vital part of this argument is that comprehensive schooling has utterly failed to fill this gap. The decision to go comprehensive in 1965 destroyed the only part of the state system that was actually working, apparently in the belief that the goodness of grammar schools, slightly diluted, would find its way into all schools.

Nothing of the kind has happened. All state schools have grown worse. That is why all exams have had to be devalued, to hide the decline. The ones which are comparatively better are largely reserved for the privileged, the strong and the savvy, and closed to the children of the poor, ill-informed and weak. Instead of grammar education for all, we have secondary modern education for all. The old 1944 aspiration to provide technical schools has been entirely forgotten. And huge numbers of pupils who can barely read (thanks to other misguided 1960s reforms) are compelled to endure a pseudo-academic education which is of no use to them, at the end of which they are awarded certificates of no use whatsoever.

A selective system gives us the chance to repair this damage, while rescuing academically gifted children from the wasteland of mixed-ability teaching and devalued examinations. Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, knows this perfectly well. But he’s allowed himself to be diverted into the usual activity of a modern Education Secretary – stunts and gimmicks, plus Stalinist exhortation (‘we must all work harder!’) . These actions and speeches give the illusion of great change, while actually doing little more than alter appearances. Why, for instance, the big fuss about academies? As Anastasia de Waal of Civitas has shown, there really isn’t any proof that they are significantly better than other schools. Or we have the lionising of heroic, charismatic heads, who can by the sheer force of their enormous personalities transform bad schools into good ones. But what happens when they leave? And what happens to the many schools which lack such leadership and always will? Not all heads can be exceptional, any more than all our children can be above average. What we need are schools which are institutionally designed to succeed, and will do so even if the head and staff are merely competent.

The comprehensive system is anti-education, having as its main aim a political target - the promotion of equality. Why should schools be run on a principle which is designed to damage them? No wonder only giant personalities can make them work at all. Think what those giant personalities could do in schools that were designed to be good – grammar schools. It is time for a return to selection, and all it needs is for a major political party to adopt this policy for it to happen. The current absurd position, under the School Standards and Framework Act of 1998, is that it is actually against the law for any local authority to open a new grammar school.

This rubbish would have been swept aside long ago if the elite classes really had to experience comprehensive schooling. But they don’t. Tories have been able to escape by paying fees, which is why that party has been so indifferent to this grave problem for so long. Well-off dwellers in market towns have been able to use rural comprehensives which, while inferior to grammar schools, do not suffer the discipline problems and high staff turnover of their inner-city equivalents. The Roman Catholic Church has managed to preserve some standards in many of its secondary schools. But now the education disaster, with all its social, cultural and economic implications, has begun to threaten the security of well-off people far from urban squalor.

Labour grandees – more importantly, for it is their party which ferociously insists on comprehensives, whereas the Tories merely meekly comply – have been able to escape through loopholes. They get their children into schools which, through small expensive catchment area or religious preference, have escaped the worst features of the all-ability bog-standard comp (which is still a bog-standard comp even after it has been renamed ‘The Burger Queen Academy, a specialist school for astrophysics and hairdressing’, or whatever it is). Until now these escapees by fiddle and dodge have mostly been left wingers – above all Anthony Blair who wangled his young into the London Oratory. Many more obscure leftists , some of them almost Leninist in their fervour for comprehensive schools, have made sure that their own heirs and successors were protected from it. It is interesting that such people will be rude about almost every form of education wangle except the one that they use – the catchment area dodge.

There are several schools, mainly in a certain part of North London, where early and careful attention to the borders of catchment areas can assure young Karl, Leon and Rosa a place at a school which is actually subtly, elusively selective, but officially comprehensive. It is quite expensive to do this, but New Labour apparatchiks are often rich these days, and it is not as if they are saving to pay for school fees. Those involved may then, if they choose, deliver lofty lectures to the rest of us on how wicked we are to pay fees, go to church or favour selection, while their young breeze into Oxbridge on the state schools quota. This interesting state of affairs is dealt with in detail in the chapter entitled ‘The Fall of the Meritocracy’ in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, the most, er, comprehensive examination of this issue ever published in this country.

Now, thanks to ‘Free Schools’ and to David Cameron, this hypocritical pestilence is spreading into the Tory Party. Mr Cameron seems to see some virtue in sending his children to state schools, declaring in February 2009 that he would ‘like them to go through the state sector’ and adding ‘I think it’s crazy that we should pay lots of money for private schools. We all pay our taxes. You should have really good state schools available for all.’ As a statement, this is incoherent. What is the automatic virtue of a school being run by the state? And if there were truly good state schools available for all, then he wouldn’t need to say this. If there aren’t (and there aren’t, which is why so many people pay lots of money in fees) then why does he want to send his children to them? And by the way, does he think it was ‘crazy’ of his parents to send him to the hilariously opulent Heatherdown prep school (special lavatories for chauffeurs at sports day) and then to Eton? Does he think they should have sent him to the local primary and a reasonably civilised rural comp, as no doubt they could have done? I doubt it.

The answer to all these questions, of course, is that Mr Cameron is acting and speaking for political advantage. He was doing the same when he proclaimed himself to be in favour of ‘elitism’ in schools on Friday. If that is really so, he must choose between two different kinds – a meritocratic elite, based upon academic selection, or what we have now, based on money and privilege. The people he hopes to win round to his Liberal Tory project are egalitarians, and so they ’believe in’ egalitarian, secular comprehensive schooling, at least as a slogan. You can’t really believe in it for any other reason, or in any other way, as it doesn’t actually exist and never will. I’m sure Mr Cameron personally doesn’t believe in this. He doesn’t (and I have this on good authority from his first boss at Tory Central Office) believe in anything. But he sees advantage in it and lo! Wonder of wonders! A charming and old-fashioned Church of England primary school lies a short drive from his London home (or what was his London home until he was confined in Downing Street) and also that of Michael Gove.

Even more happily, both men, in this secular age, turn out to be that rare thing in their generation, enthusiastic members of the Church of England, and their wives, likewise keen church supporters in this era of unbelief, do sterling work on the parish magazine of the church to which this school is attached. So when the highly oversubscribed little school picks its pupils, it is entirely right and just that the children of these pious couples should be among the lucky ones. Why, they even shared the school run. Had things turned out differently, and had this school turned them away, I wonder what the Camerons and the Goves would have done. Likewise, I wonder what they will do when their children turn eleven, and they face the desert of London secondary education. Funnily enough a solution to this problem may be at hand, if Toby Young’s West London Free School manages to succeed, and others follow suit. After all, London is full of middle-class parents who have to choose between Bog Lane Comp or enormous fees, and hate it.

Mr Young’s school, of course, has to fulfil the requirements of the 1998 Act. It cannot select by ability. That is against the law. The same is true of a number of ‘comprehensives’ in North London favoured by New Labour persons. Yet these are famed for their excellent Oxbridge entry. I shall be very interested to see, seven or eight years hence, what the West London school’s pupil profile and university entrance record turns out to be.

Can you really have, as I think Mr Young has suggested, ‘grammar schools for all’? I do not think so. I am told that streaming or setting can recreate forms of selection, and - while accepting that these are better than nothing- I note that the whim of a head or a governing body can end or alter them, whereas a school that is openly and clearly selective from the start will remain so unless it is closed down. Many teachers (and heads), influenced by decades of radical teacher training, strongly disapprove of streaming and setting, and have dogmatic reasons for wanting mixed-ability classes. I’d also point out that the ethos and atmosphere of a school entirely populated by pupils who are able to benefit from academic education are quite different from the ethos and atmosphere of one where such pupils are a segregated minority on the same site.

But you can have a school that is officially comprehensive in its constitution, but isn’t in practice. However, the one group of people who will never benefit from such institutions are the children of the poor and powerless and ill-informed parents, who do not understand the deceptive maze of modern state education and cannot play it to their advantage. It is these whose lives are ruined and wasted by our national hypocrisy. It is these who are being betrayed by all the leading political parties. Because Free Schools will not help them, and because they will reduce the necessary pressure on the establishment to restore grammar schools, I hope they fail.

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. 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, can really share the view of those who object 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.