One of the most impressive aspects of our school is its powerful sense of community; the myriad, informal ties that bind so many different individuals and families together in a common purpose. Hundreds have contributed to the life of the school over the years, be it through fund-raising, standing for an hour or two behind a stall, painting faces backstage for a production or, in my own case, helping to create a visiting writers and speakers programme. Parents are encouraged into the school, and even welcomed to add something to the curriculum, in both small and substantial ways, if they have the time and expertise. A school community can also think out loud collectively about the often unexpected problems that arise. When, tragically, a young child was killed on a dangerous crossing near a local primary school, one of several serious local traffic accidents, a group of parents and school staff, clothed in black, marched through the neighbourhood demanding traffic safety measures from the council, something we won almost immediately.
An active and strong school community benefits all parents, whether they are involved or not, because all instinctively feel part of a common and successful enterprise. The greater the mix of children in terms of social class and levels of achievement, the greater the sense of collective possibility, the easier the job for the school. At parents’ evenings I am always moved and impressed by the warmth, detailed attention and sometimes appropriate sternness shown by teachers towards every child, whatever their family background, whatever their academic progress or lack thereof. I have seen, up close, that there are no quick fixes. Education, particularly in ‘all-in’ schools like ours, is about constant encouragement, over days and weeks and years, particularly for those children who lack support from home or who have difficult or disrupted lives, although there is a limit to what we should expect schools and teachers to be able to rectify. It is also not just about exam results but about fostering all kinds of interests and talents.
Still, it would take a hardened cynic not to be moved by our latest GCSE celebration evening, and the sight of so many students proudly walking up to the stage to receive their certificates to the audible and generous congratulations of their peers. I could not help thinking how many of those same young men and women would have been written off, under the old selective system, before they reached puberty—losing their intellectual and personal confidence, maybe for good. But we were also that night celebrating the stellar results of children who would have sailed through the eleven-plus. To enable the education of all children, side by side, seems to me a far richer definition of success, for both our education system and our society as a whole, than to take only the apparent winners, most of them from relatively affluent backgrounds, and educate them in separate, privileged enclaves, while condoning second-class facilities and resources for the unlucky majority. We may have a long way to go in genuinely equalising resources within our education system but I remain grateful that I, and millions of other parents, have not had to educate our own children within such a brutal and unimaginative framework.
Given all this, I find it hard to take seriously the accusation made by critics of existing state education that middle-class parents who send their children to comprehensives are deluded, or disingenuous. Or, most damagingly, that they are—in the words of teacher and free school founder, Katharine Birbalsingh—‘disguising the failings of state schools in the inner cities’. The charge of conspiring in the provision of second-rate education to poorer children is never, I notice, put to parents who support private schools, grammar schools or the more socially selective church schools. Often, it is local families, in partnership with staff and school leaders, who have turned schools around in the most difficult circumstances, and made them remarkably successful.3
State education has never commanded the same loyalty or sense of affection from the British public as the NHS. In this book I will explore some of the reasons why this might be, including the divided way which universal education was imposed after 1944 and the consistent refusal of politicians to consolidate the changes first foisted on them by popular parental demand. High-quality comprehensive education was never presented to the people as a democratic ideal; indeed, it was never presented in any coherent form at all.
This absence of a binding ideal, combined with a lack of the resources necessary to furnish it, ensures that ‘education, education, education’ remains a national obsession, rather like a mildly unhappy, forever unresolved relationship. Much tinkering by successive governments has done nothing to help the matter; in fact, it seems to make it worse. The nation continues to agonise over the related issues of school choice and school quality. Almost every day, TV, radio and newspapers supply some new story on the subject, be it parents failing to win their first choice of school, violence in the classroom or the impending crisis in further education, including rising tuition fees. Public debates, private seminars and grandly titled conferences on some aspect of schools or learning take place virtually every week.
It was not always the case. Writers about education in the 1960s and 70s frequently remark on the muted nature of political and public interest during this period. One reason for this, I would suggest, is that despite the transformation during this period from the selective to the comprehensive model, the system as a whole was more stable, with far stronger local government. And it is no coincidence that anxiety about comprehensive education really took off around the time of the oil crisis in the early 1970s. Worries about education and the economy are bound to be connected: the more perilous the national finances, the quicker pundits and politicians are to locate the problem in our schools, and to propose yet another radical overhaul of the system. This has now become an ingrained cultural habit.
This book comes at a pivotal and highly dangerous point in the story of state education. With manic zeal, the new Coalition Government is advancing the ‘choice and diversity’ revolution begun in the Thatcherite years and pursued with ambivalent vigour by New Labour. It comes accompanied by the deepest cuts seen for a generation, a high-risk strategy that has angered large sections of the educational community and whose wider impact will soon be felt by the public. While in England the fear is of further fragmentation and division, Scotland and Wales, both of which have comprehensive systems, are also convulsed by debates about how to improve standards and, in particular, how to address the gap between schools serving different communities—while also trying to deal with the shock of slashed public spending.
Even so, are the latest school wars really a battle over the substance and soul, the fate and future, of Britain’s education? Yes: at this point in history, we can say that they are. Even commentators sympathetic to these reforms describe the current government as the ‘breakneck coalition’. The scent of battle is everywhere in the air. A recent feature in the Spectator, accusing pro-comprehensive campaigners of bullying tactics, was entitled ‘Revealed: the secret war over England’s schools’.4 Writing about abolition of the grammars in his Daily Mail online blog, Peter Hitchens justly affirms: ‘The reason why this controversy has run for so long is that it matters so much, and says so much about those who take sides in it.’5 The writer James Delingpole has even gone so far as to describe the actions of those who oppose free schools as ‘actively evil’.6
But the metaphor of war and battle resonates at another level, too. The current clashes over government plans represent the intensification of a struggle that has been going on, in different forms, for nearly fifty years. There has been a long and harsh battle between supporters of comprehensive schools and those who want to retain selection in some form, whether through the restitution of the grammar schools or through more subtle means.
In his calm, clear analysis of the recent history of state education, State Schools Since the 1950s: The Good News, Adrian Elliott compares the ideological divide over the grammar schools to a long-running Sicilian blood feud. It’s a good image. In his autobiography The Great Betrayal, Brian Cox, the chief figure behind the notorious Black Papers (a series of interventions from the political right that lambasted progressive developments in education, from comprehensive reform to more child-centred teaching methods, published in the 1960s and 70s), describes how he found himself ‘the most hated professor in the country … nicknamed