Rowan Moore’s metaphor was a sound one. Behind the glitzy shop-window dressing of the Coalition’s school plans, with their relentless harping on novelty and freedom, there was a deeper and darker agenda. While a British Social Attitudes survey published six months after the 2010 election found that public satisfaction with both health and education had improved dramatically over the past twenty years,11 elements of the Coalition Government set out ruthlessly to undermine public confidence in public services. In order to justify rapid and widespread change, it was vital to the new right that it paint an apocalyptic picture of state education, and project an image of the nation’s schools as places of intellectual mediocrity when not given over to anarchy and indiscipline. Here, it was building on an often dishonourable national prejudice that stretches back decades. Adrian Elliott worked as a head for over twenty years, and found that the public message on schools remained remarkably unchanged over that period; state schools and those who worked in them were a disaster. ‘If anything, the portrayal of state education in England by the media, politicians and business leaders has become more negative. Criticisms [now] appear almost daily in books, newspapers, journals and the broadcast media.’12
In a piece for the New Statesman in 2010, Fiona Millar and I looked at the typical image of state schools presented in the press. We found a consistent picture of despair: ‘discarded needles, enforced mediocrity, petty bullying, too much political correctness, not enough Jesus or competitive sport: a distorted picture put out daily by a press and broadcasting media, few of whose leaders use the system they so relentlessly traduce.’ We highlighted a piece in the Sunday Times by one of the paper’s war correspondents, Christina Lamb, who asked the question, ‘What’s wrong with winning?’ In it, Lamb explained in anguished prose why she had to move her son from a state to a private school. The main problem, according to Lamb, was the lack of any competitive drive within what was, by her own account, a happy primary school, led by a ‘firm headmistress and young, dedicated teachers’. Forced to resort to ‘subterfuge’ in order to find out her son’s overall ranking in the class, Lamb was later dismayed to find that on sports day, ‘instead of racing against each other, the children were put into teams with a mix of different ages … with each team doing different activities.’13
Such worrying experiences forced Lamb to apply to the nearby oversubscribed private school, where she was deeply reassured by the head’s boasting about everything from sporting achievements to A grades to Oxbridge entrance successes. Lamb makes much of her own state education and avowed abhorrence of the ‘two-tier’ system of education in this country. This theme of reluctant conversion is a common one, with minor variants. A piece by Will Self in the Evening Standard in October 2009 was headlined: ‘I’m a diehard lefty but my son is going to private school’. Having described the reasons why he had to take his son out of a state primary, Self concluded that he could not be accused of hypocrisy, on the apparently watertight grounds that he had never actually believed that state education was an engine of social change. One of the sadder stories in this genre was by William Miller, the middle-aged son of the writer, television presenter and theatre and opera director Jonathan Miller, who, in the Mail on Sunday in February 2009—under the banner headline ‘Atrocious lessons and daily bullying … why I won’t send my children to a state school’—castigated his father for propounding a ‘a mistaken ideology’. According to Miller, he and his two siblings were ‘the victims of the most cavalier of social experiments’: they had been sent to a comprehensive. William Miller was at school in the 1970s. State schools are very different places today. No tales of bullying or poor teaching in a public school over thirty years ago would be used to condemn private education today; they would more probably be filed away under Interesting and Irrelevant Social History, or used to demonstrate the many improvements that have occurred within the sector in the years since.
Every story of this kind relies on often unchallengeable anecdotal detail. Little place is given to the part played by parenting, personality or other behind-the-scenes factors or tensions. According to these writers, and dozens more like them, it is the school and the school alone that causes a child’s lack of achievement or unhappiness. The reader also has no way to address the clear contradictions that arise between these stories. Lamb’s son was in an admittedly happy, co-operative primary where, according to his mother, his ruthless edge was not being sufficiently sharpened. Self’s son was allegedly bullied and tested to the extreme. Miller blames his lack of an academic education on his middle-class parents, while other newspaper features will regularly castigate the middle class for claiming that the state education system, rather than their own privilege and efforts, enabled them to achieve good results. Parents who send their children to inner-city state schools no longer appear vaguely daring so much as disingenuous and dishonest, as Martin Samuel in The Times has argued, because they ruthlessly exploit their own affluence and connections to cover up their children’s poor education.
The real politics of education is never openly discussed in such articles. Lamb declares herself impressed by ‘the astonishing range of facilities and activities’ on offer at the private school she finally chooses for her son. Yet the resource argument, central to the privilege and achievements of the private sector, is treated as a marginal element in her decision, rather than being woven objectively into the story. Even the smallest private school spends about twice what the state sector spends on each pupil, currently around £6,000 a year in England. At the top end of the market, fees are £30,000 a year for boarders. Many private day schools will charge half that.
Similarly, stories of struggling state schools are presented out of context, as if a set of teachers and local authority officials got together and deliberately decided to create a bad school, to prove beyond doubt that comprehensive education really is the engine of mediocrity. Only passing reference is made to the extraordinarily complex issues of school choice, admissions policies, funding or the huge impact that poverty has on the ability of so many children to learn. Part of the fresh attack launched by the Coalition and their allies on state schools involves the claim that poverty is used as an excuse, not by the poor themselves, but by the do-gooding middle class, who actively prevent rigorous learning from taking place; whereas in ‘good’ schools, home background would, of course, form no barrier to learning.
It is not just newspapers that misrepresent our schools. Comprehensives get a rough, sensationalist ride from modern TV. Waterloo Road, the prime-time soap opera, features the popular actress Amanda Burton as no-nonsense super-head Karen Fisher. While Fisher is appealing, her school is not. It has, over time, been both set on fire and demolished by a digger; its lockers are sprayed with graffiti, its students peddle drugs, and its often raddled-looking teachers have the temerity to belong to a trade union.
Two best-selling novels of recent years reinforce this general picture of an out-of-control pupil population in league with the politically motivated, professionally incompetent, or both. The North London school featured in Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, published in 2003, is a den of chaos and appallingly low standards where ‘last year we had 240 pupils sit their GCSEs, and exactly six of them achieved anything higher than a grade E pass.’ Not, then, a fictional representation of Heller’s own North London comprehensive, Haverstock School, which educated among others Oona King and David and Ed Miliband. Mercilessly lampooning the comprehensive school staff as either cynical and weary or sentimental and naive, this supremely English novel reads less like satire than a prolonged act of casual, conservative vandalism.14
But St George’s, Heller’s fictional school, seems like bliss compared to the hellhole featured in Sebastian Faulks’s best-selling state-of-the-nation novel A Week in December (2009). Radley Graves, an alcoholic, internet-addicted teacher works at a chaotic South London comprehensive in the ‘Lewisham/Catford overlap’ where ‘the kids were allowed to come in late to lessons … to talk pretty much unchecked through a class … not to work if they didn’t fancy it.’15 The school football team even plays a fixture against St Michael and All Angels, a real school which achieved notoriety when teacher Katharine Birbalsingh spoke publicly about some of its pupils at the Tory Party conference. It has since been announced that the school is to close, following a sharp drop in applications.
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