Pupils at Thomas Telford comprehensive school. Photo: David Jones / PA Archive/Press Association Images. All rights reserved. Selection in secondary education is back. In fact, it never really went away. Even now, private schools and the 160-odd grammar schools that survived the comprehensive schools programme of the 1960s and 70s choose their pupils partly or wholly according to their scores in academic tests. Some academies are allowed to select up to 10% of their intake on the basis of their natural aptitude in areas such as music, languages, or sport.
The prime minister now wants to extend academic selection by authorising new grammar schools to be formed and enabling existing schools to introduce it. She portrays this – candidly enough – as a continuation of reforming conservatism, with its strong focus on individualism and personal striving. As a result, we’ve been treated to a re-run of the old debate between those who are in favour of comprehensive schools because they ‘level up’ all students and those who are against them because they hold back the most able. Since this disagreement is about priorities, not facts, it’s a debate that can never be resolved.
The international evidence – see, for example, this recent summary from the IFS – is that outcomes for disadvantaged (i.e. poor) pupils are better in properly comprehensive schools than in schools in which the most able pupils are not present. This is a compelling argument if the priority is ‘closing the gap’ of educational attainment. It was not surprising, therefore, that when interviewed on BBC radio on 9 September, the new Education Secretary Justine Greening was unable to articulate how grammar schools would improve educational outcomes overall, and sadly was not pressed on the point. However, when she’d finished with jargon such as “21st Century”, “turbo charge”, “smart education”, and even suggesting that the demand for grammar schools was a natural consequence of the Brexit vote, she relented and gave us the good old parental choice argument. I’ve argued elsewhere on oD that consumer choice is not a category that can meaningfully be applied to your children’s education, and I won’t go into that again now. The pertinent question here is not how the education system can uphold consumer freedom, but how it plays into patterns of discrimination. This question has come into sharper focus with the announcement of this new policy.
