By James Coombs
Are we nearly there yet?
In 1964 Harold Wilson’s government announced the end of selection. However, the task of implementing this was given to Local Education Authorities (LEAs) via a circular. Government circulars set out principles and policies but have no legal effect. Like the pirate code they are, “more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.”[1]
The following government under Ted Heath issued another advisory circular saying any decision to end selection lay with the duly elected local authority. Wilson was re-elected in 1974 and reiterated the objective of ending selection via another non-binding circular. That was given a statutory basis by the 1976 Education Act which said, “education is to be provided only in schools where the arrangements for the admission of pupils are not based (wholly or partly) on selection by reference to ability or aptitude.”[2] The 1976 Act was repealed three years later by Margaret Thatcher’s government.
David Blunkett told the 1995 Labour conference there would be no selection, either by examination or interview. Labour’s School Standards and Framework Act (SSFA) 1998 prohibits the creation of any new grammar schools. It also includes provision for local communities to remove existing selection. Several ballots have been attempted but none has ever succeeded.[3] [4] The BBC reported concerns that the rules defining feeder schools were rigged in favour of maintaining the status quo. “… parents at private prep schools can vote, because the schools successfully prepare children for the 11-plus, while Catch-22 means that parents in nearby state primary schools are excluded because the schools have no tradition of sending pupils to grammar school.” [5] Blunkett later clarified that what he had intended to tell conference was no further selection!
Making 150 odd LEAs responsible for delivering a national comprehensive system resulted in a heterogenous shambles. Over three quarters of England’s LEAs do not have a single selective school. Others have just one or two. Nine LEAs were defined in the Education (Grammar School Ballots) Regulations 1998[6] as fully selective areas because at least 25% of children were educated in grammars. In Buckinghamshire and Trafford, that figure is closer to 40%. It is a chaotic mess which is neither selective nor comprehensive. It satisfies neither no-one in a bitter debate normally contended on anecdotal ideological grounds.
The problem facing politicians may stem from an inability to clearly distinguish between phasing out grammar schools, widely seen as providing a superior academic education, and phasing out selection which determines which children are admitted to those schools. No politician would ever argue for the abolition of (the fictious) St Crispin’s Grammar, founded in 1482 which always gets such good exam results.
Even DfE statisticians have fallen into this trap, perhaps pushed by ideological political masters. Their analysis of preferences recorded by parents applying for secondary school places concluded, “The first preference demand for grammar schools, relative to supply, is 49 per cent greater than for non-selective schools.” [7] The report appears objective, but it manifestly fails to address the question it superficially appears to deal with. Faced with a selective system, parents will still prefer the selective school which gets good results. The implication that they are therefore content with a system that forces them to coach their children from an early age is simply non-sequitur.
Social mobility?
The 1944 Education Act was intended to create a tripartite system offering an academic education through grammar schools or technical based schooling along with basic provisions for those children who were neither academic nor technically proficient. Existing grammars were rapidly assimilated into this system but very few technical schools were created. The result was a secondary education system focussed only on academic achievement which defined children at the outset as either successes or failures based on the 11+ test.
This gave rise to an entire industry of prep schools so named because their entire raison d’etre is to prepare children for grammar schools – ie pass the test. In the same way pilot fish owe their existence to sharks, prep schools would never have evolved without selective education. Paying to put children through prep-school is widely seen as a cost-effective way to get the state to pay for secondary education every bit as good as private schools. It is a good investment. Egan and Bunting (1991)[8] found intense coaching resulted in gains of 30 or 40 points in the context of a 100-point scale.
In Kent, which has more grammar schools (32) than any other authority, the council warned schools that such coaching was “not permitted” and that it would ban non-complying schools from hosting the test. That did nothing to prevent them from openly advertising how successful they are at coaching children to pass the test. One school was even admonished by the Advertising Standards Authority, not for openly ignoring the council’s ban on coaching, but for exaggerating how effective it was at doing so.[9]
Labour may have initially welcomed selection believing it would promote social mobility by offering a first-class education to any academically proficient child. However, repeated studies show grammar schools contain far fewer proportions of pupils from deprived backgrounds than other state-funded schools[10] [11] [12].
Faced with such uncomfortable facts, in 2013 Buckinghamshire announced they were introducing new “tutor-proof” tests[13]. It was claimed these tests could assess natural ability[14] and they rapidly gained popularity to the point where Theresa May said, “While there is no such thing as a tutor-proof test, many selective schools are already employing much smarter tests that assess the true potential of every child. So new grammars will be able to select in a fair and meritocratic way, not on the ability of parents to pay.”[15] However, this claim was based entirely on fantasy. The Commons Education Select Committee concluded that attempts at creating a ‘tutor-proof’ test had been unsuccessful and “… that efforts to make the examination less predictable may have the converse effect of encouraging well off parents to pay for more private tuition, further disadvantaging children from poorer backgrounds.”[16]
Far from promoting social cohesion, the evidence shows that grammar schools have the opposite effect leading to former head of Ofsted Sir Michael Wilshaw described them as “stuffed full of middle class kids.”[17]
Expansion by stealth.
Although Parliament outlawed the creation of any new grammar schools, government found creative ways to circumvent this. Changes to the Schools Admissions code in 2012 made it easier for schools to expand. In 2015, Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, approved the Weald of Kent Grammar to create an ‘annexe’ 10 miles away in Sevenoaks. A decision which would not have been out of place in an episode of Yes Minister. In 2018 the Times reported, “Grammars paid 20 times more to expand than comprehensives”.[18] The article explains how the Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) supposedly intended for stopping roofs collapsing or boilers exploding had been used for school expansion. Half the expansion spending went to the handful of remaining grammar schools. Theresa May’s government announce £50m per year funding to expand grammar schools on the strict undertaking that they admit more disadvantaged children. Those benefits do not seem to have materialised.[19] [20]
The underrepresentation of disadvantaged children in grammar schools is not contested. Addressing that was one of the key factors in the May government’s 2016 Green Paper. What is open to debate is whether the proposed policy would address it.[21] When challenged by Teacher Tapp’s self-confessed education evidence geek Karen Wespieser, Theresa May reportedly shut down the debate by saying, “You can have all the evidence in the world, but headteachers have told me grammar schools are good for disadvantaged pupils.”[22]
The reasoning behind this seemingly ideological fixation on just one type of school based on how it selects its pupils is not immediately obvious. However, viewed in the wider context of a decade of austerity and 9% real terms reduction in education funding[23] Jon Andrews from the Education Policy Institute suggests it is a promise of ‘jam tomorrow’.[24] It is easier to create more grammar school places and nebulously argue this will give poorer children better opportunities in the future by which time it is far too late to judge the efficacy of the policy. That is considerably easier than raising taxes to support a properly funded education system.
Parental choice?
“The world has been fundamentally reordered by widespread neoliberal economics that has privatized basic public goods – social protections, education, pensions and criminal justice among them – with often disastrous impacts on the human rights of the extremely poor.”[25]
The widespread acceptance of this maxim, that public services can only operate efficiently when there is an element of competition has arguably driven the biggest social upheaval since the second world war. Thatcher’s 1988 Great Education Reform Bill applied this ‘market based’ approach to education by making schools compete with one another for pupils and the funding they attract.
The problem is that, unlike grocery shopping, parents can’t just switch to a different school this week if last week’s trigonometry was a bit off, like the cabbages on aisle 13. Parental choice is a myth. Schools choose pupils. In 1988, when Thatcher’ bill was passed, 15% of schools acted as their own admissions authority. A decade later that had doubled to 30%[26]. The Academy program stripped away any vestige of accountability. 95% of secondary schools now determine their own admissions.
The other major flaw in this policy is as Goodhart’s law observes, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. Year after year, national media publish articles praising the “top 100 state schools” based on raw GCSE results. Fiona Millar wrote about the bewildering complexity of admissions and how different criteria were used and abused.[27] Millar observed that, “the pressure of the performance tables has led to some schools finding ingenious ways of using their freedoms to improve intakes.” In the case of academic selection, the school does not even need to be ingenious. Unsurprisingly, research shows that by far the strongest predictor of attainment at age 16 is attainment at age 11. “This seems to confuse some commentators, members of the public and even policy-makers who assume that the good results are largely due to what happens in the school rather than the nature of the children selected.” [28]
Children need to learn critical thinking skills, how to collaborate, derivative subsumption, creativity and far more proficiencies that exams don’t even touch. Sociologist William Bruce Cameron nailed it, “Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.”[29] Our market-based education system is divisive. It pits schools against each other to create winners and losers. It is informed by lazy journalists incapable of looking beyond raw GCSE results which predominantly test knowledge acquisition in an age where this is available at the click of a mouse. Grammar schools are “good” because they select the right sort of pupils.
Ending selection
“As a result of the academies policy, a transparent national system of maintained schools, where schools operated to a single legal model (with modest variations), had their own legal identity and management, and were overseen by democratically elected local authorities, has been transformed into a highly opaque part-locally administered system and a part-centrally controlled system of academies.”[30]
Sixty years of political football between the two main political parties has resulted in an education system which is neither selective nor comprehensive. On top of that academisation has systematically removed any accountability replacing this with an anarchic system in which schools compete with one another for limited resources like the dystopian Hunger Games but less lethal.
The first step to reforming this Kafkaesque monstrosity must be removing control of admissions from the schools. Even die-hard Thatcherites must see the fundamental flaw in that. Regional independent admissions authorities need to be created that can take a holistic view about what is best for the area rather than individual schools gaming the system to their own advantage. These admission authorities need to be overseen by democratically elected bodies. Sounds familiar?
Renationalising academies will remove ‘top slicing’ which currently diverts public spending away from educating children. Six of the largest LEAs, responsible for educating nearly half a million children each had just one person being paid over £130,000 (director of children’s services.) The largest 19 Multi-Academy Trusts also responsible for educating the same number of children apparently need 106 executives paid over £130,000.[31]
Once accountability for admissions has been restored, the government will be able to finally deliver Blunkett’s promise from 1995. “Read my lips: no selection, either by examination or interview …”
James Coombs originally graduated from the London College of Music, works in IT, and has a Masters degree in Data Science from Buckingham University. He is on the steering committee of Comprehensive Future where he helps interpret education-based data. He regularly uses Freedom of Information to hold public authorities to account, and has a passion for public interest, transparency, and equity in education.
[1] Barbossa H. The Curse of the Black Pearl, 2003.
[2] 1986 Education Act https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1976/81/enacted
[3] BBC News, Parents vote to keep grammar school, March 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/673218.stm
[4] TES Magazine, Grammar respite as ballot bid founders, July 2000 https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/grammar-respite-ballot-bid-founders
[5] BBE News, How grammar school ballots work. October 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7033652.stm
[6] The Education (Grammar School Ballots) Regulations 1998 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1998/2876/made
[7] DfE brief: Analysis of secondary school-level applications and offers data by school type, England, 2019. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/secondary-school-preferences-by-school-type-2019
[8] Egan, M. & Bunting, B. (1991) The Effects of Coaching on 11+ Scores British Journal of Educational Psychology, 61, 85-91, https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-8279.1991.tb00963.x
[9] Schools Week, Kent private schools ignore 11-plus tutoring ban. Oct 2016. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/kent-private-schools-ignore-11-plus-tutoring-ban/
[10] Atkinson, Gregg and McConnell. The result of 11 plus selection; An Investigation into Equity and Efficiency of Outcome for Pupils in Selective LEAs (2004)
[11] Cribb et al. Poor Grammar. Entry into Grammar Schools for disadvantaged pupils in England (2013)
[12] Andrews, Hutchison, Johnes, Grammar schools and social mobility (2016)
[13] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-21292570
[14] Millar F, ‘Tutor-proof’ 11-plus professor admits grammar school test doesn’t work’ Guardian, Sept 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/12/tutor-11plus-test-grammar-schools-disadvantaged-pupils
[15] https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/britain-the-great-meritocracy-prime-ministers-speech
[16] House of Commons Education Select Committed. Academic Evidence on Selective Secondary Education. December 2016 https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/POST-PB-0022/POST-PB-0022.pdf
[17] Ofsted chief: grammar schools ‘stuffed’ with middle class, Channel 4 news, Dec 2013.
[18] Grammars paid 20 times more to expand than comprehensives. The Times July 2018. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/grammars-paid-20-times-more-to-expand-than-comprehensives-qr8m3vf0j
[19] The Guardian. Grammar school expansion still locking out the poor. Feb 2019.
[20] The Independent. Proportion of poorer children falls in grammar schools receiving £50m expansion funding, data suggests July 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/grammar-schools-poorer-children-expansion-fund-social-mobility-government-a8990701.html
[21] Grammar school expansion still locking out the poor. The Guardian Feb 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/feb/26/grammar-school-expansion-still-locking-out-the-poor
[22] Independent May 2017 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/theresa-may-grammar-school-research-evidence-general-election-twitter-karen-wespieser-nfer-maidenhead-duck-derby-a7750026.html
[23] https://ifs.org.uk/news/school-spending-pupil-2024-remain-3-below-2010-levels-real-terms-once-you-account-actual-costs
[24] https://schoolsweek.co.uk/the-evidence-that-exposes-calls-to-bring-back-grammar-schools/
[25] United Nations. World Altered by ‘Neoliberal’ Outsourcing of Public Services to Private Sector, Third Committee Experts Stress, amid Calls for Better Rights Protection. October 2018, https://press.un.org/en/2018/gashc4239.doc.htm
[26] West A & Hind A 2003, Secondary school admissions in England: Exploring the extent of overt and covert selection, Centre for Educational Research Department of Social Policy London School of Economics and Political Science
[27] Millar F. School places: a guide through the minefield of admissions. The Guardian, Oct 2014 https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/oct/07/choice-schools-children-parents-admissions-selection
[28] Gorard, S. and Siddiqui, N. (2018) Grammar schools in England: a new analysis of social segregation and academic outcomes, British journal of sociology of education. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2018.1443432
[29] Cameron W. Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking, 1963 Random House, New York.
[30] West, A. and Wolfe, D. (2019) ‘Academies, autonomy, equality and democratic accountability: Reforming the fragmented publicly funded school system in England’. London Review of Education, 17 (1): 70–86. DOI https://doi.org/10.18546/LRE.17.1.06
[31] Campaign for State Education. Class divide. Private Eye, May 2023.
