Should grammar schools be abolished?
Would it be an attack on working-class aspirations, given that not many working-class kids actually go there?
In 2013, Jack Deasley took the 11+ test to get into his local grammar school, and failed. At the age of 18, he took a mock 11+ out of curiosity and failed again.
Which is strange, given he managed to get three A* at A-level and got a first-class degree in History and Politics at the University of Cambridge.
“The 11+ isn’t a test of your ability,” says Jack, but how well you’ve been “drilled” at taking exams, often with the help of private tuition. “It was developed by Cyril Burt, a prominent eugenicist who argued that some people have an ‘innate intelligence’ and it’s a test that is scientifically flawed.”
That Jack went on to achieve such academic success does support the idea that the test doesn’t accurately gauge ability… but also suggests that if you do fail it - don’t worry. You could still end up at Cambridge.
But 12 years after his 11+ experience, Jack is part of Time’s Up For The Test, a campaign to ban grammar schools, because while he acknowledges that he managed to ‘subvert the system’, many of his friends didn’t.
Jack is from Lincolnshire, which has 16 grammar schools - a lot for one county - and says that this creates a two-tier system where the kids who ‘don’t make it’ feel like second-class citizens. Jack had only moved to the county three weeks before taking the test, which he thinks is one reason why he wasn’t too negatively impacted by failing. Whether he went to a grammar or ‘secondary modern’ (the name given to non-selective schools in highly selective areas) wasn’t “baked” into his early education experience, he says, or his ideas of what being clever or successful meant. Whereas his friends who also failed, “had their aspirations completely changed as a result,” he says. “They’d been told at 10 years’ old that they weren’t academic. They weren’t good at the things we value most.”
Filmmaker and education campaigner Madeleine Holt is part of Time’s Up For The Test alongside Jack, and says that just last week she listened to an academy trust CEO who has one secondary modern in his chain describe how at that school in particular the year 7 pupils stand out for their lack of confidence. They turn up to the start of their secondary experience thinking, “I am a failure,” says Madeleine.
Both Madeleine and Jack are also part of the Comprehensive Future campaign that has an interactive map highlighting every grammar school in the country: 163 in total, roughly 5% of state secondaries. So not huge when considered in isolation, but when a state-funded school caters only to a select, often elite, proportion, it has a knock-on effect.
I know this fairly well because my ‘local state school’ is Queen Elizabeth Boys’, one of the most selective grammars in the country that has around 4,000 applicants apply for just 180 places each year.
I’ve wasted many a working hour drawn into Mumsnet forums about the school, where whether it’s an ‘exam factory filled with unhappy children,’ or somewhere that offers an elite education to boys who can hack the pace is hotly debated.
Either way, given those admissions odds one thing for certain is you are not getting in without significant tutoring.
And this costs significant money, which is why only 4% of pupils there qualify for free school meals (compared to 32% at the neighbouring school) and 15% didn’t go to a state primary school, so most likely were privately educated.
This is a pattern repeated across the country, with the BBC reporting that a quarter of grammars have less than 5% of pupils from deprived backgrounds.
So while QE Boys is touted in the media as the ‘best state school in the country’, and while it counts in my local authority’s state-school offering (despite 76% of pupils living outside of it), and while our taxes pay for it, it doesn’t really operate like a state school, does it?
Particularly given that it’s just announced it will be opening a subsidiary in Dubai, which will charge pupils up to £32,000 per year, a proportion of which will be funnelled back to the school via its parent charity. Two more such schools are to open in India.
This kind of move is normally the reserve of independent schools, and QE Boys will be the first ‘state’ to do the same. So in a climate where schools are desperately short of money, QE Boys has demonstrated that the highly selective approach quite literally pays off.
Other grammars will likely try and follow suit, but even state schools at large are becoming covertly more selective in order to cultivate a more impressive reputation to attract more pupils and get more funding. “There’s all these little techniques that some comprehensives are using to try and change their demographic,” says Madeleine, referencing inner-city schools with “rowing scholarships even though they’re miles away from Thames,” while others have music, dance and language scholarships. While state school sixth forms are now becoming highly selective too, such as Brampton Manor Academy in East Ham.
And again, we have the knock-on effect, as the more competitive comprehensive sixth forms become, the more potential there is for pupils to get displaced through no fault of their own. Just recently I heard about a 14-year-old kid who knew that, while they would likely pass their GCSEs well, they wouldn’t be welcome to stay on to take A-levels at their own school. This adds another layer of pressure, uncertainty and sense of inadequacy not because the pupil is struggling academically, but because the school now only wants the best. (Or, ahem, the most tutored.)
And what about behind the scenes at these highly selective state sixth forms? I’ve spoken to a number of former pupils who say the pressure to get into the most elite universities was so intense that it seriously impacted their mental health. One 23-year-old, for instance, said her friends who were pushed to get into Oxbridge couldn’t handle it once they were there. Not because they didn’t have the academic ability, but because they were burnt out, or socially and emotionally unprepared. They either dropped out, she said, or were kicked out.
There also tends to be a bit of game-playing at these schools to help ‘up’ their Oxbridge pipeline, says Jack. For instance, “it’s notoriously difficult to get kids into Cambridge to study computer science,” and he knows of a state school with a highly selective sixth form that has just dropped the subject completely. That subject doesn’t help the school, so it’s gone, says Jack, while subjects that are historically easier to get into Cambridge with, like land economy, are encouraged. In a Varsity article this year, it was found that psychological and behavioural sciences; education; mathematics and land economy all had the highest representation of state-school kids, while those with the highest private school intake were classics; music and theology; religion and philosophy of religion.
But if being highly selective can help some state schools’ reputation, it can benefit prestigious universities who are under pressure to increase their non-privately-educated intake.
Of course, we want Oxbridge and Russell Group unis to be less elitist, but when Cambridge was at its peak enrolling almost three-quarters of its students from state-schools, closer inspection revealed that almost half of them were from London and the South East, including grammar schools…
So not privately educated, but certainly still privileged.
Then there’s the issue of ‘state-washing’. Anyone watching Amandaland might have also done a ‘PAH!’ at the screen when she says taking her kids out of private school was the best thing she could’ve done for them, because “they’ve got way more chance getting into Oxbridge from a bog-standard state.” This is a joke based on a stereotype, but if it’s made its way into mainstream comedy it’s because it’s not totally unheard of for wealthy parents to privately educate their kids up until GCSE stage, then put them into a state sixth form, in the hope that they might have more chance of being accepted into social mobility quotas…
Cambridge University has acknowledged its failure to tackle elitism, scrapping its state-school quota last year to create a more in-depth approach. What this will look like is unclear, but a spokesperson suggested the university would use data to assess whether potential students had “access to greater support or whether they had been left to find the path themselves”.
I love that phrase, because while it’s easy to roll our eyes at Amanda-type tiger mums gaming the system, in reality some parents are just better placed than others to help their children find the path, in all kinds of ways. But that’s not any child’s fault so our education system needs to mitigate the impact of social inequalities, rather than entrench them. And I agree with Madeleine and Jack that abolishing grammars and ending selective schools will play a big part in that.
“The state education system should be offering schools for everyone, because all taxpayers are paying for them,” says Madeleine. Bridget Phillipson says she wants an inclusive system, she adds, “so how can you possibly justify grammar schools? The percentage of kids they take on with additional needs is minute.” (0.6% at QE Boys, against an average in the area of 9%).
There is a schools white paper underway, which “is apparently going to have something on fairer admissions,” says Madeleine, so here’s hoping it will scrutinise the growing use of selection. And in terms of the 163 official grammars left, the Labour party are too scared of the attacks that would follow if they try to abolish them, says Jack, due to their status as “symbols of working-class aspiration.”
And status and symbolism is everything in our damagingly competitive education system, but that’s one for another post.
Thanks for reading, and I always love to hear from people on the frontline - teachers and students at any kind of school, and I’m really interested in the UK’s tutoring industry at the moment so do get in touch with your insight - anything can be anonymous if preferred.
Ps - There’s no obvious segue for this one but for anyone interested in kids and tech, I had an article in Prospect last week week about how children are being commercially exploited via social media and gaming apps: read it here.