The Truth About Our Schools

Exposing the myths, exploring the evidence

Melissa Benn, Janet Downs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138937178
• eBook ISBN: 9781317331759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"A superb, crucial, blistering expose of all the myths about our education system that are all too often used to attack it. Melissa Benn again proves why she is one of country's most formidable education campaigners - and why the powerful should fear her.

Owen Jones, Guardian columnist and best-selling author

Never has it been more urgent to publicise the truth about what works and doesn't work in our education system. Debunking the ideology of marketisation, and exposing the half-truths that pass for objective reporting, Benn and Downs meticulously lay out the evidence: that a national system of comprehensive schools delivers the best outcomes. This hugely important book should be required reading for each new Education Secretary.

Caroline Lucas, MP

Opinions about comprehensive education are often made into easy-to-swallow sound-bites by media and politicians alike and whilst the benefits of a genuinely comprehensive education for all pupils are obvious, untruths have unwittingly evolved into hard facts. Based on Melissa Benn and Janet Downs' work as part of the pioneering Local Schools Network, The Truth About Our Schools calls for us to urgently and articulately challenge unquestioned myths about state education. Benn and Downs have meticulously built an argument for its still enormously vital role, and rigorously challenge assumptions that:

• Comprehensive education has failed
• Local authorities control and hold back schools
• Choice, competition and markets are the route to educational success
• Choice will improve education in England: the free school model.
• Academies raise standards
• Teachers don't need qualifications
• Private schools have the magic DNA
• Progressive education lowers standards

Anyone who thinks that comprehensive education cannot deliver, that local authorities are the chief block to improving our school system, that competition and markets are the route to educational success and that private schools hold the magic DNA that can simply be transferred to other state schools will have their beliefs shaken by this blisteringly incisive book.

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MYTH NUMBER 1 Comprehensive education has failed

DOI: 10.4324/9781315658674-1

Reading today’s newspapers or listening to or watching our media, you could be forgiven for believing that comprehensive education has been a widespread and resounding failure in this country. Contemporary commentary, from the boldest headlines to the passing casual phrase, has a repetitive one-note quality: ‘Schoolchildren “being failed by comprehensive education”’; ¹ ‘Comprehensive schools failing poor pupils’; ² ‘Comprehensive schools have failed the working class’; ³ ‘What about the comprehensive failures?’; ⁴ ‘A choice in which the only option ends up being the failing local comprehensive is no choice at all’. ⁵ According to one recent critique, it is ‘generally regarded’ as a ‘disaster’. ⁶

Even articles that purport to be sympathetic to non-selective education will nonetheless employ emotive language – ‘Kent boasts the highest number of grammar schools’ ⁷ – or metaphors more appropriate to the battlefield as when referring to ‘grammar schools which survived the drive towards comprehensive education’. ⁸ One well-known memoir of a comprehensive education bears the rather worrying title, Comp: A Survivor’s Tale. ⁹ Even some Labour leaders have been tempted to use unhelpfully emotive imagery – former Prime Minister Tony Blair talked about the phasing out of selective education as an act ‘pretty close to academic vandalism’. ¹⁰ Other arguments verge on the patently ridiculous, such as columnist Peter Hitchen’s claim that ‘the comprehensive system is anti-education’ ¹¹ or novelist Tony Parson’s bizarre assertion, taking the battlefield metaphor to its bloodiest extreme, that going to a comprehensive is ‘a start in life right up there with dying at the Somme’. ¹²

But such assumptions and distortions simply don’t stand up to careful scrutiny. Worse, they obscure a sober assessment of everything from the history of our school system to the structural nature of the labour market, the relationship between economic and educational inequality and the reality of thousands of state schools today. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the majority of editors and prominent commentators who promote an anti-comprehensive rhetoric are privately educated or have chosen private or selective education for their own children.)

Meanwhile, almost every social problem, from the impact of poverty and rising inequality on educational outcomes to classrooms in poor repair is laid at the door of state education, particularly non-selective schools, and despite compelling expert evidence to the contrary, most commentators still recklessly assert that comprehensive reform is responsible for the stalling of ‘social mobility’ in the UK. But as Diane Ravitch writes in response to similar political assaults on public (state-funded) education in the United States, ‘public education is . . . not “broken”. Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only as far as this . . . narrative of crisis has destabilized it.’ ¹³

That is why, in place of the half-truths that pass for objective reporting, we need to draw on the wealth of evidence and human examples that tell a very different story. From this we will see that far from having bred educational failure, the (still unfinished) comprehensive revolution has laid the basis for the potential educational success of the vast majority of young people today.

The principle of comprehensive education is simple. Every child, whatever their social background or apparent intelligence or talents, should have equal access to a well-resourced, broad and balanced education from the earliest years to the age of 18 (from 2015, the legal age for participation in education or training). It is morally and practically wrong to decide a child’s potential, ability or direction in life before puberty. All young people should be well taught and wisely guided throughout adolescence so that they can (begin to) pursue their true passions and talents. Comprehensive education also sends out an important message about children being educated together: that regardless of class, faith, ethnic background, prior attainment, all children should walk through the same gates to school.

This interlinked set of simple but powerful ideas forms the basis of some of the most successful education systems in the world including Canada, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. International studies confirm that comprehensive systems and all-ability schools are the most likely to narrow the educational attainment between social classes and that the more and the earlier that an education system divides its children by so-called ‘academic ability’, the greater the gap between the resultant achievements of children from different social backgrounds. The OECD found that ‘Early student selection has a negative impact on students assigned to lower tracks and exacerbates inequities, without raising average performance. Early student selection should be deferred to upper secondary education while reinforcing comprehensive schooling.’ ¹⁴

Where the selective principle still operates within the UK – 15 local authorities still retain the 11+ and 164 grammars remain – the evidence strongly suggests that it largely benefits the affluent, widens the gulf between the better and less well-off and does long-term harm to the economic prospects of the poorer members of those communities in which selective systems exist. ¹⁵ Grammars increase social divides and harm the educational and economic chances of the majority of the population in the area where they are located: ‘Individuals who do not make it to the grammar school do worse than they would have done if they had grown up in an area with a comprehensive school system.’ ¹⁶

Comprehensive reform was the result of growing dissatisfaction with the 1944 settlement which, while establishing the crucial right to universal free education, was structured around the separation of children at puberty according to their presumed talents and ability. The 11+ exam decided if a child was to be sent to an academically-oriented grammar school or a secondary modern where the curriculum was less demanding and few, if any, exams and qualifications were on offer. A third option – the technical schools – never really took off in this post-war period, although the idea is enjoying a kind of revival with the new studio schools and University Technical Colleges.

The 11+ divided young people before puberty but with lifetime consequences and largely along class lines. The long-term effect of failing the 11+ has been described by John Prescott: ‘The message was that suddenly you are less than they are. It tends to leave you with an inferiority complex.’ ¹⁷ Recent research by a website offering learning for those aged 50+ found that this effect is common even 40 years on:

Of those who failed the 11+, 36 per cent said they still ‘lacked the confidence’ to undertake further education and training courses, while 13 per cent insisted the experience ‘put them off learning for life’. Some 45 per cent of adults with poor 11+ results said they still carried ‘negative feelings with them into their fifties, sixties and beyond’, it was revealed. ¹⁸

We need to look much more closely, then, at the so-called ‘golden age’ of the grammar schools in the 1950s. Although a minority of lower middle class and an even smaller proportion of working-class children did gain entry to grammar schools, ‘places tended to go to the sons and daughters of professional business men/women’. ¹⁹ Not only were the majority of working-class children channeled into the less well-resourced and less well-regarded secondary moderns, but as former head Adrian Elliott recounts in his book on state education since the 1950s, academic results in the grammar schools themselves were under par. Those working-class children who did get into a grammar often gained fewer qualifications and left school much earlier. ²⁰ As Elliott states,

According to the Crowther Report in the late ’50s a staggering 38 per cent of grammar school pupils failed to achieve more than three passes at O-level . . . It is clear that of the entire cohort of 16-year-olds at this time, only about 9 per cent achieved five or more O-levels and that less than half of those who attended grammar schools reached this benchmark. ²¹

These figures, say Elliott, were national averages and so included some of the most high-achieving grammars of the period.

Opposition to the 11+ grew during the 1950s as academics increasingly questioned the evidential basis of the exam itself and ever larger numbers of vocal middle-class parents became unhappy when their children were consigned to clearly ‘inferior schools’. The journalist Simon Jenkins has written about the ‘gilded myth’ of the grammars, and reminds us that

At political meetings at the end of the 1960s, the—then education spokesman—Edward Boyle was torn limb from limb by conservative voters, infuriated that their children who had ‘failed’ the 11+ were being sent to secondary moderns, along with 70–80 per cent of each age group. They had regarded the grammars as ‘their schools’. The 11+, they said, lost them the 1964 election and would lose them every one until it was abolished. Margaret Thatcher recognised this as has every Tory party in practice ever since. ²²

Simon Jenkins also reminds us of the bi-partisan nature of reform during the late 1960s and 1970s with both Conservative and Labour local authorities backing the move to ‘all-in’ schools. Across the political spectrum it was realised that, properly organised, and sufficiently resourced, ‘all-in’ schools could give many more children the chance to thrive, academically and socially.

Comprehensive reform was never fully achieved. Even today, in 2014, a significant number of grammars remain, together with a small but powerful private sector that educates 7 per cent of the population. Nevertheless, from the ’60s onwards, comprehensive reform had a major impact on the chances of the majority. First, most children in this country were not told that they were failures before they had reached puberty and therefore were deliberately to be consigned to second-rate schools. Second, the advent of comprehensive education endowed those same young people, who would previously have been written off as wholly without skills or talents, with the chance to acquire a range of knowledge and qualifications and the confidence to continue enjoying learning. Coupled with a progressively higher school leaving age, it gave many more young people the chance to gain qualifications so that the percentage of young people gaining five O-levels (or GCSEs) rose from 23 per cent in 1976 to 81 per cent in 2008. ²³

According to Brian Simon, an early advocate of comprehensive education,

the concept of a common curriculum for all . . . was a major objective of the whole comprehensive reform movement of the 1960s and 1970s [and earlier]. This movement was primarily concerned to prevent shutting off access to full life opportunities for considerable proportions of the nation’s youth. ²⁴

This it did, in spectacular fashion. The number of students in education at age 17 grew from 31 per cent in 1977 to 76 per cent in 2011 and those achieving a degree rose from 68,000 in 1981 to 331,000 in 2010, an almost five-fold increase. ²⁵ Both the percentage and absolute number of working-class men and women who went to university in the 1970s increased for the first time since the 1930s. ²⁶

Jenny Chapman, the Labour MP for Darlington, spoke of the human side of this expansion, in a debate on social mobility in the House of Commons in 2010:

five or six years ago there were one or two wards where a young woman of eighteen or nineteen wou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Reviews Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Myth number 1: Comprehensive education has failed
• Myth number 2: Local authorities control and hold back schools
• Myth number 3: Choice, competition and markets are the route to educational success
• Myth number 4: Choice will improve education in England: the free school model
• Myth number 5: Academies raise standards
• Myth number 6: Teachers don’t need qualifications
• Myth number 7: Private schools have the magic DNA
• Myth number 8: Progressive education lowers standards
• Afterword
• Foreword to articles
• Fiona Millar – Want fairer school admissions? Then stop tinkering and scrap all selection
• Francis Gilbert – Debate: is a teaching qualification needed to teach? The Expert Opinion
• Henry Stewart – Should schools compete or collaborate?
• Janet Downs – Gove distorts history to ‘prove’ teenagers are ignorant of history
• Melissa Benn – We need to tackle brazen elitism to help poorer children
• Index