No-one thought school system through

JOHN Healey’s piece (Letters to the Editor, November 7) caught my eye last week, especially his references to the crystal clear evidence about education segregation.  In his letter he infers that only ‘Thatcherite Tories’ were in favour of grammar schools and talks dismissively of educational apartheid. ‘On message’ for a Labour MP, but not entirely correct and I was surprised that there was no challenge to his view.

It wasn’t only Tories (Thatcherite or otherwise) who were puzzled by the abolition of selective education. There was a considerable groundswell of opinion in Rotherham in favour of retaining the grammar school. Single issue independent candidates won over 40 per cent of the vote in some wards in council elections around 1960. And the question was: How did anybody think that the education system would be improved by getting rid of the best bit? It made no sense then except perhaps to the likes of Manny Shinwell, and it makes no sense now unless you favour the politics of envy.

The aim was laudable enough; the pursuance of a fairer society in which everybody was offered the same opportunities. Unfortunately nobody bothered to think it through. There was, after all, a point of principle to be defended. It didn’t matter one jot whether the opportunities suited the aptitudes and aspirations of the student, only that everybody was offered the same. That was only fair, wasn’t it. And furthermore, only that was fair. Right?

But it wasn’t grammar schools that were the problem, they worked very well.  It was the secondary moderns that were failing. Universally known as ‘the scrapheap’ (a message which was overheard and understood by their pupils), they offered a poor imitation of the grammar school curriculum rather than something more tailored to the wants and needs of their intake. And yet it was the scrapheaps that were retained.  Why?  A more thoughtful would have been to leave the grammar schools alone and to lavish similar care and attention on the secondary moderns.

Incidentally, if we had taken that route our universities might still be centres of excellence where the academically gifted go to learn how to think rather than ... but let’s not go there just now.

What happened was that selective education was abolished and the newly styled comprehensives tasked with the delivery of a quasi grammar school education.  However, nothing was done to ensure that they were equipped for the job. Almost two years after the programme started, the staff at some Rotherham comprehensives still did not include language or science teachers. And some teachers who were in place were, by common consent, not up to the job of teaching any academic discipline to examination standard.

Generations of Rotherham school children were sacrificed to the unquestioning certainties of the hard left who made ‘one size fits all’ education a moral crusade.  The inevitable outcome was that some thrived whilst others disengaged, becoming resentful and disruptive in the process.

Unfortunately, and despite what Mr Healey thinks, there is nothing crystal clear about any evidence regarding education systems. So far only theory and dogma have survived and the dogma is under challenge because the advent of social mobility which coincided with the advent of grammar schools seems to have declined coincidentally with their abolition. It has been suggested that there is a link.

The one thing that was regrettable about the grammar/secondary modern school arrangement was the insidious elitist segregation that was practiced.  For example, the school football and cricket teams only ever played their own kind (so to speak, and forgive me for not finding a better way of saying that)  The secondary moderns all played each other but nobody else, whilst the Grammar and the Technical High Schools arranged (prestigious?) fixtures with the grammar schools of Sheffield, Chesterfield, Doncaster and so on.

Something wonderful might come of it if our representatives in Westminster and at the town hall would look again, with an open mind, at the benefits of the grammar school and a properly thought out selective education system. Who knows, the liberal left may find that the counter intuitive solution is the one that best serves its aims.

Richard Beeley, Maltby