GTC at the Oxford Union
last updated:07 Nov 2007
The motion, 'This house believes grammar schools work' was proposed by a student of the University and supported by Graham Brady MP and Chris Woodhead. Joining the student opposing the motion were Professor David Jesson and Keith Bartley, who argued that although grammar schools work well for most of the young people who attend them, the system that promotes grammar school does not work in the round and for all young people.
Oxford Union speech
Grammar schools work well for most of the young people who attend them and for the parents who place their children there. There can't really be much dispute about that, given their record of academic success, the levels of subsequent participation in higher education, the opportunities they provide for sporting, artistic and cultural engagement and the very strong social and moral ethos that many provide.
Perhaps I should cross the floor at this point and join the proposition? But we will convince you that - on a broader understanding of success - the system that promotes grammar schools does not work in the round.
Their highly selective offer to a tiny minority of young people, cannot hope to meet the challenges and aspirations of a global economy.
In the 70s, 12% of school leavers entered universities, now it's 43% and the Government is aiming for 50 per cent. While this is undeniably an improved direction for the UK, let us not forget that in the latest OECD report, that same 43% puts us 28th out of the 30 participating countries in terms of the percentage of students expecting to complete different levels of tertiary education. And two thirds of the OECD countries already exceed that 50% target.
And that is the source of my discomfort with the grammar school proposition. Grammar schools are part of a system that was designed to exclude the majority of young people from the highest levels of success and the widest range of opportunities.
Let us be clear. Ninety three per cent of children and young people are educated in the maintained sector. Their education is publicly funded. Public policy must therefore concern itself with the pattern of school provision and its funding. The social and economic outcomes of public policy should be anticipated, thought through and - as far as possible - deliberate rather than accidental.
I just cannot accept that it is morally right, scientifically valid or socially useful to determine a child's life chances on a set of test papers taken at the age of ten and a half.
Independent schools don't do this. Eton has often been described as a gloriously successful comprehensive. Faith schools don't do this - though they are socially selective in other ways.
Academies and specialist schools don't do this. Increasingly, many of the most highly successful of these new schools are opting not to select even a proportion of their pupils by ability.
We may choose, as a society, to allow inequality to persist, either because to outlaw inequality is impractical, or because we believe the requirements for liberty and choice have greater moral force than equality.
But that does not mean that we should set out deliberately to engineer, and to have the taxpayer subsidise, further inequality both of opportunity and outcome.
The 19 local authorities with a substantially selective system admit only around 25% of children to their state maintained grammar schools.
So I object to the public funding of inequality.
The traditional myth associated with grammar schools is that they gave bright working class children a chance to escape from poverty into a world of opportunity. That was true for some - a long time ago. The nostalgic haze surrounding these stories of adversity overcome leave out the remaining pieces of the jigsaw - less good quality education in secondary moderns for the majority - who failed - and family division for those who had one sibling succeed at 11+ and another fail. And we never know whether the difference in scores between two siblings was one point, ten points, or indeed whether one ‘failed' the 11+ having gained a higher score but in a different year and a different cohort. What we do know, though, is that by the age of 11, those who do not pass have a much bigger mountain to climb in terms of life chances and opportunities.
Currently less than one per cent of the poorest children in England attend grammar schools.
Research presented at the Royal Economic Society in April this year showed that where selection persists, poor bright children struggle to make it - quite the reverse of the notion of grammar schools as a route out of poverty.
Among the very brightest primary school pupils only 32% of children on free school meals were admitted to grammar school compared with 60% of the better-off bright children.
Given everything we know about the persistent and cumulative effect of social disadvantage on educational success, it cannot be right to accentuate those divisions still further. We know also that the social and economic cost in terms of prison services, policing , health and criminality of dealing with disillusioned, disaffected and disadvantaged young people escalates dramatically as they become adults.
I am well aware that the future of grammar schools is a hotly contested topic in Conservative circles, with some high profile casualties on the front bench.
It was courageous of David Willetts, both in the literal and in the 'Yes Minister' sense, to rule out further, substantial, conservative investment in grammar schools. But his solution, or his sop to traditional conservative opinion, was to say that all schools should be more like grammar schools and that all schools should have grammar streams.
The research evidence to support or contest the benefits of streaming is frustratingly thin.
Pupils in lower ability streams appear to do worse and to become more alienated from learning, but pupils in lower streams often have the least effective and experienced teachers, so you can't really disentangle the variables.
Single sex groupings appear to be beneficial for some subjects; setting for Maths seems to increase the achievement gap between low and high achievers; but setting in English and science doesn't.
It is frankly rather disturbing that, 50 years after comprehensive schooling was introduced, we still know so little about what works.
Grammar schools may be irrelevant - and therefore neutral - in the 130 local authorities that no longer have a selective system. But their effect on participation in higher education - and particularly on access to the leading universities - is not neutral.
Martin Stephen, the High Master of St Pauls, has argued that it has never been harder than today to get a place to read medicine, law or English at what he calls the Ivy League universities. That may be so, but the young people filling those places are coming from the independent and the grammar schools.
Does this matter?
It matters, if you believe as I do, that intellectual ability and the potential to benefit from a truly excellent higher education are not confined to a narrow tranche of society. There is a social and economic imperative to unlock the potential in as many of our young people as we can.
It matters, if you believe as I do, that there is a moral imperative to intervene to tackle the huge gap in educational achievement between rich and poor - more intractable, and more stark in this country than almost anywhere in the OECD.
I quoted Martin Stephen slightly out of context. He was arguing that elites are both inevitable and necessary. But I don't think he was arguing that we shouldn't lift the floor upwards. And he did say that access to elite schools should not depend on the economic standing of the child.
It's a waste of talent and a denial of hope to believe that the highest levels of academic success are only achievable by 20 to 25% of our children and young people. The demands of a global economy mean we must aspire to better than that.
You can't have it both ways. Either you believe that grammar schools work because they have bright children in them - in which case where is the added value - in what meaningful sense do the grammar schools work? David Jesson will explode some myths about adding value when he speaks.
Or you believe that grammar schools do add value, and significantly improve a pupil's chances of doing well. In which case, how can one justify reserving them for just five per cent of the population - as we do now - or to a quarter of children if national selection were to return ?
Within schools, we can't compensate for all the disadvantages that stem from poverty. But nor should we shrug our shoulders and say 'what can you expect of these children?'
I agree with the two Davids - David Willetts and David Laws - who argue that schools that admit the most disadvantaged pupils, should be the most generously funded. We should intervene where we can, and we should place our best teachers and our most generous resources into the battle to lift the baseline of achievement much, much higher for all our young people.
