When my wife said she thought we should educate our three children at comprehensive schools, it was with a degree of trepidation that I went along with her. I was thankful to save the several hundred thousand pounds it would probably have cost to send them to fee-paying schools, money which I at least showed scant sign of being able to earn. But I wondered whether the education would be good enough. Like many a middle-class parent, I was frightened of a system of which I had no personal experience. My parents had tightened their belts to pay for my schooling, and I feared I was failing to give my children the advantages I had myself enjoyed. Articles in the Tory press which suggested that all comprehensive schools were useless struck me as unfair, but I also feared there might be something in this.
Five years after this experiment began, our children are doing well, and I have tumbled to rather an obvious point. Where you go to school is not actually of much importance. What matters is who your parents are. All the research shows, as Gillian Evans reported in her book Educational Failure and Working-Class White Children in Britain, that ‘it is possible to combine socio-economic classification of the household with the child’s overall developmental score at age 22 months to accurately predict educational qualifications at the age of 26 years’.
Evans points out that before schools have anything to do with it, ‘children’s developmental score is already stratified by social class (measured by parents’ occupational status and level of education)’. All those anguished conversations about which school to choose, including the latest rumours about the relative merits of the art, music, science, languages and PE departments at various establishments, are beside the point. Some children will do well pretty much regardless of where they go to school, and some will do badly pretty much regardless of where they go to school.
Rich and conscientious parents will of course be more likely to choose good schools than bad ones. I have observed north London couples who are fervent believers in state education, but have nevertheless decided, with a heavy heart, that it is their duty to send their children to Westminster, because our local comprehensives do not offer much in the way of Latin or Greek. I myself regret that my children will not acquire the canon of traditional cultural references exemplified by Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. But their teachers are good, and will teach them things of which I have no inkling.
The essential point is that parents’ belief in the transformative power of schools is wildly exaggerated. When parents inform you that all their troubles are over, because they have got Jacob or Sophie into some establishment that will take care of everything, a degree of scepticism is warranted.
Parents are not the only people who make this mistake. Politicians do it too. The government says our schools ‘should be engines of social mobility’: a sentiment found in Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers: a Strategy for Social Mobility, published last year with an introduction by Nick Clegg. The evidence suggests, on the contrary, that our schools are engines of social division. As the authors of the strategy admit: ‘The gaps in achievement between rich and poor actually widen during the school years.’ It is right to make every effort to improve state schools, and to restore, as is now happening, the rigour that was sacrificed when most of the grammar schools were scrapped. But when you improve a school, the children who will benefit most are those who are already doing well.
The argument about the percentages of children from independent and state schools who go to Oxford and Cambridge completely misses the point that the state school pupils who get to those universities are in most cases from middle-class homes. A confident middle-class child, whose parents went to university, will usually do just as well at a comprehensive as at a fee-paying school.
I asked a teacher who has worked in comprehensives for 20 years if it was true that his present school was divided along class lines. He thought this was an unfair way of putting it — ‘Comprehensives do bind and unite as well as divide,’ and their cleverest pupils are sometimes kept sane by forming friendships with children of modest abilities. But this teacher agreed that ‘divisions of class, religion, ethnicity and aspiration do exist’, and added: ‘Those who succeed most are from what you might call aspirational families, which is often but not always connected to class. Most of our most successful students are in some way advantaged. If you come from a supportive family, which encourages you to take opportunities, and renders you good at getting on with staff, and if your parents are themselves academically strong, that further enhances your chances of success.’
There are of course some students who do less well than might have been expected: ‘Some children seem advantaged but start to smoke a lot of dope.’ Middle-class parents are sometimes so devoted to their careers that they have no time left for their children. But more depends on who a student’s friends are: ‘The important thing is not the school but the peer group, and birds of a feather often flock together.’ Class affinities make themselves felt in the choice of friends, and your friends are the people who educate you, or fail to educate you.
This teacher harboured no animus against fee-paying schools: ‘The private sector at its best is outstanding. The state system often does sustain curiosity. Both sectors are under pressure from league tables. The exam system provides the necessary currency, but the important things can’t be measured. The beauty of the state sector is that there’s a bit less pressure.’
De Tocqueville observed in the first half of the 19th century the craving for equality which exists in democracies. This craving is still very widespread today, and we do not know how to satisfy it. Attempts to create economic equality have generally ended in disaster, so we try instead to pursue educational equality. But children are not equal. Middle-class Tories should not feel threatened by comprehensives, for the better these schools become, the more they will do to preserve existing inequalities.
It is appallingly unfair to impose on comprehensive schools, or indeed on universities, our society’s frustrated yearning for equality, and then to blame them when society becomes more unequal. Tony Crosland, a passionate champion of comprehensives, argued in 1966 that ‘we must allow time for the beneficial influence of education to compensate for the deficiencies of upbringing’. What a beguiling dream, and what poppycock it turned out to be.
Andrew Gimson’s Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson has just been published in an updated edition.