The Shadow Education Secretary is suggesting that private schools provide qualified teachers to help deliver specialist subject knowledge to state schools. It’s depressing that they don’t all already have in-house specialists. Not surprising though, according to Terence Kealey, who argued in 1991 that the state should never have got involved in education in the first place:
“Ever since St Augustine had founded King's School, Canterbury in AD 597, charitable church schools had flourished. They were rarely short of sponsors. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, for example, was raising no less than £10,000 p.a in London alone in 1719. New societies continued to be formed… But the Commons did not believe that the free market could supply sufficient education. From 1807, the House reverberated to claims that the Prussians and the French, with their universal state education, were bound to overtake us economically and culturally. Yet, decade after decade, the British kept their lead. Britain's relative economic decline came after the introduction of state schools. Moreover, the Cambridge social historian R.S. Schofield has shown that, by 1890, literacy amongst school leavers in England and Wales had exceeded 98 per cent. Yet the propaganda against the church schools has continued unabated to this day.
Parliament passed the Free Schooling Act in 1891 and church schools were killed off. They had charged small fees, mainly because fees improved attendance:
“Had nationalisation been followed by a vast influx of funds, it might have been justified. But it was not… The substitution of state for private funding of the schools did not increase their share of the GDP; it merely replaced parental and church control with that of the politicians.
The middle classes do well because they have evolved a culture of self-help. The Victorian working classes were developing one too, paying for their children’s education and choosing between schools, before Parliament decided they could no longer be trusted…It is absurd that, under the state, parents hand over their school fees, in the shape of taxes, to enable bureaucrats and teachers' unions to control the education of their children.
Tristram Hunt’s proposals do have a familiar ring to them; the history of education policy-making is full of reports that try to come up with a way of spreading the benefits of independent schools. In the 1940s, the Fleming Report recommended that a quarter of pupils should be given bursaries. The problem was numbers:
“There are only 40,000 boarding places in public schools for boys and girls as compared with half a million pupils in grant-aided secondary schools and million in junior schools.
In fact independent schools continued to offer non-fee-paying places to local authorities for years, but were consistently turned down by the local authorities, partly because of the expense. The cleverest pupils could still go to grammar schools, but pretty soon, these schools were being assaulted from all sides because of the way officials were implementing the 1944 Education Act, the headmaster of Leeds Grammar School, Dr Terry Thomas argued in 1947:
“In the past grammar schools have been centres of learning and scholarship. They were the public schools of the people. There the poor boy could obtain the intellectual disciplines which have always been the privilege of our so-called better classes. He had an equal opportunity of drinking at the wells of knowledge and acquiring the basis of culture. A School Certificate at Little Puddlecombe Secondary Grammar School ranked equal with a similar one obtained at Eton. Now the School Certificate is to be abolished in the noble name of parity—to ensure that the secondary grammar school shall win no more public esteem than the modern school. The gap between the secondary grammar school and the independent school is to be widened so as to close the gap between the secondary grammar school and the modern school. The poor boy's chance of emerging is thus reduced… There is nothing in the Act which compels this destruction of the secondary grammar schools. It is merely the edict of bureaucrats whose social philosophy is that all men are equal—except officials. There are still orders and ranks in the Civil Service.
Despite what the Act says, parents in effect have little choice. The last word remains with the L.E.A. Formerly many parents could exercise a choice. To make all things equal, this is now destroyed so that nobody has a choice. If more parents opt for a grammar school education than the available places, then many are going to be forced to accept the modern school or to contract out of the State system. To such lengths have our administrators been driven in their search for equality.
Grammar Schools pretty much disappeared in the 1960s. Britain was getting richer, but fewer and fewer people could afford school fees. It meant public schools were becoming a more important question for the Conservative Party, according to Angus Maude, Conservative MP and father of Francis Maude:
“It is hard to see how discussion can avoid coming to grips with the whole awkward question of what Tories now feel about 'privilege.' Nowhere are the implications of this question more awkward than in the field of education. Tory social reformers, imbued with the Disraelian ideal of the unfragmented society, are inevitably worried by the divisive effects of the dual system. Yet surely all Tories should— though few of them now openly say so—be in favour of a degree of 'privilege' in society if it is earned by the performance of social duties. It is not easy to decide how far this is the case with private schooling.
Michael Gove focused on standards and freedom of choice in the state sector. He ran into the same problems as Robert Lowe had in the 19th century when it came to payment by results – the teachers won the argument the first time round. The problem with Tristram Hunt’s plan is that they’re a bit tokenistic: he’s coming up against the old problem that the state sector is far bigger than the independent sector. Public schools may find it easier to develop an atmosphere that lends itself to learning, but they won’t magically improve state schools: it’s the government-funded schools that need attention.