A Brief Reply to Mrs Bartley
Here is my brief reply to a posting here
https://whitstababble.com/2016/10/30/the-questions-peter-hitchens-doesnt-answer/#comments
by Mrs Jo Bartley, a campaigner against academic school selection in Kent, who has posted here under a title which all but compels me to respond, as it implies (untruly) that I have been unresponsive up till now. In fact, I have responded swiftly and completely to dozens of tweets which Mrs Bartley has aimed at me on Twitter over the past few weeks.
While I have no ‘vision’, I would certainly advocate a selective state school system with selection by assessment and mutual agreement as exists in various forms in the Laender of Germany. I have never been especially prescriptive about how this would work, beyond the following:
The selection would be neither rigid nor totally final, based on long-term performance as observed by teachers, open to appeal and open to correction later. The ultimate test would be the child’s performance in the school.
I would envisage three different types of school, academic, technical/vocational and general. I am not and have never been rigid about the age of selection. Private schools select at the age of 12-13, state schools earlier. I am entirely open to arguments. But I fear that very late selection, such as is used by sixth-form colleges, would not rescue the bright children from poor homes who, as Sir Michael Wilshaw notes here, suffer so badly in non-selective state secondaries:
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ambitions-for-education-sir-michael-wilshaw
The key part of the speech is here :
‘The fate of the most able pupils in non-selective schools is particularly depressing. Some 60,000 youngsters who achieved the top levels at Key Stage 2 did not achieve an A or A* in English and maths 5 years later. Indeed, only a quarter achieved a B grade.
According to the Sutton Trust, 7,000 children a year who were in the top 10% nationally at age 11 were not in the top 25% at GCSE 5 years later. These youngsters are drawn disproportionately from the white working class.’
Quite how Sir Michael, a grammar school product, squares this with his present-day opposition to academic selection, I have no idea.
Mrs Bartley frequently suggest reforms to the selection-by-wealthy system she supports, what they are she knows not, and I know not either. She writes: ‘I support fairer admission policies and would like to see changes to the way we award school places. I did tweet four or five school admission methods that could prevent schools becoming socially selective. They are complex, they might be combined, one has not even been tried on a large scale. I am not going to apologise for not explaining them in 140 characters on Twitter. I was recently involved with a plan for a cross-party group to look at fairer admissions. Sadly it got cancelled due to the potential return of grammar schools.’
Alas, no such method exists. The search for a method of selecting fairly in a compre4hnsive system is much like the mediaeval search for the Philosopher’s Stone, which was supposed to turn base metals into gold. It does not exist and cannot be found. The ingenuity of non-academic selection systems is well-described here by Roy Hattersley https://www.theguardian.com/education/2005/feb/22/schools.uk
But it is only part of the story. Fake or genuine religious faith, severe and rigorously enforced parental contracts, privileged feeder primary schools, ferocious and well-publicised uniform or other discipline polices which drive away unwanted types, temporary and permanent exclusions *after* entry, are all used for non-academic selection - all heads knowing very well that all good schools are selective. Sporadic attempts by fair access regulators to enforce the supposed comprehensive principle rather frequently fail. Part of me wishes they would succeed, as this would soon end the complacency of the Waitrose classes about selection by wealth.
Mrs Bartley also writes : ‘I also accept that the brightest pupils in comprehensive schools need more attention. This is not hard to have a decent plan for, it just hasn’t been done. I don’t know why there is no political will to make this happen.’
Because there isn’t. Why should there be? Complacency rules, while our international position, a ruthlessly objective measure, sinks each year, but we make no connection between the two things. Our supposedly brilliant comp kids can’t speak foreign languages, mostly don’t do sciences or maths beyond the elementary, are ill-read and ill-informed about history and the world, , have little idea how to think and are not much desired by employers. The private schools are not in truth much better. With a few exceptions, but the low standards of our exam system allow them to seem to be so..They, of course, are all openly selective, and some are very selective indeed.
The education authorities, who mark their own work, are satisfied with their own exam results, set by them at a level which allows many schools to appear to be doing well, and subjective OFSTED reports which declare that schools are ‘good’. Or ‘outstanding’. Are they? Whisper it not in Gath, but probably not. The saddest era in the history of modern British education was the immediate aftermath of comprehensivisation, as fewer and fewer pupils could cope with the old GCE ‘O’ level. First it was drastically watered down. Then it had to be abandoned completely, and replaced by the GCSE., not remotely comparable as an examination or a stimulus to genuine study. Next came the A level, which has been diluted repeatedly and no longer means what it used to. Let us not even speak about our University ‘degrees’. Devalued currencies circulate at home without much remark, as their value shrinks slowly. But take them abroad after a year or two, and you will find out the true story. It’s the same with our ‘brilliant comp kids’, so marvellous that many domestic employers would quite reasonably rather hire Poles, who don’t even have English as a first language – but have learned it seriously enough to allow them to work, and who have both the discipline and the basic knowledge which make them desirable to employers.
Mrs Bartley, like many educationally privileged persons, is oddly happy to see academic selection at an age when it is too late to benefit the working class children mentioned by Sir Michael Wilshaw in his speech linked above.
Mrs Bartley says: ‘I’d also like to see specialist sixth form colleges for those with the best GCSE results. ‘Academic selection’ is necessary and happens in every school system, but the age is important. I think it should be at an age when a child has had full opportunity to decide what they want to do, and a chance to prove what they can do.’
I have always wondered why, after all that weepy propaganda about children who fail the 11+ being marked for life and discarded as failures etc, ( an argument actually largely disposed of by the form of selection I favour), they seem so happy to put them through a test at 16 which is just as ruthless and divisive. Not to mention the highly selective nature of the better universities. 16 is actually a pretty tender age, and so is 18, in my experience. But there you are. Sunt lacrimae rerum, as the Romans used to say.
Mrs Bartley then erects a straw man, claiming that 'grammar school fans [who] think there are only three types of child, the practical sort, the technical sort, the academic sort'. Nope, but there is a limit to the number of different types of school any society can provide in large numbers. One point I’ve never been able to insert into this argument is my view that one of the things we need most of all is a return of the Direct Grant system, under which first-rate private schools open hundreds of places, paid for by the taxpayer, to state-school entrants. This system can *only* operate through academic selection I’d extend this to the great boarding schools, from Millfield at one end of the scale to Winchester at the other, to try to fit round pegs into round holes. But we can’t have perfection.
Contrary to Mrs Bartley’s claim, I have no special attachment to selection at 10, 11, 12 or 13. I have repeatedly told her so. The tweet she quotes is one of a series, in which I said ‘She knows perfectly well that selection at 11 is not necessarily final. But she pretends not to know, because the fact hurts her cause.’ And ‘But 11 a reasonably good age to spot talent early enough to avoid it being wasted.’ She pays no attention. She also admitted in the same exchange that she knew of no research on the subject either way. Nor do I.
She then raises the issue of University. I will simply say that I think University is proving a major waste of time and money for many of those gulled into seeking a place there, and that we would be a better-educated country if we reformed our secondary schools and had fewer, more selective universities. I also have strong opinions on primary schools and on home-schooling, not to mention ‘dyslexia’, ‘ADHD’ , synthetic phonics, times tables and child-centred discovery. But I find that if one deviates too much from the subject under discussion, one loses the thread. So I’ll leave it at that.