My left-wing Mail on Sunday colleague, Suzanne Moore, has this week given delighted praise to my old friend Michael Gove, the Education Secretary. Oh dear. In the dear dead days before Mr Gove fell in love with Anthony Blair’s neo-conservative invasion mania, we were allies against the Abolition of Britain. When Michael went still further along the Blairite Road (the sky-blue-pink brick road, perhaps?), and joined the Cameron project, we spent two hours striding round Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens on a freezing winter’s day, while I tried to persuade him that Mr Slippery was an anti-British menace, and he tried to persuade me that Mr Slippery would lead us into a conservative future. In the end, we both gave up – though, as we both enjoy arguing and we both believe that it is possible to have profound disagreements and remain on friendly terms, and because I respect Mr Gove’s undoubted intellect and personal generosity, we still enjoy each other’s company on the rare occasions when we meet.
I think Mr Gove is the only major figure in the government (on the Tory side at least) who knows how to think properly, and who truly understands the nature of the bargain he has made between power and conscience, and who therefore has any control over its outcome. Also, I should point out that we simply don’t agree about the cultural and moral issues which seem to me to be the decisive questions of our time.
I suspect that Oliver Letwin knows quite well what the government is up to, as does Francis Maude. Both are very intelligent, much more so than their leaders. But I don’t think either man is really a conservative in any important way. I’d say the same of Vince Cable, in many ways an old-fashioned Labour man. So they don’t face any real conflicts of conscience.
But I had always thought that Michael Gove at least understood what was really wrong with British education. I still think he does. But his speech, delivered at Brighton College on 10th May and available here seems to me to have been designed to please all the wrong people. If the reaction of Suzanne Moore and some other left-wing commentators, such as Matthew Norman are anything to go by, it has done so. Why has he done this?
I quite agree that the private schools have a disproportionate hold on the higher levels of most trades and professions. I quite agree that this is a bad thing, because it restricts these high levels to a narrow group of people whose parents have the money to pay the colossal fees now demanded by the better private schools.
While I view one or two old-established institutions, such as Winchester, as being valuable parts of the national heritage which need to be preserved, I am no special friend of the private schools in general. I think it would be wonderful if Winchester could become again what it was originally meant to be, a school to find and educate the best minds of each generation for the service of the nation, regardless of the wealth of their parents.
I have myself paid out enormous sums in fees to various such schools over the past quarter-century. I won’t go into individual details, but I will say that it has not always been justified by the results.
Many private schools, for instance, are infested by political correctness. Geography is often a matter of Green, warmist propaganda, the teaching of history has been eviscerated, and languages are seldom taught in such a way that those who undergo the teaching know how to speak or even read the language at the end of years of study. Instead they are taught as wearisome exercises in repetition without the solid grammar, vocabulary and constant exercises in two-way translation, mercilessly corrected, which are the only real foundation for language teaching. . Most private schools are ridiculously concerned with their performance in amassing the devalued currency of modern examination certificates. These are a gift for them. As all such schools are selective (often also getting rid of poor performers if they threaten to drag their averages down), efficient drilling of middle-class pupils will invariably produce what looks like a near-perfect record.
Far too few take up the option of the IGCSE, close to the old ‘O’ level. Almost all give far too much importance to results league tables.
This is as worthless as an OFSTED award of ‘outstanding’ to a state school. It does not mean an absolutely good education has been provided. It means that modern targets have been successfully met, a wholly different thing.
But that does not stop parents paying for them. Unless they happen to be within range of the small minority of state schools which maintain some sort of standard, often through secret selection, most parents who can afford fees, even if it is a major stretch involving considerable sacrifices, will do so. They are not , as is so often claimed by leftist metropolitans who have access to the London Oratory, Cardinal Vaughan, Camden School for Girls, William Ellis or similar exceptional state secondaries with religious qualifications or small catchment areas, rejecting the comprehensive idea out of silly snobbery. They are rejecting it because they have studied the facts and concluded their local state secondary simply is not as good, and will not miraculously become as good if they send their children to it.
Some of them think (research supports this view) that single-sex education is better than mixed schooling, ad find that their local state schools are all now mixed. Some of them – I am among these – are also worried by an egalitarian, secularist, morally relativists and often anti-patriotic, multicultural ethos which they see as hostile to the ideas and beliefs they have sought and hopes to pass on at home. While few private schools offer active reinforcement of religion, patriotism and conservatism, they also don’t actively seek to undermine these things.
As for it being in some way their duty to sacrifice their children on the altar of equality for the good of all and the creation of a classless society, I suspect this is bunk. While I can see how a mediocre state secondary school’s *results* might get better if it had a bigger middle class intake, I cannot see how the school *itself* would get better. All that would change would be the quality of the material, not the quality of teaching or the strength of the discipline. Meanwhile I suggest that the *outcome* for the children subjected to this social engineering would in almost all cases be worse than if they had gone to a grammar or private school.
As for the hoped-for mixing of the classes, the experience of Robert Crampton, who has written frankly about this in ‘The Times’ seem to suggest that it does not in practice take place, or certainly didn’t in his Hull comprehensive. Whereas I suspect that in grammar schools, there was mixing and the general direction was up; in most comprehensives, there is little mixing, and the general direction is down.
Now, let us take the crucial segment of Mr Gove’s speech:
‘I can’t help reflecting on some other facts about our society which the excellence of the education offered in our independent schools underlines.
It is remarkable how many of the positions of wealth, influence, celebrity and power in our society are held by individuals who were privately educated.
Around the Cabinet table – a majority – including myself – were privately educated.
Around the Shadow Cabinet table the Deputy Leader, the Shadow Chancellor, the Shadow Business Secretary, the Shadow Olympics Secretary, the Shadow Welsh Secretary and the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development were all educated at independent schools.
On the bench of our supreme court, in the precincts of the bar, in our medical schools and university science faculties, at the helm of FTSE 100 companies
and in the boardrooms of our banks, independent schools are – how can I best put this – handsomely represented.
You might hear some argue that these peaks have been scaled by older alumni of our great independent schools – and things have changed for younger generations.
But I fear that is not so.
Take sport – where by definition the biggest names are in their teens, twenties and thirties.
As Ed Smith, the Tonbridge-educated former England player, and current Times journalist, points out in his wonderful new book “Luck”:
Twenty-five years ago, of the 13 players who represented England on a tour of Pakistan, only one had been to a private school. In contrast, over two thirds of the current team are privately educated. You’re 20 times more likely to go on and play for England if you go to private school rather than state school.
The composition of the England rugby union team and the British Olympic team reveal the same trend.
Of those members of England’s first 15 born in England, more than half were privately educated.
And again, half the UK’s gold medallists at the last Olympics were privately educated, compared with seven per cent of the population.
It’s not just in sport that the new young stars all have old school ties.
It’s in Hollywood, Broadway and on our TV screens.
Hugh Laurie, Dominic West, Damian Lewis, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne – all old Etonians.
One almost feels sorry for Benedict Cumberbatch – a lowly Harrovian – and Dan Stevens – heir to Downton Abbey and old boy of Tonbridge – is practically a street urchin in comparison.
If acting is increasingly a stage for public school talent one might have thought that at least comedy or music would be an alternative platform for outsiders.
But then –
Armando Iannucci, David Baddiel, Michael McIntyre, Jack Whitehall, Miles Jupp, Armstrong from Armstrong and Miller and Mitchell from Mitchell and Webb were all privately educated.
2010’s Mercury Music Prize was a battle between privately educated Laura Marling and privately-educated Marcus Mumford.
And from Chris Martin of Coldplay to Tom Chaplin of Keane – popular music is populated by public school boys.
Indeed when Keane were playing last Sunday on the Andrew Marr show everyone in that studio – the band, the presenter and the other guests – Lib Dem peer Matthew Oakeshott, Radio 3 Presenter Clemency Burton-Hill and Sarah Sands, editor of the London Evening Standard - were all privately educated.
Indeed it’s in the media that the public school stranglehold is strongest.
The Chairman of the BBC and its Director-General are public school boys.
And it’s not just the Evening Standard which has a privately-educated editor.
My old paper The Times is edited by an old boy of St Pauls and its sister paper the Sunday Times by an old Bedfordian.
The new editor of the Mail on Sunday is an old Etonian, the editor of the Financial Times is an old Alleynian and the editor of the Guardian is an Old Cranleighan.
Indeed the Guardian has been edited by privately educated men for the last 60 years…
But then many of our most prominent contemporary radical and activist writers are also privately educated.
George Monbiot of the Guardian was at Stowe, Seumas Milne of the Guardian was at Winchester and perhaps the most radical new voice of all --Laurie Penny of the Independent – was educated here at Brighton College.
Now I record these achievements not because I wish to either decry the individuals concerned or criticise the schools they attended. Far from it.
It is undeniable that the individuals I have named are hugely talented and the schools they attended are premier league institutions.
But the sheer scale, the breadth and the depth, of private school dominance of our society points to a deep problem in our country - one we all acknowledge but have still failed to tackle with anything like the radicalism required.’
Well, the facts are undeniable (I enjoyed his outing of the inescapable, relentless Laurie Penny, too) , though it is pretty obvious why most Rugby Union players are privately educated, and couldn’t care less where the culprits of popular music went to school.
But then Mr Gove went on to say ‘We live in a profoundly unequal society.
More than almost any developed nation ours is a country in which your parentage dictates your progress.
Those who are born poor are more likely to stay poor and those who inherit privilege are more likely to pass on privilege in England than in any comparable county.
For those of us who believe in social justice this stratification and segregation are morally indefensible.
And for those of us who want to see greater economic efficiency it is a pointless squandering of our greatest asset - our children - to have so many from poorer backgrounds manifestly not achieving their potential.
When more Etonians make it to Oxbridge than boys and girls on benefit then we know we are not making the most of all our nation's talents.’
This is all very well, so far as it goes, but surely it is an argument for the reintroduction of the academic selection which, as I have so often pointed out here, unquestionably opened up Oxbridge, the professions and all the higher trades and professions, to boys and girls who would otherwise never have climbed?
Mr Gove knows these facts perfectly well. I know, for instance, that he has read my book ‘The Broken Compass’ (reissued as ‘The Cameron Delusion’ in paperback) in which in a chapter called ‘The Fall of the meritocracy’, I provided the fullest and most detailed description of the comprehensive revolution, its reasons, its ignorant good intentions and its actual effects , together with incontrovertible evidence of the success of grammar schools in storming the battlements of Oxbridge.
But the speech doesn’t mention grammar schools, or selection. He alleges the unproven virtues of ‘Academies’, a type of school which cannot be precisely defined because it relies so largely on the presence (or absence) of a charismatic head – who can of course leave or be replaced at any time. That definition is growing vaguer all the time as the number of academies increases, under heavy pressure from the government, and encouraged by suggestions that the new status will bring bigger budgets. What it actually brings is nationalisation, direct central control through budgets, a weapon in the hands of a future Labour government which they may come to regret.
Are Academies, as such , better than other schools because they are academies, as grammar schools are undoubtedly better because they are grammar schools? It seems open to question. Anastasia de Waal, in work done for the far-from-leftist thing tank Civitas in 2009, suggested that many academies (which were to begin with exempt from Freedom of Information Laws , though this has now been put right) were doing what so many other schools do to hide the real state of affairs – entering pupils for easier subjects avoiding history and geography, and concentrating on vocational courses which bump up grades.
If there is more recent work showing a connection between Academy status and academic excellence, I should be interested to see it.
Mr Gove, of course, knows that his leader, Mr Slippery, has no time for grammar schools and risked a serious row in Opposition, so that he could distance his party from the idea that grammar schools might one day be restored ( as they have been successfully restored in the parts of Germany formerly under the control of the defunct German Democratic Republic, which was of course keen on comprehensive education).
I suspect that the purpose of this speech was to put pressure on private schools to co-operate with him in sponsoring more ‘Academies’ and ‘free Schools’. But what if they don’t? What if their parents, already groaning over fees of £15,000 a year of post-tax income, plus paying heavy taxes for state schools they don’t like and don’t use, might resent part of that hard-earned money being diverted to dubious ‘Big Society’ schemes to save the useless comprehensive system from itself?
If Mr Gove really wants to end the dominance of the private schools, rather than to milk them, he has a simple solution available. He can be the first Education Secretary in decades to come out openly for a large-scale return to selection in state schools. He has the intellectual power and the standing to do, and it would revolutionise the whole education debate in the country if he did so. Why doesn’t he?