A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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Grammar schools could more easily create a truly educated upper-crust of society than is currently possible with comprehensives. But the cultural transmission of our literature and history would require a national progressive government which is interested in using grammar schools as a nation building tool. Under a hostile government an academic grammar school could just as easily be used to inculcate Wokeness. But recognising this ideological tension is important for understanding the reasons why grammar schools were abolished. As well as being unfair to less able or less privileged children, they were seen as barriers to the social engineering of a homogeneous community. The Pidley statement Hitchens references is This creates a more meritocratic society where professional, educational and economic success more closely correlate with real ability, rather than inherited privilege. This is not just more fair, but also benefits society as a whole, as the economic potential of the country is maximised.

A key data point Hitchens relies upon, then, is based on corrupted data. Looking again at Table 3a of the same Excel file, we see that of the 71.7% of independent school pupils entered for GCSEs 64.2% achieve 5 A*-C grades (not necessarily including English and Maths) which equates to 89.5% of eligible pupils and exceeds the same statistic for comprehensive schools by 16.2% (69.3% of 97.2% is 67.4%). 2 A similar gap existed in 2006/07 when fewer independent schools used iGCSEs. And students from private schools dominate universities with high UCAS entry tariffs . Fee-paying schools continue to educate much of Britain’s elite. Only 7 per cent of British children are privately educated, but, according to a 2016 survey by the Sutton Trust, three-quarters of barristers went to independent schools; so did one third of MPs, over half of the partners at leading London law firms, and more than half of the editors of leading newspapers. Over the past 25 years, 60 per cent of British Oscar winners were privately educated, as were around 30 per cent of Oxbridge’s 2022 intake. I went on to to teach in Comprehensives, for seven years, in East London, leaving to become a Chartered Certified Accountant in the Oil & Gas industry, and, owing to the paucity of education I encountered as a schoolteacher, I selected, by income, to put my own children through private schools, namely, Dulwich College and Alleyn's, (as I was not prepared to entrust their education to the state, for which my children remain ungrateful, indifferent to, and oblivious of what they avoided) where they both succeeded, academically, as far as the watered down syllabi allowed, with one of them graduating from a Russell Group University (Leeds), and the other eschewing university (which I think is a very good decision for most young adults today, particularly if it's not a Russell Group one), and relies on his well rounded social skills to make his way, along with a raft of mainly A and A* Grade GCSE O' and A' Levels.There is much further data to support the idea that grammar schools and independent education have little to no effect on examination performance, and that the disparities between pupils at each type of school are nearly entirely due to differences between the ability of the pupils who attend them. A 2018 study found that ‘exam differences between school types are primarily due to the heritable characteristics involved in pupil admission’. A 2020 study showed that expansions in free education in the UK did not raise wealth or income among their beneficiaries, which suggests that the positive relationship we observe between education and socio-economic outcomes within birth cohorts is due to signalling rather than skill acquisition, as Bryan Caplan has argued in The Case Against Education . And in The Son Also Rises , economic historian Gregory Clark argues that social mobility did not rise as a consequence of the same expansions in schooling (or many other social changes, such as mass literacy). Hitchens even showcases the many stories of students who transferred to a grammar school after showing academic potential after age eleven. Of course, some bright children did not or could not transfer and were left disappointed by their failure to gain a grammar school place, but surely this is an argument that they should have been better expanded rather than scrapped? Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops

Rather embarrassingly, Hitchens references a 1983 report that showed these intended “paradises of self-expression” still managing to academically outperform their comprehensive successors. This should put to bed the fear-mongering swathes of the comprehensive faithful still deploy about the SecMods in an attempt to dismiss the merits of selections. Naturally, Hitchens largely ignores the Crowther Report of 1959, whose information was based upon much more comprehensive studies than those of Gurney- Dixon, including a detailed survey of all young men entering National Service between 1956 and 1958. In his conclusions, Crowther states flatly that “a majority of the sons of professional people go to selective schools but only a minority of manual workers’ sons do so” and he adds that “a non- manual worker’s son is nearly three times as likely to go to a selective school as a manual worker’s”. He explains that the 1944 Act never truly launched the semi-mythical tripartite system. Its proposals for technical schools never came to fruition, and the less academically rigorous Secondary Moderns were never intended to help students gain academic qualifications . T hus they should not be judged on their fulfilment of these criteria. The popularly maligned SecMods were the first fumbling attempt at national secondary education and cannot sensibly be compared to their historic counterparts. Hitchens also correctly suggests that grammars became an important issue under Harold Wilson because only a totalitarian regime could feasibly destroy private schools. The arguments made by this book, and by others in the right-wing press, serve as an alibi for cash-strapped middle-class parents who want a better education for their children. I argue they should wear their prejudices openly, and demand the reintroduction of grammar schools for their own self-interest.Recently, I've been invigilating in secondary schools, and was surprised to see how little content the GCSE O' and A' Level papers contain nowadays, even compared to when I was teaching 37 years ago, so I have to agree with Peter Hitchens, much against my hopes when I started reading this book, that there is little chance of Grammar Schools returning, in the form they used to exist, largely, but not only, because teachers of today have not been given the chance to obtain the necessary education themselves. The book’s focus on the harms suffered by talented working class pupils in the comprehensive system mean it has been warmly received by conservative pundits, who now offer a reactionary fusion of traditional merit-based conservatism and the identity politics of the white working class. However, Hitchens omits any mention of heredity, makes basic statistical and evidentiary errors, and ultimately fails to make a compelling case that social mobility has declined as a consequence of the comprehensive system. Thus goes the central argument and complaint of this book. It sees the destruction of the emerging grammar school system as an unforgiveable and irreparable act of cultural vandalism, which cannot simply be remedied by an expansion of the last remaining grammar schools. They are, the narrative goes, a pale imitation of what could have been achieved. It is striking that the book sees how hard individuals work at age 11 as a just way of determining their future, and views measuring academic potential as so straightforward that there is absolutely no reason to worry about the validity of such judgements. From the book’s perspective, you either believe education is for academic rigour, selection and knowledge or you believe it is for in social engineering in the name of equality. To protect academic rigour, it is insistent that we need to select people early and separate those who will be paid to think from those who will not. Anyone who dares suggest that such divisions might be harmful to society, or feels that determining people’s academic futures at such a young age results in a massive waste of human talent, are dismissed as deluded egalitarians. The book equally appears to have little time for anyone who wants an open education system in which people have chances to engage with knowledge at different points in their lives and find out how they can use it to contribute to society.

Nevertheless, the case against expanding grammar schools is straightforward. They are not good at increasing social mobility. In 2016 only 2.5 per cent of the kids in grammar schools, for instance, qualified for free school meals (an indicator of poverty). Hitchens would argue that this is a supply problem: grammar schools are so few, and the demand for them is so high, that affluent families will elbow out poorer families by spending more on resources such as extra tuition. The national progressive right is open minded and numerate, so shouldn’t adopt Hitchens’ position whole cloth the way many conservatives and post-liberals have. 5 We should support the reintroduction as a way of making school more pleasant for clever children through soft segregation, aiding cuts to university and post-sixteen education, boosting middle class fertility, and starving wasteful and expensive private schools of massive amounts of cash. Nonetheless, I would, without doubt, support any return to selection by ability, rather than income, at the drop of a hat, in the unlikely event the electorate were to be given the chance to choose, by the current crop of political elites, who, ostensibly, stand on either side of the imaginary divide between the two main parties. Grammar schools decrease the salience of the home environment and provide a level playing field between the haves and have-nots. The examination grades of different social classes converge, and working-class hostility to education is eradicated through the leadership of enthusiastic teachers and cultural spillover from middle-class schoolmates.Surely, some readers will criticise the author for failing to offer a solution to this great betrayal , and yet he does not because he admits that it is impossible. Hitchens points to the declining share of Oxbridge entrants from independent schools after the introduction of the tripartite system: 62% percent before the Education Act 1944, falling to 45% on the eve of comprehensivisation in the mid-1960s. The representation of state (nearly entirely grammar) schools more than doubled in this period, from 19% to 34% (pp. 89-91), with the remaining places were filled by overseas students and students from direct grant schools.