And so it begins. Theresa May is, we learn, ready to scrap the near 20-year ban on grammar schools, launching a “new generation” of selective education. Creating more grammars will aid “social mobility”, a government source said. “If you’re a really bright kid you should have the opportunity to excel as far as your talents take you.”
Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of education or inequality in this country will know each word of that is myth and contradiction. The government is either preparing to instil major educational reform with no understanding of the evidence, or it is intentionally lying. I’m not sure which is worse.
I’m a product of the grammar school system. Working class. Parents who hadn’t gone to university. Growing up in an area with few job chances – but notably, one of the country’s rare, remaining selective state schools. Then I passed the 11 plus. I went to a Russell Group university, got a PhD, and I’m writing this for the Guardian. If that isn’t social mobility in action, a fast move into the middle classes, I don’t know what is. But people like me – lucky anomalies – are used by supporters of grammar schools use to distort reality: as human exhibits for the claim that keeping, and now expanding, selective education is the definition of fairness and equal opportunity.
Let’s be clear. Grammar schools – far from a benefit for smart working-class kids – are simply another way for the middle classes to entrench their advantage. More than four times as many grammar school pupils now come from private prep schools than the number entitled to free school meals. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that more deprived children are significantly less likely to go to grammar schools than the most advantaged – even when they achieve equally good results aged 11.
While parents in poverty struggle to give their children a decent breakfast to help their brains develop, the well-off hire private tutors as another leg-up to pass grammar school entrance exams.
Even if a few working-class families like mine buck the trend, our success is built off the back of the ones left behind. As I’ve written before, no matter how good many comprehensives are, selective schooling – by its very definition – creams off what would make them better: not only the advantage for children of being surrounded by classmates with high abilities, but the teaching staff are more likely to be attracted and retained by schools with them, and the invaluable power of educated, wealthy parents.
The damage is long-term harm. In communities where selective education already exists, the salary difference between the highest and lowest earners is considerably bigger than in areas with a comprehensive system. The facts could not be clearer: grammar schools actually widen the gap between rich and poor.
But the truth is, facts mean very little here. Rather, the right’s adoration for grammar schools embodies the worst of its class prejudice. Whether we succeed – the grades we get at school, the jobs we do, the salaries we earn – is down to how smart we are and how hard we try, and nothing more, they say. There are a few individuals – the ultimate diamonds in the rough – who deserve, in their view, to be saved; the rest bring about their own disadvantage.
The debate over selective education is not simply about grammar schools but wider, warped attitudes about poverty, education and status in this country. It is the ideology of conservatism in a nutshell: the fetishisation of personal responsibility and convenient amnesia towards structural inequality. That the alumni of Eton and Oxbridge run the country, and the working class clean the toilets is simply a coincidence. Or worse, it is exactly – quite fairly – how things should be.
In this system, grammar schools are sold as a way for the poorest to escape where inequality puts them. You almost have to respect the gall of May and her grammar school supporters. Not only have they found another way to kick the life chances of working-class children but they are doing it under the guise of helping them.