‘Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking it is stupid.’ Albert Einstein
‘The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives’ Robert Maynard Hutchins
‘Likely as not, the child you can do least with will do the most to make you proud.’ Mignon McLauglin
In 2015, I was invited to contribute a chapter to a book being published by Civitas entitled ‘The Ins and Outs of Selective Secondary Schools: A Debate. A number of well-known educationalists and writers including Geoff Barton, Alan Smithers, Joanna Williams, Fiona Miller and Peter Hitchens and the two MPs, Nic Dakin and Graham Brady who contributed to the publication, Launched in a Committee Room in the Palace of Westminster with speeches by David Davis and Tristram Hunt, it felt like the start of a serious debate about selection in our schools.
I felt very much an outsider in the debate, being neither English nor having taught in a UK secondary school. Indeed, I assumed I was asked to contribute based solely on an article I had written several years earlier entitled ‘Unnatural Selection,’ the same title I used for my chapter. Then as now, I started with an apology for writing on one of educations sacred cows, acknowledging that what I wrote was ‘mere rhetoric that . . . could never dent an immutable belief system’ adding that ‘. . . I make matters even worse by using examples from off-shore thereby breaking another cardinal rule, of presuming that other countries do things better than we do.’
The debate, after a spark of interest and an exchange of views, duly fizzled out and apart from plaintive bleating about grammar schools and the iniquity of the 11+ so it remains: Unresolved, put into the too hard basket, the property of lobby groups and theorists, politicians and teaching unions. In re-visiting it, I want to return to the premise I adhere to in everything I write on education, ‘what is the best education we can give our children’ – that is individually and collectively.
Naturally in what I write there will be caveats, the most significant being that we shouldn’t confuse a failure of discipline with a lack of ability. Like a few other educationalists (Mary Myatt being one such voice), I have always seen our approach of dumbing down to children who struggle in class or who are subject to interventions and differentiation, or even withdrawal is wrong. Rather than being unable to cope, I am convinced that many, especially those who struggle with written communication are merely bored, bored by being pandered to, bored by the irrelevance of the curriculum, and bored by having to respond in a predetermined way. Seldom is it the complexity of the concept or information that holds back children from learning; rather it’s frustration with the tedium allied to the lack of equity, understanding and opportunity for all children to flourish.
Second, I want to challenge the view that doing away with selective schools is an attack on excellence, on intellectual rigour, on catering for our brightest and most able children. Of course, that is what some people choose to see, for that is all they’ve ever seen. Sometimes, the alternative is incomprehensible. Yet rather than dumbing down, getting rid of selection in education can, and does, lead to a raising of standards. Children respond to challenge and to high expectations; we often fail to realise just how high we can aim and because of the paucity of our curriculum and methods of assessment, how to reach them. That is our country’s loss.
I want to keep my argument to two main points. There is plenty written elsewhere on selection and I don’t want to just go over well-trodden ground. Some assumptions have to be made, particularly on the importance of discipline (preferably self-discipline) in learning, and that is much more achievable when education is seen as relevant and equitable. The second is that while this applies particularly to the debate in the state sector, particularly competitive entry to grammar schools, it is also relevant to independent schools that need to look at the merits of inclusivity and the breadth of the offering.
My first is that selective schooling is unfair and wasteful, primarily because it ignores the concept of readiness, but also because it fails to properly consider other factors, such as home background, language acquisition, other learning traits, ambition, aptitudes and specific learning needs. Despite new tests designed to level up other considerations, the system by which children are ‘selected’, usually based on a test or series of tests, is too narrow, favouring a conformist, traditional approach to learning, discriminating against those who learn differently or who have other abilities; and second, that selective schooling fails the education of those who are the beneficiaries and, as a consequence, denies us the opportunity to produce well-rounded and socially aware students from whom they have been separated and who have different backgrounds, different ways of learning and different abilities to share.
When we ignore the whole concept of readiness, as selection inevitably does (and the younger it occurs, the greater the social and personal cost) we fail a whole cohort of children. This is not only a casualty of selection into schools, but selection within schools which is applies to both state and independent schools that adhere to an inflexible system of streaming and setting. I have seen too many children of 10, 11 and 12 who were far from capable of passing a rigorous entrance examination yet who, five years later, achieved outstanding grades – and predictably so. No-one can teach us anything in life that we are not ready to learn. Sometimes, the lightbulb moment doesn’t come until university or later in life. Closing doors on our young (for that is what we do with selection) is wasteful and unfair. By using such a rigid set of tests to measure academic ability at a fixed point in time along with some predictive test to measure ‘potential’ we ignore all that the test doesn’t measure: work ethic; mindset; ambition; opportunity and incentive; abilities other than academic; creative thinking; and so on. Now we are beginning to see children with certain learning difficulties being sought out because of bespoke skills and aptitudes they offer, offering insights and a creative mindset that isn’t part of the mainstream, and essentially, conformist curriculum. What a pity we don’t recognise these same abilities in our schools.
My second point is significant if we look at the other societal cost of selection, of rewarding conformity over creativity. In the Margaret Thatcher Lecture of 2013, Boris Johnson used the measure of IQ to assert that people were ‘very far from equal in raw ability, if not in spiritual worth.’ The latter comment is problematic, especially if, as implied, it is linked to the first. Johnson’s assertion betrays a belief in academic intelligence, that successful human beings are measurable, by their IQ which forms the basis for selection in schools. Yet it is disturbing to see how some ‘intelligent’ people, streamed from their peers at a very young age, become immured, believing that their academic ability entitles them to the spoils of influence and power, outside the normal conventions and values of society . We only have to look at the Bullingdon Club to see how remote many such people become. We can also look at the way intelligent people are often short on emotional intelligence and lack both common-sense and tolerance. Some leading politicians and public figures provide apt examples of people who try to intellectualise social problems. That is the way we have made them. That is the way we have indulged them. The reality is that you cannot know about people unless you are one of them and don’t live in gated communities. A reliance on academic ability at the expense of other traits and experiences, and in isolation from a cross-section of other peers with all their views, behaviours and backgrounds fails them and so long as they run this country, fails us all
In my chapter of the book, I gave examples from my own teaching practice in New Zealand where schools are not selective and yet very able children did as well as children in selective schools elsewhere, referencing two of my history students who went from their New Zealand school to Cambridge and end up with 1st class honours degrees. How much better off they were, I thought, having been in schools with other student who had a range of abilities and talents, interests and views, and not all of them academic. How much better they understood their communities and the talent that abounds in their less well-achieving classmates. I have known far too many students who achieved through dint of hard work or in fields that were immeasurable; so many who changed dramatically when they got the bit between their teeth; so many whose attitude and ambition made a mockery of their IQ. Children who had their own high expectations of themselves when their schools had told them otherwise.
We need to change. The system we have of winners and losers, of league tables, of acknowledging some talents and ignoring others; of catering one way of learning and failing to recognize its shortcomings, has to change. I’d love to see more independent schools take the lead and become properly non-selective. I’d love to see bursaries not being restricted to the brightest and the most talented students from local state schools, but the average student, even the struggling student. We have to stop placing a value on children and a level of expectation based on something we label as intelligence. Surely seeing who lines up under the banner of ‘essential workers’ tells us that. Selection denies both the opportunity for the vast majority of children while producing collateral damage on those who are the beneficiaries, limiting their relevance and voice. We don’t have to look very far to see the consequences of seeing life as an academic exercise and people as data; we need to get the humanity and empathy back into our society and it is our schools that provide the gateway.
