The debate about opening the doors to new grammar schools is being well covered in the news media. There is a battle of ideologies and the tried and tested weapons of that argument have been wheeled out and fired across the battlements. But there are fundamental fractures that are being overlooks and threaten the best of Britain.
I’m against grammars, and the planned changes. I think there are two additional problems that are not getting the attention they deserve – the fixation on academic pedagogy and faith.
That said, I do also accept that the current offering for many families is not offering the social mobility promised by the comprehensive ideal. We do have selection by postcode and most of our children do not get the education they deserve.
However, grammars are not the solution, or are they about adding choice or improving outcomes for more of our kids. They will, once again kill off choice and progressive shifts in our society. But all this is being well covered elsewhere.
Firstly – the grammar ideal – of an academic education for the smartest kids, contains the pernicious view that the most able are best suited to an ‘academic’ pedagogy. Academia is great and an essential part of the picture – but all corners of our society deserve and need leadership and excellence.
We are also still only using a single measure (examination results) to judge success for children and across the system, which doesn’t capture the range and breadth of human talent and experience. Grammar schools double down on this narrow measure – like going ‘all in’ in poker.
Grammars, and the academic model of pedagogy they perpetuate, are wrong and dangerous for our economy and society – as they take those most likely to transform our world away from the modes of learning with connect most to the ‘real world’.
If there were choices of selective schools that offered Project Based Learning, or work-based learning models – with different accreditation or qualification routes … for the brightest and most able… and our society valued those as much as business does… then we would have choice.
We have an unspoken agreement that politicians and society will not tell teachers how to teach – and that the modes of teaching are not to be politicised. However, we know that exams and structural aspects of schools are being shaped to an academic ideal ill suited to our society. This is not just my opinion – but also one shared by the CBI.
So, when we talk about choice – maybe it is time to offer real choice in terms of what happens inside the classrooms. I think much of the promise of the free schools policy was in the model of what has happened in the US – where charter schools have grown highly successful groups of schools offering a range of pedagogies – including the wonderful Expeditionary Learning and High Tech High schools.
Worse than this, the plans to allow faith schools to select based on religious belief (or professed beliefs) will further divide our society into smaller cultural ghettos.
The faith school system is the basis of our mass education and we have many reasons to grateful to the Church for creating a model of education embraced our children and communities in learning. However the history of our school system also shows that church attendance was more important than coin in children attending school.
Faith schools are the reason that we still have selection in our school system – as they have grasped this principle jealously – and we have allowed the idea of schools ‘choosing’ which children to teach to remain.
The exclusivity is not only divisive, it is unfair and should be illegal. In Oxford City, we are overwhelmed with faith provision, where only a handful of community schools provide an non-faith ‘choice’ for parents. In a hugely divided city, where a there are more children attending private schools than average we also have the destabilising impact of selection by wealth as well as academic ability.
The implied growth of new grammars comes with the promise of new faith schools (as the old free school policy has failed) to answer the pupil place crisis.
If there was an opposition worth lobbying, (sigh!) we should not only be urging them to fight grammar schools.
If we want better and appropriate education for our children, to fuel our economy, and enrich our society, then we must also take on the white elephants of academic learning and faith.
- We must, once and for all, take academic learning off the pedestal it is wobbling atop.
- We must remove all faith provision from our state funded sector.
Until these things happen, the logic of grammar schools, high stakes testing, ignoring the well-being of our children and teachers, and increasing workload for teachers, will continue unchecked.