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The real Educational Apartheid, affecting students of any
race.
The desperate inequality between private and state schools
can only be addressed by a truly radical solution.
Put an end to educational apartheid
Peter Wilby
The Observer, Sunday 7 July 2002
One might have guessed that if, as the New Statesman revealed
earlier this year, thousands of chattering-class parents in
north London were paying for their children to receive private
tuition on the side, the Blairs, who, in spirit, remain Islington
to the core, would be among them. The Prime Minister's attitude
has been perfectly consistent ever since he became Labour
leader: he is a normal, middle-class family man who wants
the best for his children.
He would like, as a good, liberal-minded, socially conscious
sort, to send them to the local comprehensive but it is, alas,
a little rough, and it doesn't get enough students into Oxbridge.
So he carts his children across the city to the London Oratory,
a school that is technically a comprehensive but is widely
regarded as being both socially and academically selective.
To
this advantage, he adds tuition from teachers at Westminster,
one of the country's most élite private schools. It
hardly needs saying that, even if children from the poor areas
of London got into the Oratory, their parents couldn't afford
£100 a week for tuition. Why, then, should anybody be
surprised that, as social research tells us, the gap between
a working-class child's chances of getting into a top university
and a middle-class child's chances continues to widen?
The
Blairs, like many other middle-class families, will shake
their heads over this but their concern for the wider social
effects of educational inequality wanes as their children
progress through the school system. Nobody's belief in social
justice, community spirit, workers' solidarity, fair shares
and the rest of it long survives the terror of their children
flunking GCSEs and A-levels.
Even
advantaged state schools like the Oratory struggle against
the private sector in the competition for entry to the élite
universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge. That is why
the young Blairs need private tuition. Fee-charging schools
have smaller classes, more highly qualified teachers and better
buildings and equipment. They can select out or kick out the
dim and the disruptive and can concentrate their efforts on
the academic qualifications needed for university entry, without
having to worry about the education needed for those who will
become carpenters or waiters.
They
send dozens of children to Oxford and Cambridge every year
and so have the contacts and the experience to guide their
charges through interviews and other entry hurdles. The top
comprehensives may be able to give a child an excellent chance
of an élite university place; the private schools can
virtually guarantee it. All else said on the subject is waffle.
As
a result, the 7 per cent of children who attend private schools
take nearly half the places at Oxford and Cambridge and nearly
a third of the places at other élite universities such
as Durham, Manchester and Bristol. It is crude educational
apartheid and a major obstacle to the equality of opportunity
that New Labour says it wants.
The
restoration of state grammar schools would makes no difference.
The grammar schools flourished 40 years ago, when private
schools were still more concerned with social conditioning
than academic success. In those days, the private sector was
simply not meritocratic in the sense it is today; many schools
hardly taught science and they prepared a high proportion
of pupils for the armed services or the City, neither of which
was interested in degrees.
Now,
no matter how much the state schools heed calls to pull their
socks up, or acquire fancy new names like beacon schools or
city academies or science and technology colleges, or obey
ministerial injunctions to abolish mixed-ability teaching
classes, they can never compete on equal terms with fee-charging
schools. Would the latter stand still and allow their market
to wither away? Of course not. They would focus even more
fiercely on university entry, make classes even smaller and
upgrade the laboratories. The fees would rise, but past experience
suggests no limit to their customers' willingness to pay up.
So
what's the answer? There is a very simple one. We change the
whole basis of élite university selection. Each year,
Oxford and Cambridge between them admit 6,000 UK undergraduates.
There are about 6,000 schools and colleges that have young
people taking A-levels. The top pupil from each - the one
who achieves the best A-level results - should get a place
at one of the two universities.
This
is a crude version. But we could include Durham, Bristol and
some of the London University colleges and select, say, the
top half-dozen from each school; this would create enough
flexibility to allow for the successful students' different
subject preferences. We would have to take some account of
the size of school or college. The whole thing would be arbitrary
and unfair, but not nearly as arbitrary and unfair as the
present system.
Such
a scheme would transform both education and society. Why would
anybody pay for a private school if it could deliver no more
top university places than the local comprehensive? Why would
people clamour to get into the London Oratory? On the contrary,
ambitious parents would calculate that they were better off
sending their children to the most bog-standard comprehensives
they could find on the grounds that the competition would
be less intense. On the same principle, the housing market
might be turned upside down, because the premium would be
on property in deprived areas close to 'problem' schools,
not on the schools in the suburbs.
Far
from falling, standards would probably rise because all the
research suggests that the most successful comprehensive schools
- raising the achievement levels of all types of children
- are those that have a broad mix of social backgrounds and
academic abilities. My scheme would virtually guarantee the
social mix that most comprehensives have always lacked.
I
do not claim for this proposal that it would increase social
mobility. The middle classes would manipulate this system,
as they manipulate the present one, to their advantage. The
Blairs and their like would pay for private tuition so that
they scooped the top places in their chosen school. The people
who got to Oxford and Cambridge would probably be very similar
to the people who go now. But at least we would be rid of
our vicious educational apartheid.
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