Georgia L Gilholy is a journalist.
Last Saturday, the Times ran an interview with Rachel Reeves in which she vowed never to send her young children to private schools, as she wants them to “see the world as it is”.
Given the elite bubbles that many independent schools concoct around their students, it is understandable that the Shadow Chancellor, herself from a working-class East London background, does not want her children to feel alien to her own experience, which undoubtedly shaped the policies which are now her career.
Reeves also told the newspaper that she had to work hard to achieve what she did. This is undoubtedly true, and I am sure she probably did work harder than students from wealthier background who have since landed similar roles,
Yet there is something missing form her comments. Her approach implies that private schools advantage children in some mysterious and unfair way that state schools can never hope to replicate, so long as private schools exist, simply because because of their relative lack of investment and connections.
Of course, private schools have many allegedly unfair advantages. There is no justice in where and when, or to whom, we are born, and what our parents’ bank accounts may boast. But only a totalitarian society could try and eliminate these inequalities – and it would still be unsuccessful.
I am not suggesting that there is no place for the state to intervene to ameliorate inequity, especially when it comes to education.
But Reeves seems to forget that we had once a state that was beginning to do so rather effectively – and not by her preferred means.
Direct-grant schools were a form of private school where the fees of one-quarter of all places were paid by the state, on behalf of pupils who would otherwise not have been able to attend.
We also had grammar schools up and down the country which selected children by academic ability via the 11-plus, offering a generation of working-class children a chance at earning a proper academic education.
By the mid-1960s both of these types of schools, which overwhelmingly aided children whose parents could not dream of affording private education, were regularly outperforming independent schools in admission to Oxbridge and other elite universities; many of those forking out for Eton and Harrow were thoroughly disgruntled.
State schools have, and have always had, the power to outperform independent schools – if they encourage academic pupils to excel through streaming and a rigorous curriculum.
Of course, the system had its flaws. But was that reason to abandon academic selection entirely?
Upon entering government in 1964, Harold Wilson was able to capitalise on some of the resentment for the grammar system in certain areas to do just that.
The previous Tory administration had simply not built enough to permit as many qualified students as the baby-bulge generation, leading to many sufficiently academic youngsters being funnelled into schools poorly-equipped to nurture their ambitions.
As Peter Hitchens explained in A Revolution Betrayed, the long-awaited book on how we misunderstand the grammar era, the 1944 Act that launched them nationally was itself betrayed. The Act’s promised technical schools were, with a few exceptions, never even created.
Secondary moderns have latterly been demonised. But a simple assessment that they failed ignores important historical context.
For starters, they were only the first, fumbling attempt at mandatory, nation-wide secondary schooling. They were also never intended or designed to deliver lots of academic qualifications or university offers (in an era when only a small portion of school leavers pursued higher education at all); judging them on the extent they did this is thus meretricious.
They were far from perfect, and there was plenty of scope for improving and fine-tuning. But those who lament the way many secondary moderns became so-called sink schools should realise that we have erected in their place a whole sink-system.
Of those ministers who dismantled academic selection, and lauded comprehensives as the bright future of education, precious few actually sent their own children to the newly-minted comprehensives. Reeves consistency, at least, is flattered by the comparison.
Labour radicalism was partnered, as so often, with Tory inertia. As a result, the old system was swept away in most of England. In those areas which held out, mostly in the South East, competition for places is extremely fierce, and broad catchment areas mean local children often lose out to middle-class peers from further afield.
As a result, grammars today have a reputation of elitism and snobbery – the precise opposite of what they were intended for.
The cost-of-living crisis, and the cycle of dysfunction that has embroiled Westminster over the past few years, means that political discussions often endlessly focus on short-term fixes.
But a fairer and better-functioning education system is the root of long-term growth, innovation and stability. If either major party wishes to reinvigorate Britain’s global competitiveness (an open question), reviving meritocracy in the school system must be a priority.
The abolition of selective education means children’s futures are now more determined by parental wealth and postcode (rather than ability) than they were at the height of the grammar experiment; selection takes place not at the exam hall, but the estate agent (or the parish church).
If Reeves is truly concerned with helping children “from all backgrounds”, why not reintroduce widespread academic selection?
Such selection is, in fact, already legal – if it occurs at age 16, when admission to colleges, apprenticeships, and sixth forms are usually decided.
But why wait until after pupils have completed their GCSEs, which since the abolition of AS Levels are now normally the only qualifications they have when universities are making offers?
Polling by the conservative think tank Onward suggests that most people would like to send their children to grammar, and most support selective education to some degree.
The most difficult aspect of renewing Britain’s lost education brilliance will be not protests from the public, most of whom are desperate for their children to get the best education possible, be it academic or vocational, but the training and retaining of teachers.
Perhaps if Reeves fulfils her ambition of entering No 11, she will come to better understand that it is far easier to destroy things than to create them.