I didn’t congratulate you on your appointment as secretary of state, a success story you should have crowed about. After all, according to the line of argument from you and the Conservative party, it should have been nigh impossible for someone with your experience of secondary education to have reached one of the highest offices in the land. You went to a comprehensive school. And yet, mysteriously and amazingly, it hasn’t prevented you from progressing.
As if this wasn’t remarkable enough, I see that Theresa May, who appears to be driving the grammar school bus, did herself experience a few years of comprehensive education after her grammar school was converted. In another time, another space – and I suppose, another political party – you could both just as easily write a narrative that would explain how socially aware, broad-minded and well educated you are, thanks to your comprehensive schools.
Sadly, this line of storytelling doesn’t seem to appeal to you. Instead, I see swaths of evidence-free stuff about improving chances and raising standards, and a glorious metaphor from your minister of exclamation marks and subordinate conjunctions, Nick Gibb: “turbo-charging social mobility”.
Let’s run with this image of turbo-charged social mobility. So far, creating selective schools guarantees that a small minority of parents, either with enough money to pay for tutoring or with enough education, will be able to help their children take up these places. For Gibb to blast his way through this, you would have to create special places for some particular kind of poor kids, who will have been hand-picked through a new kind of detection system which, as yet, you haven’t told us about. An Ofqual-run child catcher?
But what is social mobility? You’re clearly not talking about moving sideways, so it can only mean moving “up”. This offers us a picture of society as having a fixed structure with a top, middle and bottom. Few politicians seem interested in the idea that this structure could ever change. In fact, talking of “social mobility” seems yet another way of convincing us that the structure is the natural order of things: we must have a tiny percentage at the “top”, owning and controlling nearly everything, a larger percentage of extremely well-paid managers and smaller owners in the middle, and an even larger percentage whose sole means of earning a living is being employed by those “above” them.
Social mobility, as I understand it from you, is the process by which people in the lower groups rise to the higher ones. As “mobility” doesn’t include the word “rising”, it could, in theory, mean “falling”. In fact, if people are to rise, don’t the same number have to fall? So in the theoretical landscape of grammar schools turbo-charging social mobility, won’t a swath of people have to be turbo-charged downwards?
We need to know. I can imagine some of your keenest supporters will want to know if their position in, say, the middle group, is under threat from oiks and yobbos in the lower group.
Of course, whether education can or does enhance this kind of social mobility is debatable. The peak of the grammar school system I came through in the 50s and 60s coincided with economic expansion, which brought more “middle” jobs. Four to seven years in a grammar school marked a pupil as suitable.
Since then, the policies of your predecessors closed down large areas of manufacturing, and new technology is reducing the need for many kinds of work, so it’s hard to see that type of social mobility – moving up to fill vacant places – materialising in the present day.
Meanwhile, do you remember how your department used to talk about closing the “attainment gap”? If you have schools for high flyers to help them fly high, won’t they fly even higher than the low flyers in the other schools? In my day, the main purpose of grammar schools was to signal to parents that their children wouldn’t have to hang out with the oiks and yobbos.
Subtly, imperceptibly, schooling was a process by which we all learned our place. The one-off, do-or-die exam marked us for life and told us we were “better” or “worse” than others. This was the main message we got.
Social mobility? Social fixing, more like.
Yours, Michael Rosen
