Did you ever play that game when you were a child, where someone dragged you along on a rug sliding over a shiny floor? Then you’ll remember that sensation of the ground appearing to slip underneath you. Does your job feel like that? I ask, because the main people announcing education policy at the moment are Theresa May and Nick Gibb.
Perhaps it works like this: the prime minister is headteacher; you are deputy and Nick Gibb is the ambitious assistant head. The PM has her time taken up dealing with playground fighting between two year 9 boys, Hammond and Johnson, while Mr Gibb is doing his usual job of telling people they’re not good enough.
A couple of speeches last week, though, from Mrs May and Mr Gibb, suggest this picture may not be accurate. You’ll know that Mrs May had planned to open new grammar schools. Then the awful event of last June occurred and Mrs May found that even with the brown envelope deal with your Northern Irish friends, there was no certainty she would get away with her plan.
Now, though, we see she was determined not to give up and had a plan B up her sleeve: the annexe (were you consulted?).
She talked about it again last week. Where there is a grammar school, there can be an annexe. Where there is an annexe, there can be another annexe. One of Mrs May’s justifications for this is that it is popular with parents, she told the Friends of Grammar Schools campaign group in Westminster. Does this include the parents of the students at the non-grammar schools, I wonder? Do they sit about saying how pleased they are that there is a grammar school down the road that supposedly offers a better education than the one their children are allowed to have?
Another is that it’s good for social mobility. If this is based on the period between 1944 and 1970, it’s a case not proven. The economy was expanding, while migrants were coming in doing jobs deemed by experts as being “at the bottom”. Perhaps it’s the claim that the grammar schools of that era gave some working-class children opportunities that the education system had not offered before. True. However, this doesn’t prove that a truly comprehensive system, offering a full range of courses to children of all abilities and interests wouldn’t have done the same.
Even so, the whole concept of social mobility is dodgy, isn’t it? In an economy that’s not expanding, if the lower orders are to be upwardly socially mobile some of the upper orders are going to have to sink to make room. Is Mrs May advocating that?
The thing is, we don’t really know why your boss is still so keen on selective schools despite all the evidence against them, and we are still waiting for you, or her, to publish the results of the famous public consultation on the subject – “Schools that work for everyone” it was called – which closed last December and hasn’t been heard of since.
Your assistant head, Mr Gibb, chipped in on the debate, too, though. At the same grammar schools event, he showed what a dab hand he is at maths with these stats: “The attainment gap between disadvantaged students and their classmates in selective schools is 1.7% – compared with about 8% in all schools.” This is a killer fact. Presumably the gap is even wider in non-selective schools. Can you explain this? Might it be possible that the reason disadvantaged pupils at selective schools do better at exams than disadvantaged pupils at non-selective schools is that the disadvantaged pupils at selective schools have been selected on the basis of their ability to do better in exams?
Can I leave these questions with you? Perhaps Mrs May has decided that you’re not supposed to be making statements on any of this, but if you get a chance to nip down the corridor and ask your colleagues, it would be great to hear from you.
Yours, Michael Rosen
