I’m struck by how much of the current debate about grammar schools and their part in promoting social mobility relies on ideas about the past (May opens floodgates on grammars, 9 September). There is a vital role here for historians of education, who are well placed to expose some of the myths of the experience and consequences of the tripartite system as well as account for how those same myths continue to shape popular notions of what an excellent education looks like. The modern state grammar school of the popular imagination, and the secondary modern which was a necessary condition for it, existed over a relatively short period after 1944 and the system was soon (by the late 50s) generally regarded as a mistake. The key thing that promoted social mobility, to my mind, was not the grammar school but the huge expansion of higher education with full financial support by the state. In 1964 Harold Wilson’s Labour government made sure this would happen, and that, in turn, relied upon a national commitment to comprehensive schooling. At that time, only about 4% went to university, only a quarter of whom were female; such numbers could not sustain the expansion of the sector. The evidence is clear: higher expectation of entry to university, financial support and comprehensive education equal social mobility. If we were serious about increasing social mobility (whatever that means today) we would scrap university fees and invest in education from the cradle to the grave.
Dr Catherine Burke
Reader in history of education and childhood, University of Cambridge
• The Conservatives’ grammar school spasm is primarily about neither nostalgia nor social mobility. It’s simply about cutting the cost of entrenching educational privilege: tutoring, or even prep school, is cheaper than moving house. Much more interesting is the concept of “social mobility” itself. This cannot mean what it meant in the halcyon postwar days when a huge expansion in professional and white-collar jobs meant that grammars and an expanding university sector could support a mass journey up the ladder without many of the privileged having to move down. The labour market is very different now – and an upcoming explosion in automation is set to destroy many of those professional jobs. It’s not clear whether grammar school supporters haven’t thought this through or (more likely, in my view) they have indeed thought it through , and intend the new policy as a way of ratcheting up competition in order to put the children of “their” people in the best position to survive the coming employment storm. For the rest of us, the pressing need is to think hard about a better way of organising the social relations of work in the future dispensation. I suggest that “equality” would be a better starting point than “mobility”.
Richard Middleton
Crossmichael, Dumfries and Galloway
• Having spent 40 years in secondary education, of which 34 were in mixed non-selective schools (20 years as a head), I soon learned that investment in the first five years of a child’s life is what enables social mobility. The child who starts primary school with a vocabulary of fewer than 100 words and whose family members have had no support from their local Sure Start centre is permanently disadvantaged. If only Theresa May would see the beneficial wisdom of replenishing local authorities’ funding for Sure Start and public health, she would then be investing in the nation’s future in a manner that the reintroduction of selection for 11-year-olds could never achieve. However intrinsically intellectually able they may be, the 15-year-olds whose only learned means of communication is via the three Fs – feet, fists and four letter words – have long been condemned to remain on the bottom rung of the social ladder.
Anita Higham
Adderbury, Oxfordshire
• Melissa Benn’s article (Grammar schools don’t help social mobility – we need to start earlier, 6 September) shows that by reopening the debate on grammars, the government is falling at the first hurdle in its stated commitment to equalise life chances. Frank Field’s report presented to the prime minister in 2010, “The Foundation Years: Preventing poor children becoming poor adults”, highlighted that there are interventions that can equalise the life chances of poor children before they reach school and are more powerful than the impact of income and class: the mental health of the mother, the bond between mother and child, and the home learning environment.
If we are to radically address Britain’s stagnant social mobility, greater resources in the early years need to target not only quality, as Melissa Benn rightly identifies, but the key role of parents in ensuring these first years are the basis for success in adulthood. The Foundation Years Trust was established here in Birkenhead to identify viable approaches to improving the life chances of children before they enter reception class, by engaging the poorest families as leaders in the drive to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty. An effective approach links schools, families and communities, and must be supported and promoted by a government with a genuine commitment to life chances.
Anna-Louise van der Merwe
Trust director, The Foundation Years Trust
• It’s refreshing to have Tory policy set out so clearly. Justine Greening on the Today programme on 9 September, offering her argument for selective schools: “We also know that children on free school meals who get into grammars do twice as well as other children who are in grammars.” That is, if poor kids want to be allowed in, they have to be a damn sight cleverer than better-off kids. Hardly the “country that works for everyone” that Theresa May promised.
Michael Shipman
London
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