I am late with my contribution to the revitalised grammar school debate, but I’ll continue as I have a relatively unusual perspective for a broadsheet columnist – in the 70s I went to a working-class grammar. Some of the children there were middle class, but most were from my background – a few violent skinheads, quite a lot of indifferent yobs, and a small number of bright, ambitious kids. I suppose I was one of them, although I tried to hide my intelligence. “You swallow a dictionary, or something?” was the customary aggressive challenge to my loquacity.
Grammar school did help me into social mobility, but not in the way you might expect. I got two poor A-levels, and did not attend university until 10 years after I left school. But I did get something out of my grammar school, a diluted version of what children who go to private school also get – a sense that I was capable, even special.
I developed the feeling that I was part of a group of which there were certain hopes and expectations. This has been a powerful force in my life. I may have come from a household where no books lined the shelves, where we read the Daily Express and listened to Radio 2, but my school helped me believe I could move beyond these parameters. This had nothing to do with academic ability and everything to do with confidence.
Things have changed. Social mobility rates have stagnated or dropped. Grammar schools are unfashionable and I fully understand why – the implication that you are a failure at the age of 11 is a bitter pill to swallow.
However, what isn’t usually mentioned is the other side of the coin – the positive effect of being told you are (potentially) some kind of success. Something, on the whole, a working-class child, however talented, at even a good comprehensive can find hard to believe despite the mass of egalitarian propaganda to the contrary.
If grammar schools are merely colonised by the middle classes looking for a cheap alternative to the even more unfair option of private schools, then there is no point in bringing them back. Also, if they are determined by a crude, culture-laden 11-plus style “intelligence” test, then they are also useless.
But given that a large number of working-class children simply don’t have a chance anyway, some kind of leg up might be worthwhile. If grammar schools were established in primarily poor and disadvantaged areas and based on potential rather than ability, they might be the least worst option. My 14-year-old daughter was admitted to her (state) school on a music scholarship not on the grounds of any tutoring – she had hardly held an instrument – but because she had perfect pitch.
I am not, at heart, an egalitarian, because I believe that while class and environment plays a big part in development, people have different abilities and aptitudes inborn. These aptitudes, however, are unfairly masked by money and power. Grammar schools established largely in working-class areas might make a difference. Yes – it means that some children might end up feeling bad about themselves at a tender age. Then again, as I know only too well, working-class life is full of shit of one kind or another and selection is just another kind of shit they might have no choice but to put up with. If they are anything like the kids I grew up with, they will be tough and resilient if nothing else.
At least then a substantial few will have a real chance of escape – rather then simply being universally offered the empty rhetoric of future success, which is all they get now. If the price you pay is a certain amount of bad feeling – possibly temporary – among a lot of other working-class kids, perhaps it’s a price worth paying.
