If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. That will be most people’s sensible response to Theresa May’s school reform speech. And with good reason. After years of educational reform – some of it wise, some of it not, most of it well-intentioned – England’s school system is at last working pretty well. Record numbers of children attend schools rated good or outstanding. Failing schools have been turned round. Cities such as London and Birmingham, once bywords for underachievement, now have schools whose exam results are some of the best.
Failings, problems and inequalities of course remain. Complacency would be fatal. Britain’s record for social mobility is poor, for instance, and it has been made worse by post-crash inequalities. But the idea that English secondary schools are in crisis is by any meaningful measure false. To shake the system up yet again and without consultation, let alone for the most radical reform in half a century, and especially if the shake-up is designed to replace a comprehensive system with a selective alternative that was abandoned 50 years ago because it had failed, which the current system has not, is nuts.
At which point, it is only right to pause and study what the prime minister actually said today. Her speech was wide-ranging. It wasn’t even all about education. She framed her proposals in the context of social and economic hardship, and the wish of people to get on in life. There is not only nothing wrong with that – it is also what everyone wants for themselves and their children. Nor can the focus on increasing social mobility be faulted in principle. Mrs May prefers to use the word meritocracy, but she did not pretend that all on the meritocratic ladder start from the same rung. She said she wants to put working-class people first. And she focused not just on the poorest of the working class but on the “hidden disadvantaged”, whom she dubbed those who are “just about managing”. So far so good – and so coherent.
The problems start with the practical effects of what she proposed, and continue into the politics of what people on both sides of the political divide think she is saying. Mrs May set out a vision in which universities, fee-paying schools, and chains of academies invest in schools which can introduce academic selection for all or some of their courses. But there are few guarantees that this system will work in the way she believes and plenty of well-based worries that it will have the opposite effect to what she intends.
The prime minister is adamant that this would not mean a return to the old binary system of the postwar era in which those who passed the 11-plus went on to good jobs and those who didn’t (80% of the total) were given a second-class deal. But the politics of this speech are already outside Mrs May’s control. A binary system benefiting the middle-class is exactly what many in her party have always wanted, and it is what some of them will expect. Her opponents will draw the same conclusion. Labour has been quick to accuse Mrs May of talking nice talk about social mobility while economic muscle ensures yet again that the middle class will cream off the benefits at the expense of the disadvantaged.
It is possible that Mrs May’s plans will work out benignly. But the practical evidence is against her. Areas of England that are underperforming at secondary level are not going to find their provision improved by selection. On the contrary, selection will simply create fresh divisions which will almost inevitably reward the better-off and penalise the less prosperous. That was what was wrong with the old grammar-secondary modern divide. It is the all too predictable outcome of the new grammar-academy divide too. It is reckless stuff.
Mrs May’s gamble is political as well as educational. Her underlying wish to get away from the liberal consensus where it has failed, whether in social or economic policy, is understandable. But she is not doing this in ways that bring the public together in the way she says she wants. Voters and interest groups on the right will listen to Mrs May’s speech and conclude that she is bringing back grammar schools to benefit middle-class Tory voters. Those on the left will conclude she is turning her back on working-class voters who have benefited from the comprehensive system and from recent reforms. Mrs May insists she is a different kind of Tory. Plenty of people on both sides of politics will think this shows she is nothing of the sort. If she wants to win this battle, she is going to move quickly. But the divisiveness of the issue may already be beyond her power to control.
