The case against comprehensive schools

The desire for reform — genuine, dramatic change to almost every aspect of the State one can think of — has never been so palpable. I can’t be the only one who has found himself overhearing lively conversations in public spaces; cafes, the supermarket checkout, between ordinary citizens who have clearly had enough. So, where do we start? 

When Andy Burnham linked the phrase comprehensive school in the same pious breath to that sacred trinity for all Labour Party faithful, the NHS, he inadvertently pointed the way and demonstrated perfectly why the crazy era in which we have allowed politicians to control schools must end. 

Think about it. We have laws that are designed to protect school children from political indoctrination, yet we hand politicians absolute control over the schools they attend. How can anyone be surprised at how successfully that opened the door to the corruption of our culture and democracy? 

Comprehensive schooling is an entirely political project. It has nothing whatsoever to do with education, let alone educating large numbers of children to a reasonably high standard. Its only purpose is to deliver a shamelessly political goal — a spurious and intrinsically unattainable vision of human equity. 

According to Burnham, all the thousands of teenagers who leave their comprehensive schools annually, by some miracle do so on an equal footing. So, why do many of them openly compete for places at sought after universities, whilst others learn nothing pretty much since their arrival aged eleven, are desperate to leave, or voted with their feet a long time ago? To eulogise the comprehensive school as a champion of equity, as Burnham did, is wilful fantasising. 

But then they were never really intended to achieve anything positive. They were conceived of as a way to abolish grammar schools, those appalling institutions which actually were educational, not political projects. 

This has always been a feverish national issue but what I’d like to do here is look at it as dispassionately as possible. To explore why, far from reinventing or reinforcing the comprehensive school, a Britain intent on dramatic reform should be putting an end to them for good. 

Spend some time studying secondary school websites, as I have had to do in the past, and you will quickly find that few schools label themselves comprehensives anyway. Many of the professionals inside them who deliver academic selection every day by teaching children in different sets, for different subjects, are all too aware that the label is just a politically convenient lie. 

They also know there is nothing rational, reasoned or intelligent about denying the classroom reality that academic selection works. Using schools to pursue fairness at the expense of educational success effectively hamstrings them, and every teacher in them. That is why the tutoring business is booming and why we are fast reaching a point where fewer and fewer classrooms are run by professional teachers. The pursuit of inclusion — yet another entirely political project being imposed on schools — means it won’t be long before only amateur therapists, social workers cosplaying as teachers, or most dangerously of all, only the party faithful remain behind to act as teachers. 

There is nothing rational, reasoned or intelligent about rejecting academic selection. An antipathy rooted in emotion serves only the weak mind that voices it, and those easily duped. The nominal beneficiaries, children attending school, always end up as inconveniences, to be labelled and bypassed as much as possible, just as long as the political message hits home. 

If as a nation we believe we need educated citizens because they become the men and women who generate cultural and economic prosperity for all, then the last thing you would do is champion comprehensive schooling. 

The inconvenient reality is that comprehensive schools really are incompatible with the pursuit of educational success for individual children, and for the nation as a whole, because those two outcomes are intrinsically connected.  

There is a small library of international research indicating positive outcomes from academic selection at every age and stage of education. In stark contrast there is less than a handful of overtly anti-grammar school research papers which all rely on the same, entirely political methodology.  Anti-grammar school researchers inevitably look at free schools meals data as a proxy for educational disadvantage — in itself a ludicrously meaningless substitution — then at GCSE results. After allowing for whatever data they find inconvenient, they conclude that comprehensives are better because more children pass more exams. The criteria they use to justify their anti-grammar school argument turns out to have literally, and unsurprisingly, nothing at all to do with education and everything to do with politics. 

Contrast that with the huge international Books in the Home study carried out by Dr. Mariah Evans of the University of Nevada, which found that the most accurate predictor by far of any child’s educational success is not their school, their parents’ educational qualifications, or even parental income, but the number of books they have in their home. Or take a look at the Nation Empowered report edited by Susan Assouline and colleagues (2015) or the meta-analysis by Saiying Steenbergen-Hu, Matthew Makel, and Paula Olszewski-Kubilius (2016) both of which looked at the effectiveness of acceleration programmes in the US. 

This means there is really only one question anyone seriously interested in the quality of the nation’s schools should ask themselves. Do we want our costly education system to deliver positive benefits for the entire nation, and our wider culture, or do we want to make a few ephemeral politicians feel better about themselves — before they get voted out? 

What I would like to see is not just a final abandonment of the pretence that comprehensive schools deliver equity and benefit the nation, but a radical move to take schools away from politicians altogether. 

Britain is the only nation on Earth with schools of such high quality that we can export them. Labour’s VAT attack on the private sector has done nothing to benefit the State sector. There are no new teachers, never mind the 6,500 promised and the increased costs to the State sector in transporting SEN children alone, alongside the basic funding of their State school places, will have been vast, although conveniently hidden. Labour have actually written off £5 billion of these costs for local authorities, to hide this appalling failure of basic government. 

The comprehensive school, so often a miserable, watered-down, negative experience for thousands of children, needs putting out of its misery

Labour has succeeded only in harming the education of tens of thousands of children, forcing many hundreds of teachers and other school employees out of work, while effectively incentivising our most famous, high quality schools, to extend their influence abroad even more energetically than they already were. 

A sensible politician, one intelligent enough to admit to themself just how little they really know about high quality schooling, would change tack and introduce policies designed to incentivise these schools, as well as the remaining grammar schools, to extend their influence at home, not abroad. It is an astounding act of national self-harm to undermine the priceless national resource our most famous and successful schools literally embody. The comprehensive school, so often a miserable, watered-down, negative experience for thousands of children, needs putting out of its misery.