Figures released today reveal that the Conservatives’ flagship academies perform worse than their Local Authority equivalents. What is most striking about this revelation is not the indication that Britain seems to have been pushed further down the path to educational oblivion, but rather that no one seems to care.
Failed educational reforms are as much a part of British schools as its gloopy mashed potatoes and lumpy custard. We seem to take a quiet pride in the fact that reading standards for fourteen year olds are now lower than in every other European country except Albania, and revel in the news that our ranking in science league tables has nosedived more than twenty places in a decade. After all, in the nation that produced Shakespeare and whose contribution to past educational methods reads like a straight-A report card, we can afford to adopt a certain sense of complacency.
But in this brave new world in which we find ourselves, Michael Gove’s education reforms risk not only marginalising millions of British school children in an increasingly globalised jobs market, but also confirming the demise of British competitiveness in the world economy. Still more tragic is that Gove forms part of a government which has unashamedly pursued Conservative policies on a national and international stage. And yet the model behind his academies – throwing billions of pounds at failing schools and hoping educational underachievement will somehow be reversed by the sheer weight of funding – is blood red in its ideology.
Current reforms fail to address the root of Britain’s educational downward spiral. Lavishing millions on architectural masterpieces, although artistically laudable, has proved resoundingly disappointing academically. The government is effectively attempting to dress up the same old syllabus and “one size fits all” education in a new suit. Mr Gove would be wise to do exactly the opposite, by looking back at Britain’s previous position at the vanguard of educational achievement and rewriting it in a 21st century context: he should bring back the Grammar Schools.
Grammar schools symbolised, to many, the principles of the British way of life – the right to succeed based on merit and a strong work ethic alone. Many on the Left bitterly derided these institutions as enforcing class segregation and consigning millions to a sense of worthlessness for not having passed the entrance exam at eleven. Admittedly, it is easy to look back at the two-tiered system nostalgically and attribute Britain’s previous coveted position solely to Grammar schools. To suggest that a child’s life should be determined at the tender age of eleven and that anyone who fails the entrance exam should be resigned to a factory production line is ridiculous. But the values embodied by the grammar school system are something that we can learn from.
Above all, it is the egalitarian principles imbued by Grammar schools that are most conducive to success. Grammar schools arose from the same meritocratic principles that saw Frederic II of Prussia build one of the world’s first modern societies, based on achievement rather than patronage. Grammar school pupils were built to be leaders of an empire, to conquer the world. This culture of fierce competitiveness has been replaced by a system that fails to reward success, for fear of offending.
The fact that Britain has one of the largest independent education sectors of any developed nation is rather embarrassing. Britain finds herself regressing in social mobility thanks to an education system based on wealth rather than crude intellect. It is, ironically, the disappearance of grammar schools from the mainstream education sector that has hampered rather than facilitated social mobility. As in a failed communist state, the majority are herded into mediocrity and the rich pay to get out.
Grammar schools created an environment where success was celebrated in a fiercely competitive environment. It has become all too fashionable to place the blame on the supposed elitism of Oxbridge, and its bias towards its in-crowd of toffee nosed Etonians, rather than face the fact that state schools simply don’t offer enough of the sort of education so essential to Oxbridge success. It is this feeling of victimisation present in British state schools that is the root of academic underachievement. The onus is no longer placed on the individual but on the collective. By creating a culture of endless retakes and modules, exam failure is no longer seen as the fault of the student but the fault of society.
The disappearance of competitive sport from state schools has created an environment where to win is to oppress rather than to succeed. By being fed watered down education syllabuses and denied the full fat academic rigour his privately educated counterpart has access to, the state school pupil has been rendered an itinerant refugee, wandering from one failed educational framework to another.
Rather than take the intercity express towards educational success, through learning through tried and tested methods, Mr Gove prefers to weigh himself down by the Left’s bitterness towards grammar schools. Instead he has climbed aboard the diesel locomotive destined for disaster in a world where we can no longer afford to adopt be so complacent.
