When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (36 page)

Mr Valleley, who had been at the school since 1981, was the son of a Manchester printer. He is married to a senior county education official, and was a potter by training. He is a neat, fastidious man, who wears sharp suits and coloured shirts with contrasting white collars. Almost his first act on arriving at Knutsford was to refurbish his office – ‘it had looked like a National Insurance office' – leading to staffroom jokes about the ‘presidential suite'. Local public relations became a priority. ‘What was presented in the classroom was sound and good, but the physical environment wasn't as attractive. The school didn't have status in the community. The public needed to be told “this is a damn good school. I am quite prepared for us to be compared to anyone,”' he said.

While Mr Valleley persuaded his governors and colleagues to accept me, I talked with pundits and friends, worrying the comprehensive question back and forth. In my mind I had a model of what ought to be achievable – the standards and character of the traditional American high school, for the United States has built an extraordinary democracy on schools that educate all the children in a community. A decent common education has been a central part of the American heritage. Yet the British, with our self-deluding superiority to most foreign things, sneer at American standards. (‘I seldom find that American practice is relevant to what we do here, Mr Chesshyre,' a local authority administrator had said to me a few days after we returned.) Two American friends in London had taken their children away from British schools (one private, one state) and sent them to the American School because they found their children uncherished and British teachers unresponsive. One said: ‘Mary had only been at the American School for a week when I heard her singing in the morning. I suddenly realized that she hadn't sung like that for a year.' The other, who had sent her daughter to an English school for five years, said she was at last able to conduct a proper and equal dialogue with teachers. The English school had kept her at arm's length.

American schools are more accessible to parents, and American children are maturer and more self-confident than their English contemporaries. In the States fourteen-year-old boys look one in the eye and speak up: here they shuffle and mumble, or remain silent despite being bowled slow conversational full tosses. One British child – recently returned from the States – was selected for an inter-school current affairs quiz. He had mugged up the newspapers, and his team had swanned through. His parents noticed that he was far more casual in preparing for the next round. Why? they asked. Because, he replied, we'll win if I just glance at the headlines. Within a few weeks of getting back to the Britain, the boy's desire to do his best had been blunted.

So what was going wrong? Society, through politicians and the press, was devaluing the system, which itself, in places, appeared bent on suicide. As a rule of thumb, private education was portrayed as good and state education as bad. ‘Me first' had become an acceptable philosophy. In such a climate what could be more respectable than ‘to do one's best for one's child'? Indeed, it was self-indulgent to do otherwise and almost public-spirited to educate a child privately. Did not the nation need thoroughly educated citizens? By paying, parents could ensure it got them, and at the same time relieved the burden on the public purse. In education it was to be BMWs for those who could afford them, and a clapped-out, erratic public bus service for the rest. More fool he who waited at the draughty bus stop when he could afford a car.

Almost weekly some crazed teacher or administrator threw raw meat to the eager press. Certain education authorities appeared determined to promote homosexuality, Marxism and a brand of antiracism that replaced ‘Baa baa black sheep' with ‘Baa baa green sheep'. An enthusiastic headmistress at a primary school banned the egg and spoon race as too competitive, and sports fields grew dandelions or were sold as building sites. When the BBC announced it was taking the jaded radio programme, ‘Top of the Form', off the air, right-wingers refused to believe that the decision had anything to do with programming. It was axed, they said, either because the competition was too cut-throat for pinko BBC tastes, or because children were now too ill-educated to answer the questions. The satirical radio show, ‘Week Ending,' had a mock contest between Che Guevara's and St Mugabe's comprehensives in which everyone won, regardless of whether they knew the answers.

‘How the dream of comprehensives turned into a nightmare,' I read in the
Daily Express
. ‘Twenty years on, the chickens are coming home to roost … a growing number of parents, politicians, academics and pundits are passing judgement on the all-in system … and they are finding that it has failed.' The
Sun
, determined to promote sound cultural values amongst its readers, complained: ‘Britain's comprehensives are coming out bottom of the class.' These perceived failures lay, according to such papers, at the heart of many of our national ills. The
Sun
(in an article on education) had discovered ‘the emergence of a new breed of young thug seemingly unaware of the difference between right and wrong'. (The old breed presumably knew, but ignored, the difference.) A government minister said in the aftermath of one soccer riot: ‘Our teachers have much to answer for.' Even the Education
Guardian
ran an article under the subsidiary headline: ‘Whenever I hear of a criminal brought to justice I always feel the real criminals go free.' The ‘real criminals' were, of course, the teachers.

My own first dealings with the school to which our children would be going were dispiriting. In America our eldest son had been in classes with children eighteen months older than himself. Back in London, he faced repeating a year of schooling. Accustomed to American flexibility – there was often a three-year age span in classes – we challenged this ruling in order to prevent him losing momentum. The school claimed it hadn't the authority for such a decision, thereby illustrating why fee-paying schools have been able to pinch the word ‘independent' to describe themselves. A senior teacher told me that the education authority made no exceptions, and would even separate into different years identical twins born a few minutes either side of midnight on 31 August, the crucial cut-off date. It was so clearly untrue, and implied such a contempt for parental rights and concerns, that I have never been able to take that particular teacher seriously again. I next had an interview with two borough officials, a young assistant director who appeared to agree with much of what I had to say, and an older woman. Each time the young man got close to conceding a point, his companion would intervene sharply, like a sheepdog attending to a straying lamb. ‘Mr “X” has not been with the authority long enough to interpret our policies,' she ruled, her mouth snapping shut with a determination that eventually silenced us both. Although she would not move my son, she would, she said, inform the school of his academic standard – which obviously I had already done – so that he could be placed in suitable subject sets. Nothing happened. He spent the next eight weeks tediously working his way through the system, before arriving, somewhat disenchanted, in his final groups.

A year later my second son, in the company of a lively bunch of children from his primary school, entered the same comprehensive, borne along by a sense of excitement and curiosity that was, if anything, heightened in his first few weeks. He would come home bubbling with enthusiasm for what he had been doing, shoving his exercise books under my nose before I could get my coat off. The phone became a hotline as his friends exchanged notes on homework. He auditioned for
Oliver
, and got a place in the chorus, was selected for his year's soccer team, and embarked on community projects. I could not have imagined anyone making a more positive start in any school.

However, in our London borough 28 per cent of children do not go to local authority schools. In our street the figure is far higher: each morning the Volvos – yes, they usually are – sweep up and remove the neighbourhood children, some of them tiny things in elaborately striped blazers, caps and ties. Of course, those parents have the right to pay school fees, but how many of them give the alternative any thought? The head of a prep school in a town near Knutsford, who had himself sent a daughter – now at university – to his local comprehensive, told me: ‘Many parents have made up their minds. They do not realistically assess what the comprehensive might offer. They don't even go and take a look.' Then he added with a smile that, since his livelihood depended on their business, he wasn't complaining. But I do. Every time a child is withdrawn from the state system, that diminishes the national drive to have the best. It is death by a thousand drop-outs.

Paying school fees assuages the consciences of the very busy. A friend, a television news correspondent and a workaholic, whose wife also works, decided that they couldn't give their children the additional support that he believed state education would require. Although he is such a strong Labour backer that I once suspected a future Labour government might elevate him to the House of Lords and make him a minister, he felt nonetheless it would be unfair for his children not to be at the sort of school that – as he perceived it – took care of all their needs. He certainly escaped the agonizing over whether to speak up when things go wrong that similar people who do choose state schools often go through. These are the solid citizens who devote an immense amount of time to their schools – dispensing wine and cheese and organizing the annual fête – yet do not have the impact on what takes place inside the school to which their commitment should entitle them. They suffer from English reticence, but also enter a subconscious conspiracy not to draw attention to things that go wrong. They have a doubly vested interest in the school's reputation, which they fear will be damaged if unpleasant truths are aired. Their child is at the school, and their judgement is on the line. They do not wish to give succour to those who might say ‘I told you so.' But their inhibitions deny them any real say in how the school is run. In the United States there is no invisible line on the ground beyond which parents may not step; Parent-Teacher Associations are formidable bodies whose function is not simply to raise funds for mini-buses. British teachers like to talk of ‘partnership' – they reject the concept of parents being ‘consumers' of education, because that relationship presumes rights which most teachers would not be prepared to concede. But the present partnership is chronically unequal.

A few days before John Rae retired as headmaster of Westminster School, I talked to him about the introduction of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). Dr Rae, now director of the Laura Ashley Foundation, which gives grants to educational causes, was almost apocalyptic in his perception of what's happening to our state schooling. ‘We are in danger,' he said, ‘of getting a larger and larger semi-educated mass, while economic prospects grow worse. The fabric of social life is beginning to crack.' He added: ‘Not enough state schools are well run, work smoothly or have good teaching. They go on about new exams, but the reality, for God's sake, is that the teacher doesn't keep order. Teachers are badly paid and under-respected,
déclassé
… pseudo-intellectuals. Too many have a chip on their shoulder and see parents as a threat.' When reported in the
Observer
, these remarks provoked the predictable wrath of teachers. But the poor morale of teachers is a consequence rather than a cause of the chronic unhappiness within British schools. Dr Rae asked: ‘Are the British at heart afraid of releasing the potential of all their children? I think they are. We are still essentially rather aristocratic in our concept of society. We still don't believe in the great mass of what we used to call working-class people having the talent or ability to do anything other than unskilled jobs or play football. We fear a society in which we tap the talent of this great mass, because it is going to threaten our secure middle-class set-up, and it might threaten our rather cosy cultural elitism as well.'

Historically, schooling was rationed in Britain: so many first-rate educations for our leaders and colonial administrators, a few more second-rate for our managers and business people and fifth-rate for the rest. Anything better for the masses might create discontent or even political instability. Why clutter with dangerous nonsense the head of a man whose allotted role in life will be to dig ditches? (‘Education,' declared a nineteenth-century MP, ‘would enable [the poor] to read seditious pamphlets … and render them insolent against their superiors …')

Now we have potential instability for the opposite reason. Not enough Britons are adequately educated to fulfil their own aspirations or the necessary tasks of a high-tech society. Our rivals streak ahead because they do not suffer from damaging inhibitions about the potential of people. The Japanese will produce 400,000 more qualified engineers than Britain in the next five years. A Japanese engineer/craftsman is likely to start work at twenty-one rather than at sixteen. In West Germany, shop-floor engineers are considered ‘professionals'. Many British children who do get a good education get the wrong one – too narrow and academic; but the broad majority leave school with stunted imaginations about their own possibilities, bound for an uncomplaining, but often unfulfilled, existence. A small minority – the notorious ‘yobs' – emerge unscathed by learning, hostile and aggressive.

In his book,
The Challenge for the Comprehensive School
, David Hargreaves, chief inspector for ILEA (Inner London Education Authority), conjures up a telling image of what goes on in the back rows of our worst classrooms. Through the eyes of two average girl students, lessons are like ‘very dull television programmes, which could not be switched off'. Occasionally the programme was interesting or loud enough to catch their attention, but never for sufficiently long for them to grasp the essential elements of the plot. ‘The girls had lost track of the story long ago … they talked through the broadcast whenever they could … the easiest form of resistance was to treat the lessons as background noise which from time to time interrupted their utterly absorbing sisterly gossip.' Mr Hargreaves concludes his apposite metaphor: ‘In many respects it is a marvellous anticipation of their adult roles, where features of school will be replaced by the noise of a factory, the intrusions of the supervisor's exhortations, the monotony of unwanted routine jobs.' It is not surprising that attempts to converse with them are doomed. The majority of American school-leavers are, by comparison, stimulated rather than daunted by school – most of them having survived and thrived until they are eighteen.