When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (37 page)

The educations Mr Hargreaves wrote about are an assault on the self-respect of children. He added: ‘In response [to this assault], the pupils set up an
alternative
means of achieving dignity and status by turning the school's dignity system upside down.' Hence yobbism. Dr Rae ended with the words: ‘Do we have to believe in some racial theory whereby the Japanese are born better at maths? It is a well-worn cliché that the most vital national resource is the people. In practice, it's a fraudulent claim. If we pursued our latent human talent with the drive and energy with which we pursue North Sea oil, wow, think of it! Then you really could say “the British are coming”.'

Another fraudulent concept is ‘choice' as a remedy for poor standards. Further choice, as outlined in the 1987 Conservative manifesto proposal to allow schools to ‘opt out' of local education authorities – giving mobility to the already mobile – would lead to greater polarization between the best and the worst in the schools. Those who could ‘work' the system would do so, adding another tier of opting-out parents to the six per cent who now pay: the children of those who couldn't exercise that ‘right' would be more thoroughly segregated in sink schools. Choice, said Mrs Joan Sallis, the national organizer of the Campaign for the Advancement of State Education, means that he with the longest arm reaches the highest shelf. ‘It is a nice word for a nasty process.' A few parents are candid enough to admit that choice is about advantage – the right school tie, influential friends, an acceptable accent – as well as about a decent education. Put crudely, people pay school fees to get their children ahead in the rat-race. A stockbroker, responding to a survey, was honest: ‘Everything is at the margin. I believe that the school will give my son a 5 per cent better chance, and he may just need that 5 per cent.'

Mrs Sallis, a ruddy-cheeked woman who looks like a farmer's wife, is a beacon for parents who are privately concerned that the stockbroker may have got it right. She stomps the country encouraging parents to start support groups for state education, and fires them with her own example – all three of her children, products of state education, have succeeded in markedly different ways – one as a high-powered mathematician, one as a garden designer, and one as a personnel officer in the NHS. Mrs Sallis comes from aspiring working-class Welsh stock; her father was a coalface worker for forty years. Education for her was the route to better things. There were always two fires lit in her home – one for the family and one for the children doing homework.

She became a civil servant and was bound for the top when she decided that raising children is a full-time pursuit. ‘I wanted to deliver every spoonful of egg myself.' When her children were still young, she moved to an affluent London suburb, and was ‘morally shocked' to find that local schools were ‘a soup-kitchen service' in comparison with the fine parks, public buildings and lavish private homes. ‘The attitude was that people who used the schools presumably couldn't afford anything better, and therefore ought to be grateful. “If you can't afford private schooling, don't grumble. If you can, you opt out.” As a well-dressed, well-spoken, caring mother, I was regarded as a lunatic to be using the local schools,' she said. Mrs Sallis possesses a determined Welsh egalitarian spirit, which makes her hostile to the privileges and snobbery that are inextricable from private education. ‘There is no more class-ridden country than ours,' she said, ‘and no other country has such prestigious private schools: they provide not just an education, but a passport to a way of life. We grovel before people who are meant to be socially OK.' An American friend living in London said: ‘A sixty-year-old gets an important new job, and the first thing the papers mention, for God's sake, is what school he went to.'

Mrs Sallis also objects to fee-paying schools on educational grounds because many of them work on the principle that ‘academic success is the only sort worth having.' In 1986 the historian Corelli Barnett, who argues that public schools – by creating an out-of-date elite with a soul above industry and commerce – are responsible for our industrial decline, told members of the Headmasters' Conference (the body that represents public-school headmasters): ‘For more than a century, your schools have done much to bring Britain down as a trading nation.'

Certainly when I was at such a school, only those who ‘failed' academically entered industry. One boy, interviewed by a small family firm, was asked almost exclusively about his golf. The owner wanted a congenial companion, not a whizz kid. The business went bust a few years later. Middle-class parents are still gravely embarrassed by children who ‘fail' in the conventional sense. How often you get, as Mrs Sallis said, ‘a long spiel' why Sarah is a hairdresser or Charles a decorator. No other country has these hang-ups: Americans would expect such children to win out in their chosen careers, and become millionaire hairdressers or decorators.

Recently, I met a middle-aged architect, who in the fifties had been a pupil at Tulse Hill in south London, one of the first comprehensives. He was transferred there from a technical school and, in his own opinion, would today be a carpenter but for the stroke of luck of Tulse Hill opening on his doorstep. ‘For the first time,' he says, ‘I was trusted with control over the design of what I was doing.' That trust opened a new world to him. Thirty years later, we still agonize whether comprehensives can bring the best out of bright children. Now that 90 per cent of secondary-school children attend such schools, surely it is time to be positive. Even the few who are educated elsewhere must live amongst a majority who will go to comprehensives: private school alumni don't travel in separate compartments on the Underground. Barbara Simons, a deputy head at Knutsford, said: ‘Every child has a birthright to go to a “good” school. If your child doesn't feel it is a good school, you have taken that right away from him.'

People who are sensible in all other respects fall prey to the endless propaganda pumped out about comprehensives. A well-spoken woman at a local action meeting on state education could hardly contain herself. ‘What does one do?' she asked desperately, ‘with that amount of panic and fear? What does one say to the people who are not here, who are sending their children to private schools?' A ‘Good Schools Guide', published by
Harpers and Queen
, caught the tone of the social forces at work. ‘State school pupils are sloppy, spotty and
louche
,' while ‘in private schools, manners are good and the pupils are clean and polite.' Almost every action taken by Mrs Thatcher's government, from the assisted-places scheme – which, even if one believed in its validity, would, in Dr Rae's words, be like ‘trying to cure a famine by taking a few children to lunch at the Ritz' – to the proposed Crown Technology Colleges, has been an assault on the resources and self-esteem of the comprehensive system.

The head of an academically successful comprehensive was told by Sir Keith Joseph, then Education Secretary, that it was necessary to have ‘centres of excellence'. ‘Did he not realize that we're sending scientists to Oxbridge? What happens to our standards? Didn't he know of the academic achievements of comprehensives?' the head asked in despair. He added: ‘The government indulges in massive bloodletting, and then expresses surprise that the patient is anaemic and lacking his usual energy.' Measurable standards – passes at O and A level, for example – have risen gently, but consistently, since comprehensives were introduced. The total of successful Oxford candidates from state schools in absolute terms now matches that from independent private schools.

Political pressures on what goes on in the classroom receive a massive amount of media space. In a minority of areas these pressures are real enough. One head teacher, who asked to remain anonymous so as to avoid retribution, told me: ‘I am attacked because I have a “grammar school” ethos, whatever that means. Is it because I fight to prevent standards collapsing? There is now an inverted value system. Anything that corresponds to what successful schools used to do must be bad. “Standards” are the encrusted imposition of bourgeois values, and we who pursue them are assailed for “betraying the system”. We are expected to apologize for pupils who do unusually well.' He had even been attacked because his school was praised in print for standards of behaviour that might be found in a public school. His was not an area where one would have expected a political assault on good schools. Another head – responding to, rather than resisting, such pressures, but otherwise apparently sane – told me that he never advertised Oxbridge successes to the rest of his school, ‘lest we seem to value that student more than, say, the capable musician'.

The besieged head continued: ‘Ideologues love to see things in confrontational terms, as if high standards for some impoverish the rest. It is a dangerous notion that the English don't need to compete and defeatist to think we should simply aim to be at peace with our own social engineering consciences. It is no good fudging the issue. Everyone has to know that he will only succeed the hard way, by being genuinely competitive. Precision is necessary to be a surgeon, a manufacturer of engineering equipment or a sports star. Alternative attitudes are a sad reflection on beliefs in the potential attainments of comprehensive children.' The several heads of comprehensives and the educationalists I met – perhaps because not protected by anonymity – were not so forthright, but they subscribed to the same philosophy. The unnamed head always teaches at least one bottom ability group himself, and savours achievements like getting a semi-autistic child through one CSE. Education, he said, is bedevilled by having to fight the battles of twenty-five years ago. Parents, politicians, administrators look back to when they were at school, which was either a golden age, and therefore to be restored, or a nightmare, the last vestiges of which should be destroyed. Many of our most influential citizens were the successful products of grammar schools. Often they forget the failings of yesterday's system – the high drop-out rate at sixteen of working-class pupils, the misery of the eleven-plus, the appalling provision for those who failed it. Even exam results were less shining than we remember: in 1960 research by the National Union of Teachers found that 25 per cent of grammar school pupils left with fewer than two O levels, and 50 per cent left with only four – yet these were the ‘selected' academically bright children.

A Knutsford parent from a small Welsh town recalled grammar school boys fighting secondary-modern boys on the common that divided their two schools. Each regarded the other group as foreign and hostile – as green men from another planet. The eleven-plus institutionalized two societies, separating children inefficiently and divisively at the age of eleven. The comprehensive pioneers rejected such divisions. Professor Tomlinson, of Warwick University, said: ‘If you mix people thoroughly, you will introduce the bright not only to an understanding of practical problem-solving, but also to appreciate that people who operate in that way make just as effective a contribution to society.' His vision is of a better society: ‘The ideal is to develop people to the maximum of their capacities, and prepare them for a diverse culture in which all are valued and give service. “I am an individual with a personality and skills to develop, so are you.” So relationships are built on negotiation, not on power and aggression. Successful economies grow in societies with strong social cohesion, where management and shop-floor are not at one another's throats. We do not have a generous view of each other. We believe in limited potential, especially of those who do not dress or speak well.' I discovered a Japanese saying when I visited Japanese factories in Scotland: ‘It is better for one hundred men to take one step, than for one man to take a hundred.' The English have long worked on the opposite thesis.

Even the word ‘comprehensive' is a liability, conjuring up a largely discredited era – tower blocks, Harold Wilson, new towns, plate-glass town halls and ‘white hot' technology. To the British, ‘equality' instinctively means levelling down; the creation of a grey, uniform society along East German lines, not the dynamic release of potential, which American equality strives towards. Belatedly, we have tried to undo the terminological damage. Local authorities call their systems ‘all ability' or ‘secondary', and individual schools replace the word ‘comprehensive' with ‘high'. If we had only called them ‘high schools' from the beginning, maybe the name would have assuaged British snobbery, and we might have had a fighting chance to create community schools like those of our democratic rivals.

We forget now, so extreme is the debate over comprehensives, that they were created to cater for enhanced public expectations, rather than to satisfy the whims of left-wing Utopians. George Walker, the head of The Cavendish School, Hemel Hempstead, and formerly a moving spirit behind the York-based Centre for the Study of Comprehensive Schools, is also one of twelve state heads co-opted to the Headmasters' Conference. He said: ‘Twenty years ago people had colour televisions and enjoyed foreign holidays. The expectation of a better school went with that. It was unacceptable to have all that material advance, and still get a letter saying that your youngster was going to the secondary-modern down the road.' The first stage, reorganizing schools, was widely accepted. In the play
Gotcha
, one part of the trilogy
Gimme
Shelter
, written in 1976 by Barrie Keeffe, the anti-hero, a yob about to leave school with such an undistinguished record that not a single teacher appears to know his name, complains bitterly about ‘this lovely comprehensive', where the head speaks Latin to the sixth-formers. ‘Great school – great school,' reflects one character, ‘going around talking in Latin all day. Great – that's the way to get your head smashed in the factory.' For those who could make it, unlike Keeffe's ‘Kid', it was a more optimistic age: pop stars, sports players, television personalities were creating a new breed outside conventional class divisions. Comprehensives were part of this break with the past. State education, the faithful believed, would become so good that virtually everyone would opt for it.