Grammar schools are not the answer

Disclaimer: I’m an alumnus of a well-known North London grammar school, having joined in the sixth form from a high achieving comprehensive school. I’ve studied under both school systems, coming out the other side with insights into each. No-one could accuse me of not being qualified enough to speak about the virtues and pitfalls of the grammar system. A significant number of Imperial students attended grammars and most likely support the grammar system, either vociferously or nonchalantly; however, I wonder if from the privilege of your educational bubble, you have ever looked outside?

Under the guise of ‘educational overhaul’, the Tory and coalition governments through the actions of former resident government snake Mr Michael Gove and his successor Nicky Morgan, as education secretary, have been responsible for scrapping the integrated AS-Level, trying to force every school to become an ‘Academy’, and completely redesigning GCSEs with effectively zero notice. The latest brainwave by our illustrious – and need we mention unelected – Prime Minister Theresa May, is to dispense with forty years of alternately overt and implicit educational policy, by paving the way for the reintroduction of that most divisive of schools: The Grammar school.

For the Scots, Welsh, or Northerners among you, Grammar schools are meant to represent a progressive utopia – poor but brilliant eleven year olds are to be offered an education akin to their rich privately-educated counterparts in specialist schools where entry is based solely on academic merit. These brilliant children would be able to reach their potential without (heaven forbid!) the less erudite dragging them down. They would of course be selected using the most accurate measure of intelligence known to man – the eleven plus entrance exam, serving as the key to the future. Pass it and a world of opportunity opens, but fail it and the doors are bolted shut.

The problem of this vision is that the eleven plus exam is far from a level playing field for all students, acting more as a class separator than a discriminator of intelligence. As anyone who has sat exams such as the UKCAT, MAT, or their ilk will know that tutoring is omnipresent and shoved into your face at every opportunity (shout out Medify). No matter how ‘tuition-proof’ these exams claim to be, the availability of resources and practice to families with the means to pay far outstrips the poor with potential. Anecdotally, this leads to a middle-class invasion and infiltrative classism with clear consequences on students. It’s not without reason that Tatler, a traditional magazine of the wealthy has published a list of top state schools, most of which are grammars – why waste money on Private school tuition when tutoring for the 11+ is cheaper? Grammars have become an outpost of the rich at the expense of others. The Grammar school I went to was situated in a deprived area, surrounded by poorly achieving comprehensives. Consequently, almost everyone in the local area took the test to try and get in, else they would have to resort to the failing local secondaries. You might expect then, that my school would have people from the local area? In actual fact, I could count on two hands the number of people who lived within walking distance to my school. Hundreds of kids are bussed in from the surrounding areas commuting for up to 45 minutes. If you’ve ever commuted to uni, you already know the negative impacts of this; if you haven’t, relying on two daily school buses to get there, effectively preventing you from partaking in after-school activities, isn’t much fun at all. Schools should have a strong link to their local area, with intake coming from the local children and deeply involved in local society. How can grammars possibly have a link to the local community when three-quarters of their students come from an entirely separate borough?

Grammars suck the intelligent and rich out of local schools, leading to a high achieving enclave within a failing school area. Poor school results lead to difficulty recruiting excellent staff, and wealthier families choose to move away to other areas, contributing to the isolation of the school community. The result is a vicious cycle of failure and decline, from which London’s secondaries are only recently escaping.

It appears to me that a far simpler solution, benefiting the masses and preventing the deepening of social divide, is simply to try and raise standards across the board. I was fortunate enough to attend an excellent comprehensive school; indeed, its results ranked among grammar schools even though it takes everyone in from the local community. Teaching quality was on a par with the grammar, but with wider benefits for the entire school population. There is no reason that other students around the country cannot benefit from the same education, save for Mrs May’s idealism.

We’ve tried grammar schools before, and they don’t work. The 163 educational relics scattered across England are not models to be revered, but products of a bygone age. Perhaps we ought to spend less time shoving students between new educational models every few years, and actually invest in the teaching profession. Segregation is not the solution.