SUNDAY, 16 MARCH 2025

As I write my weekly blogs, I become more and more aware of how important going to a grammar school was for me personally. It took me beyond my social class of birth, at least on a cultural level, and opened up a whole new world of knowledge and opportunity. The UK state education system in which a minority of children from all backgrounds attended grammar schools was scrapped in most of the country not long after I entered mine, replaced by what was argued to be the greater egalitarianism of ‘comprehensive’ schools in which all pupils went to the same institution regardless of academic performance.

I will begin with a short description of what happened in state education when I was young. At the age of eleven (or sometimes ten, as was the case for people like me because of my date of birth), every child took an examination called the Eleven Plus. Those who achieved a high enough score in this exam were placed in a grammar school; the rest ended up in what was called a secondary modern. I’ve not been able to find an average figure for the percentage of children who were placed in grammar schools after taking the Eleven Plus because it varied from county to county, but I’ve seen on Wikipedia regional figures as low as 10% and as high as 35%. I imagine that in my region it was closer to the former.

The grammar schools creamed off the most academically gifted and taught a curriculum that was modelled on what happened in private education. In my case, further streaming took place on arrival at my secondary school, with pupils divided into three streams based on our score in the Eleven Plus, which sometimes led to our following a different curriculum (Latin rather than woodwork, French instead of German). Unsurprisingly, with its classical music in assembly, its school anthem of Gaudeamus Igitur, and its mimicking of schools attended by the upper-classes, the streams were given Greek names: Alpha, Beta and Delta.

All these years later, arguments still rage about the changes to public education that happened in the 1960s. Many people advocate a return to grammar schools (although ‘return’ is something of a misnomer, since in some places grammar schools continue to exist), while others staunchly support the move to comprehensives. I have to admit I’m conflicted and unsure where I stand on this.

The awful thing about the Eleven Plus was that it more or less decided the entire future of a child at such an early age: once you failed this test, it was almost impossible to shift level of school. I remember one boy managed it because he had what we would now call pushy parents. They seemed terribly posh to me at the time, but in retrospect I’m pretty sure they were at most lower-middle-class. All the same, they had the wherewithal to get him upgraded to the grammar school, and they were vindicated six years on when he became Head Boy and got excellent ‘A’ level results. He could have become the poster boy against the Eleven Plus.

But most of the families in my industrial area didn’t have the skills or the confidence needed to take on the authorities, and their children who attended secondary moderns were effectively seen as ‘factory fodder’. This created a split in our class between those of us, like me, who were being offered an escape from the factory floor and those who were left behind and were labelled as much too lumpen to do anything other than work there. This led to a definite tension. I remember walking to my school each day and having to face a gang of girls from the local girls’ secondary modern who threw things at me and called me a ‘grammar grub’. My own sister, eight years older than me, had gone to that school. If the secondary modern boys were destined for the factories, the girls were viewed as nothing more than future housewives and mothers who might also clean the homes of the rich for a bit of cash on the side.

However, it can still be argued that education in those days offered more social mobility than takes place now, although we like to pretend as a society that class is a thing of the past and anyone can reach the top if they work hard enough (possibly because of our apeing of American culture). A lucky few moved up into the middle classes: some, like me, mainly on a cultural level, but a handful into positions of influence and power and a comfortable middle-class salary with a home in the leafy suburbs. It can also be argued that despite the aspirational snobbery of things like Gaudeamus Igitur, the system genuinely sought at the time to educate at least some of the children who hailed from a lowly background and increase their cultural capital, and had a real desire to raise societal standards and make lives better. We may criticise them now for their patrician attitude, but our representatives in parliament often genuinely cared about the people in their charge in those days.

I said earlier that I felt conflicted about the return of grammar schools. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that I think we are asking the wrong question. Rather than proselytising for or against grammar schools, and as always in Britain obsessing over class (and I know I’m as guilty of this as anybody), we should overhaul the whole state education system, which seems unfit for purpose, and drag it kicking and screaming into the 21^st century. Many of its critics would agree that the system needs radical change, but the problem is that we cannot agree on what it should change to, so what has tended to happen since I was born has been a new initiative every ten years based on the latest fashionable thinking, which is then reversed in the following decade.

It’s hardly a new idea, I know – it’s been around since at least the 1960s – but our state education system as it stands seems based on the concept of the factory, where the raw materials (children) enter at the age of five, are processed in an identical way, and eventually emerge as a product at the end of the conveyor belt. I can see the economic imperatives that dictate why this occurs, but it feels like herding cattle and takes no account of the specific skills or needs of the individual child. It is mass education for the masses, while the children of the establishment and the elite go to the same schools that their parents, and often their ancestors, attended. This is not only bad for social mobility, but eventually makes a country politically and economically stagnant.

So why, in an age of IT and now AI, can’t learning be more individualised? What is the point of teaching bored children geography, for instance, if they want to learn about computer programming or the practical skills which will help them find a job? Is knowing the capital of Mali or how ox-bow lakes are formed really going to be helpful to them in adulthood? And it’s not as if they leave school knowing lots about the world even after those five long years of geography. We all fail to learn things if they bore us and seem to have no purpose.

One possibility is to place students (but not as young as eleven) onto varying learning paths but in a transparent way, as happens in Switzerland, when after a few years of secondary school, pupils at the age of around fifteen choose between two options: the general or the vocational. The first is geared towards academia and university; the second is more practical and usually includes an apprenticeship. I have some personal experience of this, having taught English to groups of Swiss apprentices (although many years ago now), and I must say that they were diligent and respectful, far from the sullen teenagers I hear teachers often complain about in the UK. They got their heads down and worked, not because of some overpowering desire to improve their English, but because they needed a certain score to pass the overall course and earn the qualification (a qualification which really mattered, unlike GCSEs for most pupils in the UK). The Swiss youngsters were far from bursting with curiosity, but they were disciplined because they recognised the need to succeed at what they were doing.

I have no idea how the young people themselves felt about this, and whether there was any stigma attached to following the vocational path. Human beings always stratify by making comparisons between each other and class consciousness is not confined to England. So I’m not necessarily advocating this type of system, but it does seem to make more sense than having students who are bored out of their skulls sitting through lessons about the Treaty of Westphalia. Those who disagree may argue that this reduces the purpose of education to merely preparing someone for the world of work, and we should aim for a more rounded, liberal education which teaches critical thinking and more general intellectual skills. In my opinion, this is rather wishful, because in a world where education is centred on tests and exams, teachers will teach to the test, so very little rounded education ever takes place in reality.  

At the moment the system as it exists seems to be more about policing our children and keeping them off the streets and out of harm’s way while their parents are busy at work. This process of socialisation, although sometimes criticised as normative, or even as quietly oppressive, has to be an essential part of education of the young. But is it best served by classrooms of thirty studying subjects in which they have little interest, stuff that they rapidly forget when they leave school even if they learn it and parrot it in examinations?

I have focused so far on the young, but the idea that we cease being educated once we are squeezed out of the pedagogic sausage machine is limiting and depressing, and education for life should be more than merely a fine-sounding slogan. In theory, at least, developed countries could and should offer their citizens a chance to study and develop their knowledge and thinking, especially those who missed out when they were young. At that age, many of us don’t see the value of learning because we are obsessed with other, more pressing issues such as sorting out our hormones. When people discover a passion for something later in life and would love the chance to study it in a structured environment, an affluent society should do all it can to help them to do so. This world of learning and leisure was what we were promised lay ahead when I was growing up. In reality, though, we have somehow created a world where many people have to work two or more jobs simply to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. Few have the luxury of time to think, and one of the consequences of this is the political slanging match that envelops us today.

Education, like many other societal systems such as taxation and benefits and pensions, will always be out of date: we are so often fighting yesterday’s war and playing catch-up. But for all the furious arguments and swings of the educational pendulum over the last sixty years, little has really changed, and the same sense of gradual, inexorable decline in standards still pervades.The upper-class on the whole don’t care about state education because they take no part in it, the middle-class will game any system that comes into existence, while the poor will take what they are given and do as they are told. Young people are often berated for dreaming of instant celebrity rather than studying hard to forge a future career, but when the latter seems no more achievable than the former for most of them, who can blame them? In a world dominated by technology, the few who rise from the bottom will do this in spite of, rather than because of, their official education. We need to think more radically than merely squabbling over whether to return to grammar schools.