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SCHOOL WARS
THE BATTLE FOR
BRITAIN’S EDUCATION
MELISSA BENN
For Dad—the great encourager
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Also by Melissa Benn
Introduction: A View from the Ground
I. The Present Threat
1. Understanding the New Schools Revolution
II. How We Got Here
2. The Piecemeal Revolution
3. The Long Years of Attrition
III. The Way We Learn Now
4. The Politics of Selection
5. Going Private
6. The New School Ties
IV. What Next?
7. The Shape of Things to Come?
8. ‘Go Public’: A New School Model for a New Century
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
About the Author
Praise for School Wars
Copyright
Non-fiction
Death in the City (with Ken Worpole)
Madonna and Child
A Tribute to Caroline Benn: Education and Democracy
(co-edited with Clyde Chitty)
Novels
Public Lives
One of Us
In the mid 1990s, my partner and I made the unremarkable decision, as do thousands of parents every year throughout the UK, to send our children to local schools. Living in an inner-city area, where the question of education is often so fraught, while we did not unduly agonise as parents, we did make a conscious and considered choice based on a deeply held belief in what constitutes a good education. Of course, it is important that our daughters should learn and do well, but we also wanted them to discover how to take their place in the real world. In the lyrical words of pioneer educationalist Alex Bloom, we wanted them ‘to experience just relationships with persons’.
We were lucky in many ways. Our elder daughter started school at the local primary soon after New Labour came to power; her sister joined her there two years later. In their younger years, then, they were ‘Blair’s children’, benefiting from the visible public passion of an eager new government with a clear mandate to improve the nation’s schools—and, in time, generous increases in education funding. Primary-school class sizes were kept under thirty; there was renewed emphasis on literacy and numeracy. It was a time of relative economic buoyancy and cultural openness, and, looking back, one of several missed political opportunities—when a popular young government with an impressive majority might have made some important reforms, that not only improved our schools, but expanded the possibilities of comprehensive education itself. Sadly, the political story was to unfold in a different direction.
We discovered then, as so many parents do, that state education is in much better shape than a hostile press, TV and radio will usually allow. Our local primary school was filled with exceptionally committed and hard-working teachers. The school put appropriate emphasis on the building blocks—reading, writing and maths—but there was also plenty of history, geography, science, art and design project work, and a wide range of extra-curricular activities including drama and music and many out-of-school day and residential visits. An on-site refugee centre—the only one of its kind in the country—which worked hard to help migrant families integrate into both society and school, and a counselling service, The Place To Be, were just two examples of the thoughtful and realistic way that the school handled potential obstacles to learning amongst its pupils. Dozens of languages were spoken, and cultures represented, within the school community, and rich use was made of this unique facet of an urban primary like ours—in Brent, North-West London, one of the most ethnically diverse areas in Europe.
Watching regular class performances and special assemblies in which children from an extraordinary spread of social, ethnic and religious backgrounds lined up shoulder to shoulder, it felt as if we had stumbled across—or held the key to, at least—some kind of practical utopia. I was moved by a profound sense of possibility, the honest belief that all our children could be educated together, successfully, the common good confirmed and extended by a mix of state resources, staff commitment, and parental and community engagement.
I had not reckoned on the fraught process of secondary transfer, in which parental ambitions and anxieties, particularly in inner-city areas, are so powerful. Going through this experience—twice—and watching many parents endure it in the years since, has confirmed for me that schooling remains one of the key ways in which class identity is formed in modern Britain. It was striking how many of the middle class, happy to support ‘all-in’ primary schools, departed from local comprehensive education at secondary level, and quite how desperately a few sought to secure, by whatever means lay open to them, the right school place for their child. ‘Place’ is a particularly apposite noun here. After all, the word ranges in meaning from social station to locality, a suitable setting or occasion, high rank or status, and finally job, post or position.
This experience made me profoundly distrustful of the concept of parental choice, in all its varieties. To state the obvious: what choice can a family on a joint income of £20,000 or less exercise to apply for a school that charges £12,000 a year—before the inevitable add-ons—not to mention the difficulties a child might well face trying to integrate in a social environment where the majority of families can comfortably afford such fees? How many families even know of the existence of, let alone are able to access, the shadowy world of tutoring and exam preparation that powers children into the highly selective grammars
