Gove announced £800 million worth of capital funding to refurbish dozens of academies around the country. A footnote to the new draft admissions code intimated that academies and free schools—but not maintained schools—were to be allowed to prioritise children on free school meals in their admissions policy. Predictably, this proposal was represented in the media as a bold and innovative move towards greater fairness. But if implemented, it would not only hand the ‘new’ schools valuable extra revenue—via the pupil premium—but might open the door for some schools to ‘cherry pick’ higher-attaining children on low incomes, further destabilising the intake of neighbourhood maintained schools. By May 2011, the Department of Education website did not even list community or comprehensive schools as one of the chief school types in England. Only faith schools got a mention. From being the great reviled, they had become the officially disappeared.
At the heart of the new schools revolution was a canny political con trick: the swift but steady transfer of resources from the needy to the better-off, in the name of the disadvantaged. While the government was not yet facing the kind of opposition that its proposed changes to the NHS had by now provoked, there were many, including some from within the Coalition’s Liberal Democrat partners, who were angered and dismayed by the speed, range and brutal consequences of the government’s education policy. These included Councillor Peter Downes who declared of the new funding arrangements for the academies: ‘This is directing resources to the most privileged. In this way, life gets harder for schools at the bottom of the heap.’ Faced with reductions in both central government grants and with further money clawed back from the Dedicated Schools Grant, now used to fund academies, Downe’s own authority, Cambridgeshire County Council, had to make significant reductions in services to black and ethnic-minority groups, disabled children, early years services, teenage pregnancy programmes, special needs teachers, and sports and hobbies grants for vulnerable young people; further cuts were planned in music programmes, services to disabled children and early years work. Cambridgeshire’s share of the ‘top-slice’ cut was £1.7 million. The Cambridgeshire Cabinet took the decision to protect funding to the Children and Young People’s Services area for the year 2011–12. According to Peter Downes, ‘Had they not done so, the service reductions would have been even more severe. But we hold our breath for next year when the Cambridgeshire top-slice rises to £3.1 million.’
‘Savage’ was the summing up of former Children’s Commissioner Sir Al Aynsley Green, who claimed that society’s most vulnerable—those in care, disabled children, young carers, young offenders and those with mental health issues—would bear the brunt of a decline in services that were already inadequate, following further cuts to the Connexions career advice, Future Jobs fund, Youth Opportunity Fund, Youth Capital Fund and Working Neighbourhood fund. His conclusion was chilling. ‘We are witnessing the destruction of many of the building bricks of support for children and young people to achieve their full potential in life. It is desperately worrying. I see little in their place to inspire confidence that this generation will be looked after by government. It could spell the end of hope and expectation for many of them.’34
Let’s get the most damaging myths out of the way. The move towards comprehensive education was not some rash act of anti-democratic statist zeal, nor was it, in the astonishing recent words of Tony Blair, ‘pretty close to academic vandalism’.1 Far from it. Early comprehensive reform was bipartisan, slow and uneven in pace, with change occurring over many decades. The first comprehensive opened in Anglesey, Wales, in the late 1940s, while most of the transformation towards a comprehensive system occurred in the 1960s and 70s—and still the reform remains incomplete. A number of local authorities retain use of the eleven-plus to this day.
It may have been halting and fragmented, but it had a profound impact on post-war Britain. For to make real sense of the intense opposition that the comprehensive ideal provoked, we have to acknowledge the radicalism inherent in the idea of universal education; the idea that every child, of whatever background, is deserving of a serious education; that all the nation’s children might learn from a broadly common syllabus, enjoying matching resources and similarly high expectations; and, possibly the most threatening idea of all, the suggestion that at some points, in some places, the nation’s children—Muslim, Christian or Jewish, upper-class or impoverished, girl or boy, black or white—might actually be educated in the same classrooms together.
Here, then, were the key ingredients of what I call the piecemeal revolution, a moderate, rational plan for educational reform that still shakes us to our roots. As a nation, we are more connected to our pre-World War II and indeed nineteenth-century assumptions, prejudices and modes of social organisation, than perhaps we realise. Class stratification remains the default position, even in the twenty-first century.
That the British public has never developed the kind of affection for, and loyalty to, the idea of universal state education as it has to the National Health Service might in part be due to the crass divisions and base prejudices that shaped the 1944 Education Act. The Act was a Tory one, and so predated the reforming Labour administration elected in 1945 and led by Clement Atlee that set up the welfare state and created the NHS. Yet, in many ways, it anticipated and shared in that postwar spirit. For the first time in the history of England and Wales, the state underwrote a universal, compulsory free education system for all, which represented a tremendous leap forward. Yet written into this progress was an a-priori separation of the country’s children into winners and losers by the age of eleven—a division that predictably shaped itself along class lines.
Things could have been very different. The pre-war 1938 Spens Report had ‘considered carefully the possibility of multilateral schools … the provision of a good general education for two or three years for all pupils over eleven-plus in a given area, and the organisation of four or five “streams”, so that the pupils at the age of thirteen or fourteen years may follow courses that are suited to their individual needs and capacity. It is a policy which is very attractive: it would secure in the first place the close association, to their mutual advantage, of pupils of more varied ability, and with more varied interests and objectives, than are normally found in a school of any one type.’2 Ultimately, however, the report rejected the option of multilateral—comprehensive—schooling.
After the Spens Report, the war years saw intense consultation and negotiation between politicians, civil servants, the churches and the private schools, as well as another report—the 1943 Norwood Committee on educational reorganisation—which recommended the establishment of three distinct types of secondary school. During this time, it became widely acknowledged that if Britain won the war it would be impossible to go back to the pre-1939 situation, when nearly 90 per cent of young people left school at fourteen, only 10 per cent achieved passes in public examination and fewer than 5 per cent went on to higher education. It was vital that the country educated more of its citizens and to a much higher level.
In many ways, education had not radically altered from the fragmented patchwork of nineteenth-century provision, particularly in its tendency to assume, in the words of Matthew Arnold, that ‘the education of each class in society has, or ought to have, its ideal, determined by the wants of that class and by its destination.’3 Although a number of pieces of legislation from the mid nineteenth century onward began to implement a national system of elementary and secondary schools, locally controlled, its administration was frequently deemed ‘chaotic’. While the upper classes tended to be shipped off to the great public schools or elite day schools, and the middle classes were educated in the competitive grammars—which based their curriculum upon the public school model—the working class received a wildly uneven elementary education, its quality dependent
