style="font-size:15px;"> State-funded faith schools are a particular provocation to many parents. Every year, one can comfortably second-guess which children will win a place at one of the more prestigious Anglican or Catholic schools, pupils selected on the occasionally dubious grounds of their parents’ long-held religious practice or their children’s artistic or musical ‘aptitude’, one of the criteria by which schools select a percentage of their pupils. Clearly, the higher-achieving of these schools are choosing families and pupils as much as the other way around, thus creating for themselves a highly favourable pupil mix—what Professor Tim Brighouse would call a ‘comprehensive plus’ intake—and in the process contributing to a small but crucial narrowing of true comprehensive intakes in many local schools. Enabling faith to be played as a school advantage card has been increasingly criticised, most recently by John Pritchard, Bishop of Oxford and Chair of the Church of England’s Board of Education, and it manifestly undermines the claims of these affiliated institutions to embody genuinely inclusive values.
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Once again we chose the local community school, a brisk twenty-minute walk from our home. At the time, exam results were average, there were no rousing speeches about Oxbridge entrance, the school had no rugby team. Like so many comprehensives in inner-city areas, there was a far higher percentage of children on free school meals and children with special needs, and far fewer middle-class children, than lived in the surrounding area. But we admired and warmed to its friendly, open spirit, its determination to do well by every child and to keep improving. It looked like the London in which we live now, not a cosy recreation of the city I grew up in. There was a great deal of nervousness, and prejudice, among local parents but we decided to trust our instincts, helped by the fact that we knew a number of older children who had successfully made the transition. Several years on, our faith in something other than raw league tables, covert social snobbery and urban myth feels more than justified.
Yet despite their many strengths and successes, as well as their evident challenges, comprehensive schools like ours are routinely denigrated in the wider world. It may be bad luck, or a reflection of the tendency of national journalists to conduct research in locations easily reachable from their Central London offices, but over the past decade both our local primary and secondary schools have been subject to media ‘sting’ operations. In the first case, an experienced Evening Standard reporter, Alex Renton, who had already written a highly praised undercover piece about what life was like at an NHS hospital, was looking around for an opportunity to write a similar exposé on education, and pitched up at our local primary. Posing as someone interested in becoming a teacher, Renton was assigned to spend a week with a class of eight- and nine-year-olds. According to a subsequent report in the Guardian, Renton ‘is a personable chap and the kids like him, as do the teachers. He notes that there are children with special needs, that there is a teacher shortage, that a classroom window is broken. On day three he observes a class of six- and seven-year-olds and remarks that “disruptive children … spread chaos around them.” Next day he witnesses a session designed to deal with bullying in which a teacher coaxes children to understand inappropriate behaviour. Renton is also told about a boy who is suspected of having been a victim of sexual abuse.’ When Renton asked the class teacher, whose own daughter was at a private school, to speculate on the relative achievements of children in the two sectors, she intimated that the brightest children would rank somewhere nearer the middle in her daughter’s class.
Renton was positive about many aspects of this inner-city primary. But the double-page spread was published under the alarmist headline: ‘There was such a staff shortage, the security system had to be put in the charge of two eleven-year-olds’, a story that the school subsequently claimed to be untrue. The school and parents were angry at the paper’s deception, the distorted picture that was presented and the intimate details that were revealed. According to the Guardian, children in the playground ‘are discovered trying to break Renton’s name code in order to find out who he had written about. [The school] realise that one clue to the identity of the possible sexual abuse victim was too revealing and are concerned that the child will suffer from taunting or even bullying.’ After receiving a number of complaints, and conducting its own investigation, the Press Complaints Commission severely censured the paper. Editor Max Hastings later told the Guardian, ‘It was a considerable cock-up, a seriously misconceived exercise. One still asks oneself how, after all these years in the business, could we get it so wrong, a collective moment of madness.’ Yet the paper never issued a formal apology to the school.1
By then, of course, the harm had been done. Readers of the Evening Standard would, on their tube ride to work or back, have perused yet another casually negative article about an ailing state school and the sad lives of the creatures that populate it: a complete misrepresentation of the day-to-day life of this remarkably hard-working, stable primary.
In April 2005, Channel Five broadcast Classroom Chaos, a programme claiming to tell the dark truth about our schools. A qualified teacher—who had not taught for thirty years, according to a later BBC news report—signed on as a supply teacher at a number of schools around the country. With a camera smuggled into her handbag, she filmed her unsuccessful attempts to control a number of classes. No school was named but in a short, relatively harmless sequence at the film’s outset, one class in our local comprehensive could be identified by its uniform.
The film caused a national outcry. Executive Producer Roger Graef went into battle claiming that ‘as their classes spiral out of control, teachers face at best indifference and rudeness, at worst taunts and threats and chaos … The worst sufferers are the 15,000 supply teachers … Successive reports and teachers’ unions bear out the widespread nature of this problem. It sounds like a profession on the edge of a collective nervous breakdown.’2
Tory politicians promised that should they come back to power, they, of course, would do better. Labour politicians spluttered defensively and the National Union of Teachers (NUT) criticised the underhand methods of the documentary makers. But the real victims in this trial by media were the schools themselves, deceived and demoralised by the entire exercise—though pupils at our local school reported interesting conversations in class about the documentary, and the questions it raised—and the nation’s parents, passive recipients of a dangerously undifferentiated message about the state of state education. A teacher with rusty professional skills, to put it mildly, a clear agenda and a hidden camera is clearly not a typical member of even that most battered wing of the profession, the supply-teaching force. Once again, the casual viewer was left with a lingering—and, in the case of our local comprehensive, mistaken—impression of bleakness and blanket chaos.
Stories such as these give credence to the claim that our system is ‘broken’, our children’s education a mere ‘factory school’ experience. My objection to the objectors, my scepticism about their scepticism, is based in the first instance on the evidence of my own eyes: our daughters’ evident enjoyment and sense of safety throughout their school years, the many excellent, and some truly inspirational, teachers they have encountered, the range of academic achievement within the school (including results that match any school, state or private, in the country), and the numerous concerts, plays, workshops, debates and sporting events. I remain impressed by the determined, friendly and modest atmosphere of our school epitomised by our head teacher, who has steered the school through a period of dramatic change and improvement by dint of consensual debate and continual encouragement. All this has confirmed it for me: comprehensives work. Given an increase in resources and greater political will in relation to school structures, and particularly selection, they could be world-class. And we are simply crazy, as a nation, to permit the dismantling of what has so far been achieved, against all the odds.
At present, however, most state schools occupy an uncomfortable space between public and private; they are neither business enterprises, working to a market model, nor a robust public service, sustained by a mix of state, community and third-sector effort. Under increasing pressure from a competitive ethos, driven by league tables, schools like ours are expected to deliver ever higher standards and improved results without the
