had also been significant improvements in state education, particularly in previously low-attaining schools. GCSE results in 2009 were the highest ever for London. There had also been a marked fall in the number of children leaving primary school without reaching the expected levels in English and maths; by 2010, 60 per cent of pupils had five ‘good’ GCSEs, more than three times the proportion that left school with five O levels in the so-called golden age of the grammars. And as Jenny Chapman had suggested, more higher education places were being taken up by young women and men from low-income families. Even Gove’s ministerial colleagues presented a more nuanced, complex picture of school achievement. Lord Hill, leader of the Coalition in the House of Lords, told a conference in January 2011, just after the publication of the Education Bill, that ‘there is much to admire and build on in the current system: hundreds of outstanding schools, tens of thousands of great teachers, the best generation of heads and leaders ever.’
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The new school revolution was not just happening in government. Gove had powerful allies, keen to promote, both politically and professionally, the new strategy for schools. In the autumn of 2010 it emerged that Gove had granted half a million pounds to one of his former aides, 25-year-old Rachel Wolf, to set up the New Schools Network, an advisory body for parents and teachers who wanted to create their own schools. For Rachel Wolf, ‘parents know what is best for their children, so if they are unhappy with what is on offer, why shouldn’t they be free to set up alternatives?’21 Wolf is, as it happens, the daughter of prominent academic Alison Wolf, who produced a report on vocational education for the government in spring 2011. Another voluble, occasionally vociferous, contributor to the debate was the journalist Toby Young, who led a high-profile campaign to set up the West London Free School in Hammersmith and Fulham, where the Conservative council gave him a warm welcome. Katharine Birbalsingh also became a public champion of the new schools policy. In May 2011 she announced plans to open a free school in Lambeth, apparently with the help of Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College—a PR marriage surely made in heaven. For Seldon, private-school involvement in free schools would ‘not only profoundly enrich the lives of many children from less advantaged backgrounds, it would also give the independent school, its teachers and pupils much, because state schools in significant ways have forged ahead of independent schools, over the past ten years in particular.’22 Seldon’s view of the public sector is not one expressed by most private-school heads, nor, in fact, does it chime with much of what he himself has written on the rise of ‘factory schooling’ and a general lack of pedagogic imagination in state education.
When the new educational evangelists bemoan the current condition of the nation’s state schools, they invariably argue that the comprehensive ‘experiment’ has failed. Once, the charge from the right was that comprehensives let down bright, poor children who could only truly succeed in grammar schools. Now the argument has subtly shifted—or crudely widened—and comprehensives are accused of failing all children on virtually all fronts, through low academic standards and poor vocational provision: the central finding of Alison Wolf’s report in spring 2011. This position chimes with the right’s broader refusal to recognise any significant correlation between family background, poverty in general, rising economic inequality and school outcomes. Almost a third of British children live in poverty, and UK children regularly score badly in international league tables in terms of general well-being and happiness; but the idea that low incomes might still form a significant barrier to learning is now dismissed as a moral frailty of the left, or soppy middle-class posturing.23 Such arguments lay behind the Coalition decision in early summer 2011 to abolish the publication of Contextual Value-Added measures in league tables, one way in which government was able to track the relative achievement of schools with high numbers of children from deprived backgrounds, but now apparently deemed patronising to the poor.
Critics from the new educational right regularly imply that the entire edifice of state education is rotten and requires demolition rather than steady improvement. Toby Young uses his blog for the Telegraph and column for the Spectator to launch regular attacks on so-called low standards, political correctness and comprehensive reform—and reformers—while Katherine Birbalsingh, in a clear echo of Tony Blair’s remarks about ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’, frequently lambasts poor discipline, limited intellectual ambition and a ‘culture of excuses’ that ‘keeps poor children poor’. Virtually, all problems in state schools are laid at the door of poor teachers, middle-class liberals and an ineffectual and yet over-controlling state. A highly sympathetic interview with Birbalsingh in the Observer suggested that the ex-teacher articulates a ‘sense of frustration and despair felt by many people across the political spectrum at the variable and frequently poor quality of state education in our large cities and towns … Most of the schools she has worked in have been adjudged “good” or “outstanding” by Ofsted, as are 60 per cent of all schools. She wanted to write the book, she says, to show what “good” or “outstanding” can mean in the inner city.’ The interviewer, Andrew Anthony, summed up Birbalsingh’s views as follows: ‘It’s safe to say that “mediocre and poor” would seem a more appropriate verdict.’24 If parents who sent their children to local schools weren’t in despair before reading the Observer piece, they certainly might be afterwards.
For the new educational evangelists, therefore, only the new schools can act as a genuine engine of social mobility, another sign of how the education debate has subtly shifted. For decades, the issue at the heart of the school wars concerned grammars versus comprehensives. Support for the grammars has in recent years gone largely underground. Now, the academies and free schools are presented as the new face, or necessary modernisation, of the comprehensive ideal. Some of the new school providers feel a strong sense of mission, tinged with an almost religious fervour, to improve the lot of the ‘disadvantaged’. As the director of one chain of academies told me, ‘We are all really fighting for the same thing.’
Yet there is a glaring contradiction at the heart of this position. On the one hand, there is a strong emphasis on the non-selective, inclusive character of free schools and academies. A rigorous education should be available to all, regardless of class or ethnic or religious background. Toby Young continually uses the term comprehensive, albeit illogically: the West London Free School was, originally, designated a ‘comprehensive grammar’ (although as one debating opponent put it, this was rather like talking about a vegetarian butcher). On the other hand, as Young’s position implies, the new school revolutionaries strongly support academic selection. When, during the debate on the Education Bill in May 2011, Nick Gibb, the minister for schools, refused government backing to an amendment put forward by Graham Brady MP, a grammar-school supporter, proposing that private schools that come in under the free schools umbrella should be allowed to continue to academically select, observers of the debate thought Gibb’s rejection of the amendment flat and unconvincing. After all, the Tory party and its allies clearly celebrate, and confirm, academic selection wherever they find it. Grammar schools that have converted to academies have maintained their right to academically select. And Gove told a Friends of Grammar Schools parliamentary reception, in the autumn of 2010, that ‘my foot is hovering over the pedal’ concerning the expansion of selection within the state system. Clearly, the new education evangelists believe in non-selection—but only for all those who have not already been selected.
The new school revolutionaries regularly swing in behind Gove and Cameron in their attacks on the ‘educational establishment’ or ‘the forces of resistance’—echoes, once again, of Tony Blair and his attack on the ‘forces of conservatism’. Before the 2010 election, Cameron told The Times that Tory school plans ‘will mean some big battles with forces of resistance. Some Local Education Authorities might not like it, some of the education establishment won’t like it.’25 (In fact, there have been no Local Education Authorities since 2006, when Blair abolished them.) It is not quite clear who or what was meant by the amorphous term ‘the education establishment’, but it almost certainly embraced university-based teacher training, local authorities and trade unions, all of which have found their roles severely constrained by the new government. Cameron’s war cry was reiterated a few months into government when the Sunday Times claimed
