Grammar Schools - A Blunt Instrument

My father entered a Wakefield grammar school a few months after the end of the Second World War. This was in the wake of the 1944 Education Act, a piece of legislation that financed universal secondary school education across England and Wales for the first time. My father had just passed his 11-plus exam and ‘came from a long line of educated miners’ who resided in the pit village of Sharlston. He showed a certain aptitude for reading and writing, and my grandparents would have been pleased the young boy making it into a grammar. As with so many ordinary people back then, they believed the government when it told them this was the first step to better things.

It didn’t quite work out that way. I think my father would have struggled at school anyway - he’s temperamentally unsuited to sitting at a desk or staying indoors for long periods of time. But when I asked him why he hated that environment his first answer was “the snobbery”. I assumed he meant the snootiness of rich boys, all looking down on their poorer classmates, but this wasn’t the case. There weren’t many well-off kids in that part of Northern England at the time. No, those boys who passed their 11-plus formed a looser hierarchy; one where the well-spoken boys sneered at ‘common’ counterparts on the basis of their demeanour, observable habits and, most importantly of all, accent.

Yes, how received your pronunciation was proved the biggest determining factor when it came to a boy’s place in the pecking order. With his pronounced Yorkshire burr, my father was one of those looked down upon, although he didn’t suffer the most. Other boys had brogues so thick, it was difficult to understand a word they were saying, much to their blushing shame. When you see the abuse thrown at Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner for her manner of speaking, it’s clear this prejudice didn’t die out in the post-war years. Rather these attitudes were passed down through the generations, from within institutions that gave no consideration to local culture. As with many grammar pupils over the decades, my father was forced to take two years of Latin; about as useful to him as learning how to curtsey. Soon he was responding to teachers’ attempts at moulding him by acting up, enduring detention and corporal punishment for his misbehaviour; playing truant whenever he could. The pupil was repeatedly told his attitude and unwillingness to conform to their values meant he would never make anything of himself.

Despite their predictions, my father managed to get his certificate and leave the world of education at sixteen, never to return. His working life began picking peas in the Yorkshire fields before following his father down the pit. Then came National Service and a lifelong relationship with the military that took him around the world. His time in the army and, latterly, the Parachute Regiment, provided my father with the kind of egalitarian, all-male camaraderie he hadn’t encountered at grammar school. For him, passing an examination at the age of eleven made no difference. It simply consigned him to a different gradation of misery through the following half-decade.

At the same age I found myself attending Oak Farm Community School, widely known as the roughest comprehensive in Farnborough. The place has since been closed, with few parents wanting to enrol kids there in the 21^st century. But during my time in attendance, the only observable hierarchy was based around whether you were ‘hard’ or not. Years of daily bullying could be inspired by something as arbitrary as your hairstyle or knowing too much. But there was no distinction around class or income or the way you spoke so I had a horrible time in a very different way from my father. Large periods of my time from eleven to sixteen were spent trying to avoid being beaten up by the minority who displayed early psychopathic tendencies, or endeavouring to make violent classmates laugh and nullify their threat. Whether you were a genius or a simpleton went unremarked. Any boy who wasn’t out to physically dominate his peers was a potential ally in daily attempts at safeguarding your well-being.

By the time I left Primary School in 1987 most English grammar schools had been closed, so there was no such thing as an eleven-plus for me. I attended a comprehensive based on housing catchment and parental preference. The area Oak Farm drew its pupils from happened to encompass neglected estates, council blocks like where my family lived and the modest residences of the lower middle classes. Had the eleven-plus selection our Prime Minister wants to bring back existed in 1987 perhaps I would have made it into a grammar and there I might have enjoyed a better time, or simply encountered another style of bullying. Either way, alternative schooling is unlikely to have impacted upon my path through A-Levels then on to university, supported by a maintenance grant. There may have been an upside when it came to personal safety, but had I enrolled elsewhere I might never have learned to get on with children of all abilities, backgrounds, ethnic groups and levels of combat skill. I certainly wouldn’t have made the kind of lifelong friends you turn to regularly in a hostile environment. I would also be lacking the useful skill of being able to spot a male who wishes to do me harm in moments. It’s all in the eyes, if you want to know.

Joking aside, I think these two contrasting experiences show there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to educating a nation’s adolescents. Anyone who believes it’s simply a black or white choice fails to see the children concerned as individuals. Theresa May has been attacked for her announcements on grammars including this weeks’ budget allocation of hundreds of millions to make new free schools selective grammars, with the flagship Conservative policy condemned as a fifties throwback. But what happened to my father shows those schools were never a blanket solution for poor, smart kids, not even in that deeply-misremembered age so many politicians are nostalgic for. Cordoning off the supposed best and brightest at a time when few kids know what they want to do creates a two-tier system, one that isn’t guaranteed to benefit either group.

In grammars you had the potential for all the worst elements of our public schools – the insularity, superior behaviour, lack of any female presence to soften up all that competitiveness – combined with little opportunity for making contacts or expectation you would end up running the world one day. Meanwhile the children who didn’t pass their 11-plus internalised this failure as pre-teens, sent to what were once secondary moderns, now academies or comprehensives. These institutions have been described as the largely disregarded rump of the grammar school system, even if they’re simply teaching children who haven’t blossomed academically by eleven or don’t take to exams. The perception remains that these institutions will be pens of the least able; children with little access to high quality education when the best teachers have chosen to work elsewhere, away from establishments spoken of disparagingly by the media and society as a whole.

My formative years weren’t exactly a picnic, but how much worse they could have proved had I been cut off from classmates of superior ability; straight-A pupils who pushed me onwards and upwards. In Theresa May’s vision the state will once again demarcate children into groups, do its utmost to harness the potential of those who meet the criteria then put the rest in a box marked ‘failure’ for five years. But measuring the top 20% this way was always fraught with difficulty, and siphoning kids off from the general population marks both groups out. It’s a recipe for isolation, for an overly-prescribed future, one that isn’t modelled around a child’s specific needs, as my father’s experience attests. In the wake of all that has happened in this country recently, we simply don’t need more binary choices, especially when it comes to the future of our children.