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Beware the nostalgic comfort of a golden age. Held up to the light, most golden ages do not glister, they prove to be made of base metal. Some former pupils of grammar schools are readily able to attribute their success in later life to the grounding and belief that their schooling gave them: others do not. Add to the ranks of the latter those who felt branded a failure at the age of 11, by dint of their inability to shine at one moment in their young lives, and the picture is not altogether one of gleaming achievement.
There are those who speak as though the generic descriptor “grammar school” offers the solution to educational progress and social mobility; it does not. Over the years I have witnessed schools which have been purposeful and dynamic, the kind of well-led schools that believe in a breadth of experience that is broader than just the academic and seek to find the spark that ignites a fire of enthusiasm in every child. I have also visited exam-obsessed, small-minded, punitive schools that resemble factory production lines. There are grammar schools in both camps.
What makes great schools is a culture that conveys the joy of academic rigour while also celebrating a diversity of skills and attributes, including skills that are described, sometimes dismissively, as “vocational”. This leads to more balanced and interesting students who are more likely to have the wherewithal effectively to navigate the shifting complexities of adult life in the decades to come.
I lose track of the number of employers who express concern about the poor quality of graduate applicants to their companies. The academic qualifications glister, they say, but there is not the flexibility, resilience or nous to succeed.
The debate over expanding the number of grammar schools is the wrong one to have. Grammar schools are not of uniform quality and there is no strong evidence to suggest that they make a significant impact on social mobility. Schools are at their best when they work in a generous-spirited collaboration with other schools. We have the beginnings of a transformed system with slowly emerging clusters of schools. Let us not tinker with the system yet again but rather focus on what our schools do.
For a start, we would benefit from clarity around “streaming”. Nomenclature can be tricky. “Streaming” selects students by a broad band of ability for all subjects. I witnessed this in its purest form in a former direct- grant grammar school in the Eighties and it was dreadful. The bottom stream became a band of the disconnected who played up to low expectations.
The school had created a vicious circle. The top stream was allowed to become inward-looking and, in its own way, was disconnected, too. “Setting”, by contrast, places each child in a group for each subject that works at a pace that challenges them and with which they can cope; and there needs to be regular movement between these sets because children develop at different rates and in different ways.
It requires teaching of high quality and an ethos that genuinely celebrates an individual’s different strengths and faces up positively to weaknesses. This is a route that can be made to work for all children in any good school.
Tony Little is a former Head Master of Eton. His book, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education, is published by Bloomsbury.