Today, the Conservative shadow minister for education in Wales, Angela Burns AM, called on David Cameron to bring back grammar schools. Grammars, and the selection of children and damaging division they bring, are once again the Conservative answer to improving education.
We shouldn’t be surprised about this; we’ve been here many times before. Today’s Conservatives in Westminster may have got a bit better at hiding their desire to return to the bad old days of selection and writing children off, but you can clearly see these urges in the policies of Michael Gove and David Cameron. Every so often, just like today, they explicitly bubble to the surface. The Conservatives haven’t changed – they are as out of touch as ever with the needs of young people and their future employers.
The Conservatives in Wales have proposed dividing children at 14 so that those who excel academically can take the grammar route, and those that don’t take another, ‘secondary modern’ vocational route. This smacks of the government’s approach here in Westminster – vocational and technical education are seen as an afterthought, attempts are made to split GCSEs into O levels and CSEs, engineering qualifications are downgraded, and skills are squeezed out of the curriculum.
The plans outlined by the Welsh Conservatives today would be disastrous for our children and the future economy. Employers are crying out for more high-quality technical skills and the creative, entrepreneurial thinking that must be the powerhouse of our future prosperity. To build these skills in the next generation we need to value vocational learning on a par with academic study and we need young people to embody both. The straw man that Gove and the Conservatives have created – that young people are either practical or bookish – is an outdated and dangerous prejudice. Clearly, young people need both knowledge and skills. So we must give all young people the chance to study top quality vocational qualifications that have real currency in the job market alongside valuable academic subjects.
Today we’ve seen once again that the Conservatives are still hankering after an outdated, divisive and damaging education system. It’s another timely reminder that they cannot be trusted to build the modern education system we need to compete with the best in the world and to ensure all young people have the skills and knowledge they need to succeed. Only a Labour government, with our plans to raise the status and quality of vocational education, introduce a Technical Baccalaureate for young people achieving rigorous vocational qualifications, and ensure skills are at the heart of every child’s learning, can deliver the modern education system we need. Selection and second-class vocational education are the hallmarks of an out of-touch Conservative party with the wrong answers to the challenges we face today.
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Stephen Twigg is Labour’s shadow education secretary. He tweets @StephenTwigg
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It was Margaret Thatcher who, as Education Secretary, closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled. She went on, as Prime Minister, to replace O-levels with GCSEs.
She did the first, at least, in the teeth of the strong opposition from the entirely Labour LEA here in Durham, for example. Labour Councillors were grammar school themselves.
Or else they knew from experience how good Secondary Moderns could be, and they were therefore able to predict accurately that what was proposed in their place would be horrifically worse. Exactly as has turned out to be the case.
Whereas Thatcher was commercially educated. She sometimes pretended not to be, although without ever lying directly. But she was. And that made all the difference.
The fact that the grammar school debate is still running shows how poor Labour has been at putting it to bed permanently. From the very outset the Labour government in 1965 only put out a government circular rather than passing primary legislation – in the context of an overall majority of 5 or fewer, that was understandable, but once we had a majority of over 90 from March 1966 onwards it becomes less understandable. And the ministers of the period – Edward Short, for example – were not exactly dynamos of activity. The issue is not about secondary moderns which were not comprehensive schools in intake, but comprehensive education and achieving differentiation within a school rather than by having different institutions. Labour did not have powerful articulate advocates for comprehensives and education was invariably not one of the prime offices of state (after the big four – PM, Treasury, Home and Foreign) whereas it should have been and not just a place on the stepladder going up or coming down. We never gave education any permanency – secretaries of state were often there for little more than two years. Cameron has shown how by putting IDS in charge of work and pensions for the duration of this Parliament it it possible to achieve a major overhaul of a system, for good or ill (the latter in the case of what IDS is producing). Frankly I think Ed M needs to start thinking about a smaller cabinet which operates true cabinet government but has big players in the key roles. We will need to do and say more than the Conservatives cannot be trusted with this or that to persuade the electorate that we mean business.
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the only way to get the high quality technical education we desperately need is to sideline/encapsulate the ‘boffs’ let’s think about it. but we don’t need Grammar Schools you can do it within existing Comprehensive Schools simply by offering different approaches and tagging them.
David Lindsay is right one of the things that made the 40s/50s Grammar Schools popular, especially in the industrial north, was that there was good quality appropriate technical and vocational education available.
The Technical Baccalaureate is what we need.
Labour’s answer to the Tories going back to a neolithic form of selection: going back to comprehensives…the only thing they were comprehensive about having been failure.
Labour’s answer to the Tories privatising the NHS: going back to the 1970s NHS stuffed with bureaucrats and screwed by Unions. Labour’s answer to the invasion of cowboy privatisers: going back to bloated State industries.
Hold it up to the light, not a new idea in sight. How easy it is being a member of the Labour Party. How hard are the problems we face.
I dread the future of our children when I read articles like the above. Clearly, Labour have learned absolutely nothing over the last fifty years. The education system has been one massive experiment and political football for years. Labour ministers say no return to grammar schools but send their own children to them. That just sums up Labour and what they stand for and why they will lose the argument on education.
I went to a grammar school relatively recently (from 1993-1998). This was one of the few grammar schools that was retained because it is in a rural Conservative constituency (Gainsborough) and so there was never any motivation to reform the secondary school system in this area.
It is undoubtedly a very good school and the pupils that go there invariably do well. The experience of attending this school taught me at first hand the effects of selective education. Those who pass the exam at 11 get a good school and those who fail get a completely different education. There was a great degree of tension between our school and the two comprehensives in the town. Not necessarily resentment but I did get the impression that some of the children felt that they were already limited in their aspirations.
I left the grammar at 16 to go to sixth form college in the next town (Scunthorpe). This town was entirely comprehensively educated (in fact the sixth form college was on the site of the old grammar school) but the achievements of the more academic pupils was easily as good as any of those from the grammar school. The more diverse range of pupils with differing interests and levels of academic achievement made for a much more interesting and vibrant place to learn.
I now live in Dorset but I see the same issues arising as in LIncolnshire. Christchurch has three comprehensive schools, all good but two of them are outstanding. Both Bournemouth and Poole have retained grammar schools and have some comprehensive schools. The grammars are all outstanding (there are 4; boys and girls for Bournemouth and Poole), the comprehensive schools are varying in quality but generally indiffferent. The adjacent New Forest is entirely Comprehensive; these are all good or outstanding schools.
The point I am making is that grammar schools undoubtedly do well for those lucky enough to get in, but have a delibitating effect on the other schools within the LEA. My observations are merely empirical, I have not studied the data, however I would be extremely surprised if I was proved wrong.
A recent phenemenon is that more affluent parents provide tutoring for their children to increase their chances of passing the 11+. This conflates the existing problem of the correlation of house prices to the proximity of good schools.
My conclusion is that grammar schools are not good for the education system. More grammar schools would simply mean that more children get left behind.
IT IS TIME ED MILIBAND SHOWED SOME IRON DISCIPLINE AND RID ALL THE BLAIRITES ASSOCIATED WITH THIS OUTDATED AND DEFUNCT THINKTANK FROM THE SHADOW CABINET. WHISPERS INFORM ME THAT THERE WILL A NUMBER AXED. GAME ON.
STEPHEN TWIGG SHOULD BE THE FIRST ONE TO BE INFORMED. FOLLOWED BY CAROLINE FLINT.
IT IS TIME TO MOVE THE PARTY FORWARD
I see the bigger threat to restoring Grammar Schools coming from UKIP