Are we educating children for a democracy or a meritocracy?
Picture courtesy Brampton Manor Academy
From the mean streets of London town, where young women dread abduction by strangers and young men fear knife-wielding gangs, here is a good news story. The Borough of Newham, to the east of the East End, is one of the poorest places in Britain. With a high proportion of ethnic minorities, one in five children is on free school meals because the family is on a low income. Newham has suffered one of the highest Covid death rates in the country. Yet it also has three outstanding state schools, many of whose students will this year go to study at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton and other top universities on both sides of the Atlantic.
One of these schools has even outperformed almost all leading private schools, including Eton and St Paul’s Girls’ School. No fewer than 55 pupils at Brampton Manor Academy gained places at Oxbridge, compared to 48 at Eton. The London School of Excellence had 37 Oxbridge offers, while Newham Collegiate says 95 per cent of its students go on to study at Russell Group universities, while 8 students had offers from Ivy League universities.
What makes these achievements all the more remarkable is that these schools charge no fees, while a private education at sixth form typically costs £30,000 a year for day pupils and £45,000 for boarders. Yet all three Newham schools promise that their students will receive a rounded or “holistic” education, including many of the opportunities for extracurricular activities that were once the preserve of expensive independent schools.
It is, of course, true that entry requirements to such academic institutions are bound to be high. Brampton, for example, expects applicants at A-level to have grade 7 (formerly an A) at GCSE in the relevant subjects and an average of 6.5 (a very high B). This means that although these schools are non-selective at 11, the intake at 16 is necessarily highly selective. Competition for places at these Newham schools is just as intense as it is for older “public” schools. The borough’s proximity to Canary Wharf make it a prime candidate for gentrification, as young City workers move in.
Does the rise of schools like Brampton Manor or Newham Collegiate pose a threat to the traditional predominance of private education in the British establishment? Now that Oxford and Cambridge have changed their admissions policies and increased the proportion of state-educated undergraduates (which only a decade ago was scandalously low), the well-to-do may switch their attention to high-performing academies and free schools. Westminster School, for example, still expects to get 70 to 80 students into Oxbridge per annum. Down the road, however, Harris Westminster Sixth Form managed 44 Oxbridge places this year. The gap is narrowing and will continue to do so. Just five years ago, as many as 99 Etonians got into Oxbridge; now the numbers have halved. Oxbridge offers to Paulinas (pupils at St Paul’s Girls’) fell from 55 to 44 over the same period. Admissions tutors at leading universities are on the lookout for potential rather than “polish”. This shift in attitudes is bound to filter through to employers, too. A zero-sum game is being played for the glittering prizes — only the rules have changed and the playing field has been levelled.
What does this phenomenon have to do with the majority of children, who do not expect to go to Oxbridge or other elite universities? The answer is that more rigorous standards at the top of the state system are trickling down. Academy trusts are themselves competitive and usually quicker than local authorities to react to changes in educational orthodoxies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that more heads are demanding at least the external marks of excellence — discipline, dress codes and exam results — from pupils and staff. The fashion for creativity and skills is being replaced by a passion for rigour and knowledge.
This aspirational ethos is, in general, very welcome. It is a disgrace that so many state schools still do not encourage their students to aim high. There is, though, a risk that other educational goals may be eclipsed by an exclusive focus on strictly academic achievement. Some children who do not shine in examinations may yet flourish in other ways if given the opportunity to do so. As David Goodhart has argued in his recent book Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century (Penguin, £7.99), the jobs that are likely to survive the impact of artificial intelligence will often be those requiring craft and care rather than traditional “white-collar” professions. Meritocracy has become a “tyranny”, according to the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel — and, like all tyrannies, it can be overthrown.
The New Plan for Schools outlined by the former Labour Education Secretary Ruth Kelly here this week is aimed at all pupils, not just the ablest. Some have criticised her call for greater flexibility in the examination system and in the classroom as a return to the fallacies of “progressive” education in the 1960s. Ms Kelly means nothing of the sort. Herself a pre-eminent role model for girls — having risen to the top in such male-dominated fields as politics, economics and the Catholic Church — she has a healthy regard for academic achievement.
But if we are right to reject the failed nostrums of the Sixties, including one-size-fits-all comprehensive education, we should not romanticise the two-tier system of grammar and secondary modern schools that preceded it either. This applies especially to those of us who benefited from a grammar school education. As the American-born Oxbridge historian Peter Mandler shows in his magisterial new book The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (OUP, £25), the demand for a higher education for the majority is an essential fact of life in a democratic society which is bound to conflict with more restrictive meritocratic attitudes. Selective education may be making a comeback in state schools, but this cannot be at the expense of the rest of the system. Kingsley Amis’s notorious slogan “More will mean worse” is belied by reliable evidence (cited by Mandler) that IQ scores have risen steadily as a result of more people being educated for longer. The goal must be to have the best of meritocracy without sacrificing democracy. It’s a difficult balancing act, but it ought not to be beyond the collective wit of a Cabinet that includes Etonians (such as Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Kwasi Kwarteng), Wykehamists (such as Rishi Sunak), grammar school boys (such as Dominic Raab), products of technical colleges (such as Priti Patel) and comprehensive schools (such as Gavin Williamson). Now that state schools in Newham are giving the grandest fee-paying colleges in the land a run for their money, the Government’s levelling up agenda no longer seems unachievable.
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