Failure by admission
Posted on 19/07/2023
Grammar school initiatives to attract more children from lower income families have made little impact and the Government appears indifferent. Nuala Burgess, Chair of the campaigning organisation Comprehensive Future, considers the latest evidence.
In 2018, a self-selected group of 152 grammar school heads who go by the name of the Grammar School Heads Association (GSHA), signed ‘a memorandum of understanding’ (MoU) with the Department for Education. This coyly-named document set out a ‘shared ambition’ to see more pupils from lower income backgrounds being admitted to selective schools, and increased partnerships between grammars and local schools to improve outcomes for children across the local area. However, the GSHA appear to lack ambition when it comes to educating poorer children. A recent DfE report reveals that England’s grammar schools took four years to achieve a shameful 0.7% rise in the number of disadvantaged pupils given places.
The neutral wording of a DfE evaluation report on the MoU cannot disguise just how ineffective grammar schools’ outreach programmes have been in attracting disadvantaged pupils. Framing the humiliating low figure of 0.7% as a ‘small increase overall’, the report found ‘lots of variation’ in the proportion of grammar school pupils in receipt of Pupil Premium funding. While some grammar schools saw ‘very significant increases’, others saw a decline, and some ‘no substantial change’.
A few things need explaining about the background to the MoU before the enormity of its failure can be fully understood. The MoU was dreamt up by the DfE and the GSHA and drafted when Theresa May was prime minister. May’s love of grammar schools is on record but her plan to create new ones was thwarted when she secured only a dramatically reduced majority in the 2017 election. May’s solution was to establish the Selective School Expansion Fund (SSEF) which allowed the expansion of existing grammar schools, most controversially through the building of legally dubious ‘satellite’ grammar schools.
A total of £64 million was spent on the expansion of grammar schools through the SSEF, with the 22 schools allocated cash required to show how they intended to increase their numbers of disadvantaged pupils. The first round of bids led to a spend of £50 million over three years and resulted in a pitiful 77 additional pupil premium places. That’s fewer than four places per school. For reasons never made public, SSEF was quietly scaled back and finally dropped in 2020.
The MoU is a legacy of the loosely-defined requirements of the SSEF for which grammar schools had to show plans to improve access for disadvantaged pupils. The Fund was devised in a climate when grammar schools were especially anxious to prove their credentials as engines of social mobility and to justify a potential windfall through the SSEF. In addition to plans for new ‘satellite’ schools, many of the bids for SSEF funding included ‘intervention programmes’ designed to attract more children from lower-income families.
The modest aim of the original MoU was for an ‘upward trend’ of disadvantaged pupil numbers to be achieved through vaguely-specified outreach programmes. Like the MoU itself, the GSHA’s outreach initiatives were accepted on trust. Some grammar schools promised to support the teaching of English and Maths in local primaries using their own teachers. Others planned to use sixth form students as ‘coaches’. Some planned to adjust admission arrangements for disadvantaged pupils and others to lower entrance test pass marks. Fifty-eight GSHA member schools offered free online coaching for their 11-plus tests.
The lack of government scrutiny of grammar schools’ outreach work and of their policies to raise numbers of disadvantaged pupils, coupled with a lack of accountability, means there have been no penalties for failure. While the DfE ‘regularly engaged’ with GSHA during the period 2018 – 2022, by its own admission in the evaluation report only some of this engagement focused on ‘progress in delivering the aims of the MoU’.
Rather than reprimand the GSHA, the government has responded to the organisation’s failure by agreeing to a new and watered down MoU. The original 2018 – 2022 MoU included the GSHA’s agreement to report on progress against a number of measures, one of which was to aim for an ‘upward trend’ in the number of disadvantaged children applying as well as in numbers admitted to their schools. The new MoU relieves GSHA members of any obligation to look at numbers applying to their schools. Instead it requires them only to monitor numbers accepted. In effect, grammar school heads have promised nothing more than to keep an eye on things with fingers crossed.
Buried within the DfE evaluation report is the mildest of rebukes and a suggestion that grammar schools ‘need to challenge themselves to do more’. In an extraordinary sleight of hand, however, grammar schools are forgiven the glaring failures of their intervention programmes. Rather than being found wanting in effort and imagination, the DfE judges that the failure of the GSHA programme ‘shows what a complex issue this is to resolve’.
The stubborn exclusivity of state-funded selective schools appears to be the only complexity preventing an increase in the number of working-class and disadvantaged children accepted by grammar schools. In this light, the GSHA’s promise to raise numbers is either naïve or disingenuous. Either way, those who believe grammar schools to be engines of social mobility ignore the research and refuse to engage with current Government reports.
