Back to a comprehensive future!
Posted on 13/09/2023
In their second guest blog-post, Ian Duckett and James Whiting of the Socialist Educational Association set out what they think is needed to re-invigorate the movement for comprehensive education and show how the SEA Manifesto for Education can help.
The movement for comprehensive education has been stuck in the doldrums since the unfinished attempt by the Wilson government of the 1960s to end academic selection at 11. Slowly but surely the right chipped away at comprehensive schools. Specialist schools, City Technology Colleges, Grant Maintained schools, partial selection, selection by aptitude… all played their part in undermining the idea that one school can provide quality education for all the young people in a local community regardless of so-called academic ability. The SEA does not believe that simply abolishing the 11+ in areas where it still operates will restore the comprehensive ideal. Changes since 2010 have accelerated the move away from quality local schools for all children and towards competition in a rigged education market.
First, let’s agree with Comprehensive Future (the non-party political group campaigning to end the 11+ exam and open the last existing grammars to all pupils) that selection at 11 is simply wrong. The SEA is committed to this position and always has been. Second, let us state quite clearly: selection at 11 is unnecessarily early. Why select at 11 when the KS3 curriculum is the same in both selective and non-selective schools? In many countries (such as France and Germany) selection plays a role at 14 when vocational/technical courses become available for many pupils, whilst others progress to the academic hothouses (like Lycees or Gymnasiums). To an extent, selection for vocational/academic courses at 14 was starting to happen under New Labour’s diploma within schools, but was cut short by Gove’s reforms. Furthermore, selection at 11 is based not on achievement in particular areas of the curriculum but on an IQ test which favours those from more privileged social groups. The intellectual basis on which the test is predicated has been criticise from a range of perspectives. It is unreliable, discredited, arbitrary and unfair. The SEA alone is demanding in its manifesto that selection at eleven is ended once and for all.
However, it is illogical to oppose selection at 11 but not consider how it operates, often more insidiously, at other points in the system. 163 out of 4188 secondary schools in England are grammars: 4%. While I accept that such schools often affect the school ecology in a wider area, just arguing for changing their character whilst not addressing selective practices in the system as a whole will always only be relevant now to a small minority of parents, pupils and teachers. From the right’s perspective there is no urgent need to introduce more grammar.
Gove, arguably the most ideologically driven education secretary ever, left the topic well alone because he knew it was a diversion from his project. Simply put, this was to introduce a knowledge-rich curriculum, and linear examinations which measure how far pupils have retained and understood that knowledge, and then use these exams to select pupils for the best sixth forms and then the best universities.
Now there is an increasingly selective market in sixth forms, with, ironically, many pupils who failed the 11+ welcomed back to grammar schools post-16 because of their subsequent GCSE success. (Thus undermining arguments for the effectiveness of the 11+ in identifying the ‘most able’). On the other side of the coin lie so called comprehensive schools such as Brampton Manor in Newham or Twyford in Ealing which set high entrance criteria for their sixth forms in order to maintain an ‘academic ethos’ and do not provide vocational courses. This results in students being creamed off from other local school sixth forms and, worse, those of the schools’ own pupils who do not make the grade being told to find FE places elsewhere. Surely pro-comprehensive campaigners should be arguing for comprehensive post-16 provision too?
A good start would be to join the growing movement across the sector calling for GCSE abolition. If successful, the practices outlined above would cease. The SEA manifesto argues for the abolition of GCSEs and for a single overarching qualification at 18 within which students should be able to pick vocational, technical and academic elements of equivalent value and switch institutions at 16.
The Tories have deliberately disrupted the idea of a quality local school for all children through the free schools and academies programme. This move has massively increased marketisation in the cities where there is an illusion of parental choice. Whilst centralised control over the curriculum, teaching and assessment has increased, the variety of schools competing to deliver the prescribed diet has expanded. This inevitably leads to hierarchies of schools, particularly in cities. Nearly a third of pupils did not get their first choice of school in both London and Birmingham this year. This shows the hierarchy very much in play, with some schools vastly oversubscribed at the expense of others. At the same time, the design of Multi-Academy Trusts means that schools within them are no longer accountable to local communities. They are run by trusts—such as United Learning, in charge of schools from Carlisle to Poole—that roll out the same curriculum in all their schools. This was not the intention of those original campaigners for comprehensive schools who sought to educate pupils from all classes of a community in the same schools. The SEA manifesto argues that all schools should return to local democratic oversight. We believe too much autonomy was given to heads under the 1988 Act and that local authority control in the past was opaque. No mechanisms existed for teachers, parents and community stakeholders to have a say in the running of local schools. For local comprehensive schools to make a comeback, democratic planning has to replace the rigged market the Tories have created.
The SEA manifesto also tackles the last hidden barrier to true comprehensive education: the segregating of disabled children and those with special needs. The manifesto calls on Labour to re-state its commitment to inclusion and to work towards the position where mainstream schools become the default providers of education for these children. Newham council, for example, has a strong record in this regard.
Selection throughout the system is deliberate. Right wing ideology insists on hierarchies in everything. The rigged market ensures a hierarchy of schools in an area. A hierarchy of knowledge prevails in schools where Gove decided which subjects are worth studying at GCSE (EBAC) and A level (facilitating subjects). The arts, social sciences, design technology and vocational subjects were either excluded or labelled second class. Within subjects, for example in English, a traditional white cultural perspective was imposed, and in History the struggles of the peoples who were subject to exploitation by our empire ignored. Pupils are sorted into hierarchies within schools through setting and streaming. They are then made to sit examinations in the so-called higher forms of knowledge. If they do poorly they are diverted to vocational education which continues to be viewed as second rate. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, vocational courses are not always a positive choice for pupils. Finally, the ‘best’ are selected for our elite universities.
If implemented, the SEA manifesto (introduced in the previous blog-post) would drain selection from the system and reinvigorate the comprehensive ideal with quality democratically-run inclusive local schools emerging, for all children.
You can read the SEA Manifesto for Education here: https://socedassoc.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/a-manifesto-for-education.pdf