It is a standard aspect of rhetoric over education policy for politicians to say that they want to improve the lot of “every child”. Much of this is sugar. No minister or aspiring minister can ensure that every single pupil makes the most of the opportunities on offer. What all parties should attempt to do is to remove restrictions that prevent, for instance, both a gifted eight-year-old and, at this stage, a less intellectually developed contemporary from progressing. The first step in assisting each of them is to recognise that different, but not necessarily incompatible, solutions are required.
For the blunt truth is that the pure one-size-fits-all model of education, involving so-called mixed-ability teaching in virtually identical comprehensive schools, was tried and it failed — and it has failed the working class most of all. It hurt the bright and the less able and demoralised their parents and their teachers. The only section of the population which was not damaged — quite the opposite — was middle-class Britain, which had the resources to buy choice. It is a depressing feature of the hard Left that, at heart, it would like to extend a triumph of mediocre “equality” by abolishing successful private schools.
Much of the argument about the education Bill relates to selection. This is a red herring. Neither Tony Blair nor the Conservatives have a “secret plan” to reintroduce the 11-plus exam by the back door. Both the Prime Minister and David Cameron contend that selection is more important within schools than between them. Each would assert that the academic individual should be taught in streamed classes along with equivalent children and that the less able pupil needs a cadre of highly motivated students at school to drive up standards. All methods of education must also have enough institutional flexibility to promote the prospects of the relatively late developer.
What really matters, therefore, is that schools have sufficient autonomy to establish their own ethos, style and specialisms, and that the system overall has enough diversity to adjust to children’s profound differences. Comprehensive schools are not, in principle, incompatible with educational excellence. Yet they become so when, as many of their champions unfortunately demand, they are soul-sappingly similar and sadly lacking in ambition. In this sense, “comprehensive ” has become a euphemism for conformity.
One of the ironies of the debate is the astonishingly condescending attitude of many opponents of the Government. They share an assumption that if there is the slightest element of choice or competition involving education, then the middle class will exploit it skilfully while working-class families will either be too uninformed or insufficiently dynamic to make the most of what is available. The opposite is true. The proposed reforms will ensure that failing schools (which generally fail because they fail working-class children) are reformed and resourced. To ignore this reality is to treat this country’s children with patronising contempt. It is on this score that the merits of the education Bill should be assessed.