Imagine a school system that, after 12 years of formal education, tells one third of young people that they have failed. You might wonder whether the failure was by the designers of the system, not the unsuccessful third.
Your indignation might grow if you learnt they came disproportionately from already disadvantaged homes, and from those with learning difficulties. You might think such a system was inhumane, devised by figures without imagination or empathy. And your disbelief might turn to anger if you learnt such a system implanted a sense of failure in young people, which they and third parties find hard to shake off.
Welcome to our national schooling system. It intentionally bakes in failure for a third of students who do not achieve at least a grade 4 in both GCSE English and maths. Standards are thus maintained, and grade inflation avoided, its defenders claim. They regret that so many don’t make the cut. But they are proud of the system and won’t change it.
So, year after year, they let this mass waste of human potential roll on, and talk up further education and job pathways for those who fell short. Albeit not paths their own children travel along. Some schools are achieving heroic GCSE results with disadvantaged children. But why should the achievement of the generally more privileged two thirds require that the less advantaged third fail as sacrificial lambs?
What the policymakers see as regrettable but necessary, I see as inhumane and negligent. My sense of injustice has grown during my time on The Times Education Commission. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, the eminent Cambridge psychologist, put it well: “If you tell young adolescents that they are failures, then that is what they come to believe about themselves, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
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Is it surprising that those with low self-esteem, the unemployed and those in prison disproportionately were failures at school?
A hundred years ago the establishment sent wave after wave of disadvantaged young people over the top to be killed or scarred for life. “Sad, but inevitable,” the generals said, “for our policy is to succeed.” And at the end of the day it wasn’t the high command’s tribe who were the sacrificial lambs.
As a head teacher, my primary aim was to find out what every student loved, could do and could succeed at. Rather than institutionalising failure, our school system needs to institutionalise success.
The system is in the grip of many tired beliefs. That is why the education commission, which reports next year, is so vital.
Sir Anthony Seldon is a member of The Times Education Commission