Education and Politics

Education has long been a political battleground and continues to be so at the start of this new century. A protracted debate has centered on the impact of comprehensive schooling – on educational standards and on inequalities in the wider society. Originally comprehensive education attracted support from both ends of the political spectrum. It was the Labor government, as mentioned which set the comprehensive system into motion, however, and therefore support for comprehensive education has tended to be associated much more with the political left than with the right. The architects of comprehensive education believed that the new schools would provide for greater 3quality of opportunities than was possible in selective education. They did not give much thought to the curriculum as such, being more concerned with equality of access.

The Comprehensive System and its Critics

Critics of the comprehensive system believe that it has failed in two ways. According to such critics, comprehensive schools have not promoted greater equality of opportunity, but rather the reverse. Bright children from poorer backgrounds could proper in the days of eleven-plus; in comprehensive schools, they are held back. Equally important, the critics say, the comprehensive schools provide only a poor standard of education, because excellence goes unrewarded and specialization is discouraged. Before the introduction of the comprehensive scho9ol system, 20 percent of pupils passed the eleven-plus and went on to grammar school. With the reform, the idea was to create schools with a mixture of able and less able children. Each comprehensive school would also have 20 percent of pupils in the upper range of ability. Things have not turned out like that. As measured by exam results, only 27 percent of comprehensives have 20 percent or more pupils in the upper ability range. As part of this pattern, pupils in this ability band are more concentrated than they were intended to be: 18 percent of comprehensive schools have more than 20 percent of children in that range. These schools in effect, if not in name, have become grammar schools. Less successful schools in the system have become more or less equivalent to the old secondary moderns. In 38 per cent of schools the proportion of pupils in the top ability range is 10 per cent or less, while in 16 per cent of schools the proportion is under 5 per cent. The selection processes which have produced this situation operate in several ways. In the first place, the eleven-plus never disappeared completely. There are ninety-five remaining grammar schools, which still use the test, and they draw more able children in their area away from the other schools; and grammar schools are still common in Northern Ireland. Within the comprehensive system, schools are supposed to take the correct shares of each ability band, but further selection processes work informally, and they are no less powerful fro all that. Schools have to give priority to children within their area. Parents can thus ‘buy’ their children into favored schools by ensuring that they have the right address. Middle-class parents have become adept at ensuring that their children are admitted to the school of their choice. Those children who come from more advantaged backgrounds tend to benefit more through school selection, while those who are disadvantaged find their position further weakened. A substantial percentage of schools which have opted out of local authority control take personal and medical factors into account in deciding about entry. According to a recent study, over 50 per cent of such schools apply selective criteria in such a way (Hugill 1996). Proposals introduced by the Conservatives in 1996 will allow all state schools to select up to 15 per cent of their pupils, either by ability or a specialist subject such as science or music. They will be able to select a higher proportion with special permission from the government. Opting out was supposed to increase parental choice by creating diversity in the school system. But the unintended consequence might be to reduce such choice: an increasing number of children are being denied a place at their first choice of school.