What should we do with private schools?
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Version 0 of 1. There is a piquant scene in Ralph Glasser’s classic autobiography Gorbals Boy. The setting is an Oxford college in the late 1930s; the only proletarian member of the study group is the undergraduate Glasser; its leader is the Wykehamist and future Labour politician Richard Crossman, “beautifully groomed in silver grey suit and dove grey silk tie”; and to Glasser’s amazement and ire, Crossman leans forward in his leather wing chair and asks the question: “Why do people work?” Glasser notes in his account that the subject of the study group was social mobility – “a favourite hobby horse of Oxford progressives in those days”. Three-quarters of a century later, not just Oxford progressives. Indeed, rather like corporate social responsibility in the business world, social mobility has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie causes to which it is almost rude not to sign up. “You’ve got to get out there and find people, win them over, get them to raise aspirations, get them to think they can get all the way to the top,” David Cameron tells us. His fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson also exalts social mobility, though in his model it is making sure the right “cornflakes” get to the top of the packet; while according to Nick Clegg, the lack of social mobility is an “absolute scandal” and “we have to fight for a society where the fortunes of birth and background weigh less heavily on prospects and opportunities for the future”. Ed Miliband agrees with Nick. “The reality is that governments have not got this right for decades. It’s not just about qualifications, it’s about the culture of the country and what it celebrates and what it doesn’t.” All of which raises the question: are we sure that the systematic pursuit of social mobility is necessarily such a good idea? Three main arguments point to possible scepticism about the new consensus. Starting with what one might call the “scholarship boy” argument – in effect, that plucking talented young people out of their disadvantaged but familiar environments, and putting them on the Oxbridge (or wherever) route to the glittering prizes, is so destabilising, so deracinating that not only can they find it difficult or impossible to adjust to a very different social context, but that even if they do make the adjustment they are then emotionally reluctant or unable to return to their original community and make a contribution. The classic text is chapter 10 of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, characteristically entitled “Unbent Springs: A Note on the Uprooted and the Anxious”; and at the start, he quotes George Eliot on the scholarship boy, a phenomenon in evidence long before Rab Butler’s Education Act of 1944 – and the ensuing spread of free places in grammar schools – unleashed on the world Dennis Potter, Melvyn Bragg and other upwardly mobile members of the working class of varying degrees of anxiety. “For my part I am very sorry for him,” Eliot wrote. “It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self.” The second argument also had its classic text in the 1950s. Published in 1958, though largely set in 2034, Michael Young’s much-cited but often misunderstood The Rise of the Meritocracy is ultimately a dystopian warning against a rampant, self-serving, IQ-driven, intolerant meritocracy – a meritocratic elite emerging largely through intelligence testing and educational selection. At one point the Technicians party, as the Labour party has been rebranded, issues a manifesto complaining about the arrogant, unfeeling dominance of this new elite. “Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupation, and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there could be no classes.” And the Technicians go on: “Who would be able to say that the scientist was superior to the porter with admirable qualities as a father, the civil servant with unusual skill at gaining prizes superior to the lorry driver with unusual skill at growing roses?” The sentiments are unmistakably Young’s, and essentially the argument is that carving up society along restlessly meritocratic lines – “merit” defined by Young as I + E, intelligence plus effort – excessively privileges the winners, bringing out their least appealing qualities, and badly undervalues the contribution of the losers. Peter Hennessy refers to “the dark side of meritocracy” in his stimulating new short book Establishment and Meritocracy, and he quotes approvingly a recent Youngian utterance by the bishop of London, Richard Chartres: “It is not difficult to see why we are so keen to widen our knowledge and why we are so little concerned to increase our capacity to love – knowledge translates directly into power; love translates into service.” Finally, there is the argument that to bang on about social mobility is, whether out of naivety or pragmatic calculation, to be choosing the soft option. Or put another way, that it may in its own terms be justified to pursue greater equality of opportunity, but that what matters far more to the welfare of most people is greater equality of outcome – a far tougher policy objective, but one almost entirely written out of the script during the New Labour years and now only falteringly returned to. Furthermore, continues the argument, the two equalities, of opportunity and of outcome, are inextricably linked. “Only the presence of a high degree of practical equality,” declared RH Tawney many years ago in his great treatise, Equality, “can diffuse the general opportunity to rise. The existence of such opportunities, in fact not merely in form, depends not merely upon an open road but upon an equal start.” A graphic image, and I like to think of Tawney nodding approvingly at that irresistible Start-rite shoe advert of the 1950s, as the two small children set out together on the open road arm in arm. Taken as a whole, though, do these three arguments add up to a case that social mobility should no longer be up in lights as a public and socially desirable goal? Although mindful of a recent firecracker of an essay by David Lipsey on “The Meretriciousness of Meritocracy” – describing equality of opportunity, when combined with serious inequality of outcome, as “the worst possible recipe for a harmonious society”, I think not. In an age of so much greater emotional intelligence than when I was growing up half a century ago, as well as much-flattened cultural hierarchies, it is reasonable to expect elite institutions and their customary inhabitants to be sensitive to the circumstances of the latter-day scholarship boys and girls. Similarly, once those exemplars of I + E make it to or near the top, with any luck increasingly imbued with less testosterone-fuelled qualities, they should be capable of forming what the American sociologist Daniel Bell called a “well-tempered” meritocracy, respectful and sympathetic to the squares on life’s board other than those with ladders; while as for equality of opportunity vis a vis outcome, the two are indeed indivisible, and surely it does not have to be an either/or choice. There is also the whole matter of symbolism: as George Orwell reflected soon after the war, the Labour government’s failure to abolish first-class rail travel was all too emblematic of its broader failure to carry through an egalitarian social revolution. In 2014 we look at No 10 and see an Old Etonian in situ; we look at London’s City Hall and see the same; we look at Lambeth Palace and see the same again … They may or may not be worthy occupants, but the triple whammy is in its way grotesquely symbolic, telling us something stark and unacceptable about our society today. So where, more broadly, are we in the social mobility story? And where have we come from? It is the postwar decades – above all, the 1950s and 1960s – that are usually thought of as the golden age of social mobility. Expanding middle-class job opportunities, Room at the Top (novel and film), the last great hurrah of the grammar schools before the comprehensives took over, the rapid expansion of higher education, the youth and pop revolutions, the Tories abruptly ending their run of Old Etonian leaders, emerging figures (predominantly male) such as Peter Hall or Harold Evans or Margaret Forster or David Bailey – it is not difficult, nor was it difficult then, to construct a plausible picture. My favourite text is from The History Man by the critic and novelist Malcolm Bradbury, himself first-generation grammar and university. Published in 1975, and set contemporaneously at a fashionable new campus university (that is clearly Sussex), he gives us the backstory of Howard and Barbara Kirk, the achingly trendy sociology lecturer and his wife. “The Kirks,” begins the second chapter, “are new people”, and in a tour de force of recent social history he relates how they had transformed themselves from the anxious, puritanical and northern working-class-cum-lower-middle-class couple, both grammar-school products, who had married in the early 1960s. The title for Bradbury’s novel was wonderfully apposite, and it seemed indeed that history was flowing in only one, upwardly mobile direction. Then came the Goldthorpe shock. Based on the Oxford social mobility study, evidence collected in 1972 from 10,000 men in England and Wales aged between 20 and 64, John Goldthorpe’s Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, published in 1980, exploded that Whiggish assumption. It was indeed true, he accepted, that in terms of absolute social mobility there had been a substantial advance since the war, reflecting the fact that jobs in what he termed the “service class” – professionals, administrators, managers and higher-grade technicians – had expanded greatly, providing secure and well-paid middle-class employment for many people who had been born into the working class. Yet, argued Goldthorpe, the crucial yardstick was not absolute but relative social mobility – that is, the relative life chances of working-class children compared with other children – and this, he stressed, revealed a very different story about what had been really happening (or not happening) in Britain since the war. “Even in the presumably very favourable context of a period of sustained economic growth and of major change in the form of occupational structure,” he concluded, “the general underlying processes of intergenerational class mobility – or immobility – have apparently been little altered and indeed have, if anything, tended in certain respects to generate still greater inequalities in life chances.” For what was in many ways an impenetrable, heavy-duty work of sociology, Goldthorpe’s analysis attracted considerable attention, including prompting a memorable sentence from Roy Hattersley in the Sunday Times: “Today it seems incredible that anyone ever really believed that children from the slums – badly housed, badly fed and badly protected from illness – enjoyed equality of opportunity with their suburban contemporaries just because they took the same examination on the same day in their 12th year.” In short, the strongly pro-comprehensive Hattersley was arguing in 1980, that the postwar mechanism of 11-plus and grammar schools, for that minority fortunate enough to pass, had been part of the problem, not the solution. Was that historically fair? Given that in 2014 the man of the moment, Nigel Farage, believes that the way to lick the current social mobility problem is to bring back the grammars, and given also the widespread collective folk memory of the grammars as providing unrivalled, game-changing ladders of opportunity, it is a question worth asking. My answer would tend to side with Hattersley. Although there were undoubtedly many individual cases of working-class children going to grammars and having their life chances transformed, and although I have sympathy with the argument that the comprehensive revolution cut off the growth of a grammar-educated elite that had the potential to rival and challenge the privately educated elite, the facts are that a) the intake at most grammars was heavily skewed towards the existing middle class, and b) the early-leaving problem at grammars (ie leaving school and thus formal education as soon as it was legally permissible to do so) overwhelmingly involved and affected working-class children. By the mid-1950s a middle-class child who had been to a grammar was five times as likely to go on to a university as was a child from an unskilled working-class background who had also been to a grammar; while by the 1960s the 22% chance that a boy from a working-class background would attend a grammar – compared with a 66% chance for a boy from a service-class background – was actually 5% less than it had been in the 1950s. And of course, for every working-class child going to a grammar, there were five or six going to a secondary modern. The comprehensive revolution – Anthony Crosland and all that – may or may not have turned out in the round to be a good thing, but it had its reasons. So what do the experts tell us about what has been happening to social mobility during the 40-odd years since the Oxford study? Goldthorpe himself is still active, and last month he co-authored a study that concluded “for the first time in a long time, we have got a generation coming through education and into the job market whose chances of social advancement are not better than their parents’, they are worse”. On relative upward social mobility, he is also gloomy, noting that the child of a higher professional or managerial father is now as many as 20 times more likely to achieve similar status than a working-class child is to achieve that status. Over the last decade or so, however, it has been from economists at the London School of Economics, notably Jo Blanden and Stephen Machin, that the highest-profile and most influential findings on social mobility have come. This has been, above all, through their use of two birth cohort studies – one of them tracking the lives of all children born in Britain in one week in 1958, the other doing the same for the children of one week in 1970. In essence, they have found that the economic status of the 1970 cohort is, compared with the earlier cohort, more dependent on family background – and that accordingly, social mobility in early 21st century Britain is in decline. Although the methodology of the LSE economists has not escaped criticism, that finding has now become (especially through the tireless efforts of the Sutton Trust) the conventional wisdom: at the very least social mobility has stalled. Pessimism certainly imbues the work of Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, operating at full tilt since 2012. “Old Boys and Girls Still Take Top Jobs” was a typical headline greeting its report in August about the privately educated tightening their grip – for example, the 54 privately educated out of the top 100 media professionals being seven more than back in the 1980s. So too elsewhere: 71% of senior judges, 62% of senior officers in the armed services, 55% of Whitehall’s permanent secretaries, 53% of senior diplomats, 50% of members of the House of Lords. “Deeply elitist”, and “closed shop at the top”, was the commission’s own summary of these and similar figures, all of them way in excess of the 7% of the population attending private schools. And Milburn added in words difficult to disagree with: “Locking out a diversity of talents and aspirations makes Britain’s leading institutions less informed, less representative and, ultimately, less credible than they should be.” What to do? Clearly there is no single silver bullet. The Sutton Trust, for example, has recently issued a Mobility Manifesto setting out 10 practical policy steps intended to put social mobility at the heart of next year’s general election. These include greater use of ballots to ensure fairer admissions to oversubscribed state schools, more systematic use of the pupil premium and a significant increase in good-quality apprenticeships. Over and above (or often instead of) enhancing equality of outcome and thus opportunity, plenty of other ideas are also in the air, including in relation to the admissions policies of the top universities and the whole thorny area of internships. The focus, though, is almost entirely on stimulating upward social mobility. Yet it is abundantly if unattractively clear that for social mobility to work anything like properly, it has to be a two-way street. “The only way you can have more upward mobility in a relative perspective,” Goldthorpe bluntly informed an interviewer last year, “is if you have more downward mobility at the same time.” Which brings me to those impeccably connected, confidence-boosting exam factories, the great alpha achievers and beta blockers of our time: the private schools. They have undeniably been in the spotlight during the last fortnight. “Finishing schools for the children of oligarchs,” was how Andrew Halls, head of King’s College School in Wimbledon (day fees of more than £20,000 a year), vividly characterised them in a well-publicised Sunday Times interview. “We didn’t mean as schools to exclude the children of teachers, police officers and nurses, let alone doctors and lawyers,” he explained, “but these high fees” – more than £30,000 a year at the top boarding schools – “are above the salary levels of all these people now.” There followed a few days later the Tristram Hunt demarche. After many months of silence about the subject, the shadow education secretary announced that Labour in power would, in his words, “introduce a school partnership standard requiring all private schools to form genuine and accountable partnerships with state schools if they want to keep their business rates relief” – relief estimated at around £700m over the course of a five-year parliament. “England’s independent schools need to raise their game,” insisted Hunt. “Britain will only thrive in the 21st century on the back of an education system where pupils enjoy equality of opportunity. This crippling public-private impasse has gone on too long.” The largely hostile reaction to his initiative was entirely predictable. Much was made of Hunt’s own private-school background, as if that had been his own choice as a boy; the head of his old school accused him of “espousing what some might deem as offensive bigotry”; and the Daily Telegraph declared that Labour had “retreated to what it knows best: class envy”. Hunt was also attacked from the left for the timidity of his proposals. “‘Labour’s assault on private schools’?” began a letter to the Guardian from Richard Knights, querying the paper’s headline. “Taking away one small part of the huge state subsidies to private schools is hardly an ‘assault’, and no doubt lawyers, consultants and lobbyists will strive might and main to evade it. To say that Mr Hunt has laboured mightily and brought forth a mouse would be extremely generous.” In short, he concluded, “this is the equivalent to an ‘assault’ from one of Ken Dodd’s tickling sticks.” Clearly we need to stand back, so let me start by offering a definition: private education is essentially a mechanism – in its own terms a brilliantly successful mechanism – by which children who are already privileged by dint of the circumstances of their birth go to highly resourced schools and have their privileged socioeconomic position further entrenched and strengthened. That, it seems to me, is the fundamental truth of the matter about institutions that in many cases (including Eton and St Paul’s) were originally endowed and established in order to provide an education for the poor. A pupil at a private day school is, according to the Sutton Trust’s figures, 55 times likelier to win a place at Oxbridge than a state-school pupil from a poor background. When private-school students and state-school students meet for the first time on a level playing field, ie at university, inevitably the state-school students outperform the private ones – inevitably because many of the private ones have in effect been over-promoted, having had such superior resources devoted to them during their childhood. Private education acts, in other words, as a crucial block on downward as well as upward relative social mobility. Naturally, the private schools themselves tell it differently. “Making the type of school you attend a proxy for advantage, as Alan Milburn regularly does, just won’t cut it,” Richard Harman, head of Uppingham, recently wrote in the Times, arguing that the financial support given to pupils at private schools put him and his colleagues on the right side of the social mobility curve. The evidence, however, says otherwise. Earlier this year, I wrote an article with my son George on the issue, part of which sought to deconstruct the somewhat opaque census figures for the 1,223 members of the Independent Schools Council. We found that although one-third of pupils at private schools receive help with their fees, averaging about a quarter, those pupils are often siblings of other pupils and/or the children of staff or the military or the clergy; that one in 12 private-school pupils receive a means-tested bursary, but two-thirds of those one in 12 are still paying more than half; and finally, that fewer than one in 100 pupils are in receipt of a full bursary, ie paying no fees. In short, we found that most parents going down the private-school route still pay heavily to do so – and that the fees they pay are out of reach of the population as a whole. The aftermath of our article was notable for the dog that barked and the dog that didn’t. The one that didn’t was the private-school sector itself; normally so quick to shoot down its critics, it did not dispute our reading of the figures. The one that did bark was a Tory politician with an interest in these things. We had, Michael Gove wrote a fortnight later, “demonstrated, beyond challenge, that the wonderfully liberating education offered by our great public schools is overwhelmingly the preserve of the wealthy”. So where do we go? After a long period – going back to the 1980s or even earlier – during which the private‑school question seemed to be in permafreeze, things are moving, partly in response to external criticism, partly through anxiety about losing charitable status. Some interesting and constructive initiatives are now in play, including partnerships with state academies (a key component of Hunt’s policy) and attempts to create more needs-blind places (being pushed by Halls and other progressively minded private heads). My gut feeling, however, is that ultimately there may be no alternative to full integration into the national educational system – a system now allowing significantly more operational autonomy within it than 10 or 20 years ago. I have no wish at all, I must emphasise, to see bulldozers demolish institutions of proven academic excellence. Fundamentally, my problem is with the fee‑paying principle – which leads directly to engines of privilege, blocks relative social mobility and perpetuates a Berlin Wall not just in our education system but in our society. So what about the time-honoured parental right to choose? In the end it comes down to two competing questions. Do we prioritise the right of those who can afford to educate their children privately to do so? Or do we prioritise the right of every child, including the poorest, to as even a start as possible? In effect it is that eternal tension between Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated two concepts of liberty: the negative liberty of not being interfered with or constrained, the positive liberty of being a full citizen enjoying the same potentialities as all one’s fellow citizens. Negative liberty for the 7%? Or positive liberty for the 93%? Ultimately, it is a value judgment about what sort of society we want. It is time – high time – that the issue was squarely on the table. Of course we all have our own personal baggage. Many among the political class, among the commentariat, among the broader intelligentsia or even among normal reasonably well-off people, went to private schools themselves (as I did), or for whatever mixture of motives have sent their children there or are thinking of doing so. The desire to avoid the charge of hypocrisy is wholly natural. Yet in a mature democracy, we cannot wish away the issue, and there is a moral duty to detach from our personal circumstances and look at the bigger picture. Let me finish with the words of Alan Bennett, from his already famous sermon last summer at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge: “We all know that to educate not according to ability but according to the social situation of the parents is both wrong and a waste. Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should. And if their education ends without it dawning on them, then that education has been wasted.” • This is a revised version of the Orwell lecture given last month. David Kynaston’s most recent book is Modernity Britain: A Shake of the Dice, 1959-62 (Bloomsbury). |