The enduring myth of grammar schools

Reform UK wants to bring back grammar schools. The evidence suggests they won’t help working-class children

Last week Reform UK announced that it would consider reopening selective grammar schools if it were to win power. The proposal taps into a long-standing belief in British politics: that academically selective schools offer bright working-class children a ladder of social mobility.

It is an appealing story, and one that has endured for decades. But it is also a story that sits uneasily with the evidence.

When writing my first book, The Myth of Meritocracy, I spent a good deal of time looking at the history and consequences of grammar schools. What I found was that the reality of selective education is rather different from the popular narrative. Far from serving as engines of mobility, grammar schools have tended to reinforce the advantages of families who already possess educational and cultural capital.

Given the renewed discussion around selection, I thought it might be useful to revisit part of that argument here.

What follows is a lightly edited excerpt from The Myth of Meritocracy in which I examine the evidence on grammar schools and ask a simple question: who actually benefits from academic selection? Some of the statistics date from when the book was written, but the broader pattern they illustrate has changed remarkably little.

(Excerpt begins below.)

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Grammar schools are one of the most enduring educational myths. For some, they represent the obvious answer to Britain’s social mobility conundrum.

A great deal of this nostalgia rests on the assumption that social mobility was markedly better in Britain during the post-war period, and is now in precipitous decline. Proponents of a return to grammars genuinely want to improve the education chances for working class kids — or at least most of them do.

Part of the attraction of the old system undoubtedly rests on the fact that stark inequalities exist in comprehensive schooling. Despite the formal abolition of selection, in practice it persists, and, as with elsewhere in the economy, the power of money has only increased in recent decades.

The reality of educational inequality

Homes in desirable school catchment areas cost significantly more than those in areas with unpopular schools. According to one survey of 1,100 parents of school-age children, parents are willing to pay 18 per cent more for a property near their preferred school — the equivalent of £32,000 on the average property price of nearly £180,000 in England, Wales and Scotland. In London, the premium is £77,000 on a house costing £474,000.

For parents who wish to spend even greater sums educating their children, there are exclusive fee-paying (independent) schools. Approximately 7 per cent of children in education attend these schools, and fees start at around £3,000 per annum. However, this initial investment offers a handsome return. Pupils who attend fee-paying schools are five times more likely to go on to study at Oxford than their peers from the state sector.

Half a century after a Labour government first moved to abolish grammar schools, there is no equality in education. The most deprived areas in Britain have 30 per cent fewer good schools than the least deprived. There are also fewer good teachers who want to work there. According to the OECD, British schools are some of the most socially segregated in the developed world.

Such is the demand for school places that ambitious parents have reportedly started registering their unborn children for prestigious private schools. Other affluent parents ‘hot house’ their children from the age of three by paying for costly private tutoring. William Perry, the co-director of Bonas MacFarlane, which provides private tutoring, recently told the Times Educational Supplement that Britain has “the most in-demand private [schools] sector in the world”.

The private school network endows in the children who attend a level of social and cultural capital that has the power to open invisible doors as they grow older. It should come as no surprise to learn that so many parents should want to send their children private when they are likely to earn £193,700 more on average between the ages of twenty-six and forty-two than those who attend state schools.

Accounting for family background and early educational achievement, the wage premium is a massive £57,653. Children from independent schools who didn’t go to university are just as likely to enter the elite as working class Oxford graduates who attended comprehensives.

The history of the tripartite system

Michael Young’s 1958 polemic against meritocracy was originally aimed at the grammar school system, which was seen to epitomise the ruthless separation of “gifted” pupils from the rest at an early age.

His book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, caricatured the 11-plus examination — essentially an IQ test — as operating on the assumption that “civilisation does not depend on the stolid mass…but upon a creative minority…The restless elite.”

Those who passed the 11-plus were thus set on a path to future prosperity.

Calls to bring back grammar schools are often based on similarly inegalitarian assumptions: the sheep must be ruthlessly sorted from the goats in the name of “social mobility”. The most commonly held defence of the grammar school system is that once upon a time it allowed bright working class kids to transcend their home life. This is the very definition of the meritocratic ideal.

When grammar schools were first introduced, there in fact were good meritocratic reasons to support educational reform. A large divide between the type of secondary education available to the rich and poor led in 1944 to the Education Act, which introduced the so-called “tripartite” system of education.

This included grammar schools, secondary modern schools and technical schools. The different schools were intended to provide separate but equal schooling geared to children of different abilities. In practice, few technical schools were actually built; thus, for most children it was a case of passing the 11-plus or attending a substandard secondary modern.

The inequalities perpetuated by the tripartite system — most working-class children ended up at secondary moderns — led to the formation of the comprehensive movement, which campaigned on the principle of one type of secondary education for all.

This policy was ultimately adopted by the Labour Party, resulting in Harold Wilson’s government asking local education authorities in 1965 to reorganise secondary education along comprehensive lines. At the time, it was felt that selective education was on the way out.

Doubt was increasingly being cast on theories of inherited intelligence; gender inequality was rife — many local education authorities had more grammar school places for boys than girls; and middle-class dissatisfaction with the system was growing.

Thus, when Labour Education Minister Tony Crosland reportedly promised in the 1960s to “destroy every fucking grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland”, there was no eruption of popular outrage.

By 1979, over 80 per cent of secondary school pupils were attending comprehensive schools.

In a neat historical irony, it was Margaret Thatcher as Education Secretary who, between 1970 and 1974, is understood to have closed more grammar schools than any Education Secretary before or since.

The former Tory leader Sir John Major went on to make a doomed attempt to rally voters in the 1997 election around the slogan of “A grammar school in every town!” However, on the whole, few mainstream politicians have seriously considered reintroducing grammars (perhaps voters realised that Major’s policy would also have meant a secondary modern in every town).

Between 1980 and 2015, the Conservatives did not open any new grammar schools and nor did Labour close any existing ones. The matter was understood to have been finally closed in 2007 when the young Tory leader David Cameron rejected calls to bring back grammars, defining it as a “key test” of whether the Conservative Party was fit for office.

(Though in 2015 Cameron appeared to row back on this early pledge, allowing his Education Secretary Nicky Morgan to approve a so-called “satellite” grammar school in Sevenoaks in Kent — the first grammar school to be approved for fifty years.)

Yet the egalitarian penumbra surrounding grammar schools still lingers.

What the evidence says

Selection at eleven still exists in thirty-six local authorities; and the evidence gleaned from the 164 remaining state-funded selective schools is a damning indictment of the grammar school system.

A study of Buckinghamshire, a county with a wholly selective school system, found that private school pupils were two and a half times more likely to pass the 11-plus exam than state school pupils.

Conversely, the pass rate for children on free school meals was one-eighth of the average.

This discrepancy between wealthy pupils and the rest occurred in spite of the introduction of supposedly “tutor-proof” testing in 2013. The rich still managed to pay private tutors to beat the 11-plus.

Areas that have retained selective education also have a bigger average wage gap between high and low earners. The highest earners from grammar school areas were found to be better off than top earners born in comparable comprehensive authorities¹.

Grammar schools may benefit the 20 to 25 per cent of pupils who attend, but education for the rest tends to suffer. And these losers come disproportionately from poor homes.

Meanwhile, despite the meritocratic mythology, the winners of the grammar system come overwhelmingly from the affluent middle classes.

A study² by the Sutton Trust found that just 3 per cent of those attending existing grammar schools were entitled to free school meals. Almost 13 per cent of entrants came from the independent sector, largely made up of fee-paying preparatory schools.

At 161 out of the UK’s 164 grammar schools, only 10 per cent of pupils were eligible for free school meals. Meanwhile, ninety-eight of these schools had fewer than 3 per cent and twenty-one had fewer than 1 per cent.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies³, deprived children are significantly less likely to get into a grammar school than the most privileged, even when they achieve the same grades aged eleven.

Thus the old myth about grammar schools lifting up bright members of the working class does not stand up to scrutiny.

Selection benefits the affluent but results in poorer academic performance for the rest. Educational performance for the poorest pupils in areas where selection persists is significantly worse than their equivalents in comprehensive areas.

Nor do global comparisons reflect favourably on grammar schools: nine of the ten best education systems in the world are comprehensive.

The deeper problem with selection

Grammar schools ultimately fail on their own terms. They may benefit the affluent middle classes, but there is no evidence — either from the past or in the present — to suggest that they help the poor.

Far from boosting social mobility as their champions claim, grammar schools are a 1950s throwback mired in empty romanticism.

In a different sense, grammar schools resemble the doctrine of meritocracy in microcosm. Even if grammars were able to achieve what their supporters claim — a high degree of social mobility for the poor — the ethical question engendered by their success would remain: does a just society anoint a handful of people based on the extremely narrow criteria of ‘IQ’?

When looked at this way, it is perhaps less surprising that so many proponents of a return to grammar schools are on the political right: the desire to return to educational selection is part of a conservative desire to justify economic inequalities on the basis of natural ability.

Unjust rewards are considered just if they occur as a result of merit.

The fly in the ointment, so to speak, is a familiar one: a scientific IQ test may seem egalitarian, but to paraphrase Marx, children sit the critical 11-plus examination “under circumstances given and transmitted from the past”.

The weight of vastly divergent home and educational experiences is invariably brought to bear on rich and poor children, producing contrasting human material at the age of eleven.

When grammar schools reached their zenith in the late 1950s, fewer than 0.3 per cent of pupils leaving grammar school with two A-levels had come from the unskilled working class⁴.

Richard Tawney pointed out this fundamental paradox, which is at the heart of the “equality of opportunity” rhetoric, way back in the 1930s.

“It is only the presence of a high degree of practical equality which can diffuse and generalise opportunities to rise,” Tawney wrote. “The existence of such opportunities … depends not only on an open road, but upon an equal start.”

The same paradox that has upset broader attempts to engender social mobility also applies to grammar schools and the 11-plus.

In 1961, Raymond Williams effectively summed up the problem of a selective school system thus:

Differences in learning ability obviously exist, but there is great danger in making these into separate and absolute categories. It is right that a child should be taught in a way appropriate to his learning ability, but because this itself depends on his whole development, including not only questions of personal character growth but also questions of his real social environment and the stimulation received from it, too early a division into intellectual grades in part creates the situation which it is offering to meet.

Unequal outcomes generate unequal opportunities. Educational selection at age eleven is thus liable to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And yet, renewed calls for selective education show that the grammar school myth still exerts a powerful hold on the British political imagination.

1. Machin & McNally (2015), Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.

2. Sutton Trust (2013), Grammar Schools and Social Mobility.

3. Cribb, Sibieta & Vignoles (2013).

4. Halsey, A.H., Heath, A.F. & Ridge, J.M. (1980).