It seems the changes in schools implemented by the much maligned Michael Gove are working. Who says so? Prof Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment at the Uni of Buckingham. His evidence? Leading state schools have raised their game and narrowed the gap with the independent sector in terms of results in the new, tougher, GCSEs. Smith credits the changes initiated by Lord Baker, carried on by Tony Blair and built on by Michael Gove. His reason? Independent schools weren't obliged to go along with the Gove changes and the stats show the percentage of privately educated pupils attaining top grades stood still.
Many experts had feared that the harder courses, harder exams and additional top grade would further widen the gap between the independent and state sectors. But the best state schools upped their game and the number of them reaching the exceptional performance standard doubled. Still only a third of the total reaching that level of attainment mind, but bucking the trend of recent years.
That all seems fairly convincing. I'm personally not surprised as the howls from teachers representatives and the education lobby, not only because he referred to them as the 'blob', made me fairly certain Gove was on the right track.
Grammar schools still dominate the state school league tables, except in the north east as it doesn't have any. And the results in the north east were poor with only 15 state schools in the top 500, half its population share. Pupils in the north east have also scored worst on a scale devised by the Department for Education to measure the progress of all secondary students to GCSE. An obvious connection, especially when you factor in the fact that Wales, with no grammar schools, has the fewest schools in the top 500 whereas Northern Ireland, which does have grammar schools, has double Wales's top 500 tally with a smaller population.
That's not to say grammar schools are the only route to high performance but to me it seems self evident that the presence of a grammar school in an area will give a competitive stimulus to the best non-selective schools nearby. Standards will tend to be dragged up rather than leveled down. Smithers notes that there is a lot to be said for bringing bright pupils together as learning is a social activity. He was a working-class grammar school pupil himself and says his classmates showed him what was possible if you applied yourself. He suspects that, in a less challenging climate, he would have coasted. The concept of training elite athletes together is not controversial, so why is it in the case of academic learning?
However, Smithers notes there is a price to pay - the impact on those not selected. I don't find this a reason for not grouping bright children together, either through grammars or setting and streaming. After all, significant numbers of pupils who show promise at primary school fail to attain any A grade GCSEs. A quarter of them don't get any Bs. So there is a problem about developing children with potential which needs to be addressed by the state system anyway.
And this isn't just about developing the brightest. There is a long run trend for schools rated good and outstanding to cover an increasing proportion of pupils. Some dissenters claim this result is skewed because of population growth and infrequent Ofsted inspections. Schools rated outstanding were exempted from routine Ofsted inspections in 2011, but a sudden decline in results would prompt an inspection so I suspect we can ignore that quibble.
Checking my privileges, as I understand they say now, I was a grammar school pupil myself. But pretty much since I was, I have been a supporter of comprehensive schools with rigorous streaming in academic subjects. It seemed to me that large schools run that way could offer the best of everything: the widest range of subjects, sports and extra-curricular activities, the high intellectual challenge for the brightest and the social interaction of mixing all students together in general activities. But I have reluctantly concluded that the toxic combination of peer pressure, the disorientation of some children in large schools and the difficulty of managing large organisations of any kind mean that my long-held views are naively utopian. Most failures in organisations of any kind are essentially failures of management, but these problems are so ingrained that the larger schools in the more difficult areas must be a nightmare to manage. Just dealing with the day to day job takes all of the management's attention and longer term stuff like continuous improvement gets neglected. You see this elsewhere all the time: in care homes, hospitals and the railway, for example, anywhere where the daily challenge of just keeping the show on the road dominates the available management bandwidth.
So with some reluctance I have come round to the view that more grammar schools should be allowed, provided always that there is an adequate choice of schools for parents in any particular area. We need to be doing the best by all of our children and, for the benefit of the country and all of us in it, that includes development of the brightest children from whatever background, which was the traditional strength of the grammars. Encouraging independent schools to admit a token quotient of pupils from less privileged backgrounds isn't the answer. There aren't enough such schools to make a real difference and it wouldn't address the children from the middle ground.
Focussing on getting the highest proportion of pass grades matters but isn't the whole answer as it won't give us a competitive edge internationally.
We have a disproportionate number of the world's best universities. We have some excellent schools but not enough. We could do so much better. But maybe Gove has given us another push in the right direction after a number of years of treading water.
When Gove was moved from Education in 2014, because David Cameron wanted to reduce controversy in the run up to the general election, Cameron wisely instructed his successor, Nicky Morgan, to continue implementing Gove's reforms. This was critical, as it takes longer than the tenure of most Secretaries of State to make progress and the establishment is very good at playing the long game. After all it was actually Ken Clarke who implemented most of Baker's reforms. Clarke also had problems with resistance from the establishment, calling it "like wading through treacle". Even the Guardian marked Gove's departure by saying that, while he had been controversial and arguably the least popular education secretary in history, two of his reforms could end up being the most influential in 20 years time. The first was the phonics check for year 1 pupils. Phonics had theoretically been government policy as the most effective way to teach reading in the early years at school for a number of years, as it had been before the trendy 60s and 70s cultural revolution in education which did just about as much harm as Mao's version. But inertia and opposition meant it had never been properly implemented. The phonics method works. The second was opening up the national pupil database so that researchers could access information on aspects such as poverty, disadvantage and educational achievement. The impact on educational policy and identifying problems over a long period is likely to be profound. At the time the Guardian noted that the changes to A levels and GCSEs would take a number of years to work through the system. Now we know those reforms also seem to be working, make that at least three major successes for Gove's reforms.
On reflection it might well be that there is a correlation over my lifetime between the Tory politicians most hated by the left and the government ministers who have been most effective in making major changes which have been positive for the well being of the country. I give you Thatcher, Gove and Duncan Smith as examples. None of whom I was convinced about, to put it mildly, when they were setting about their most important reforms.
I might have gone to a grammar school but I wasn't bright enough to see that at the time.
* Michael Gove - a controversial but influential education secretary. The Guardian 15 July 2014 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jul/15/michael-gove-controversial-influential-education-secretary
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