Friends of Grammar Schools

“The golden age for social mobility was the era of the grammar schools: before their abolition, more students from state school entered Oxford and Cambridge than from private schools.”

654 words        Publication date: 21 July 2009

Source: The Evening Standard  Page: 14

(c) 2009 Associated Newspapers. All rights reserved

THE report by the former health secretary, Alan Milburn, into social mobility which is published today contains a bold bid for mass appeal: its claim that the middle classes are being excluded from the professions. The report also recommends that the state should be a surrogate pushy parent, by raising the aspirations of children whose families would not normally entertain ambitions for them to be doctors and lawyers.

It is true that 45 per cent of senior civil servants and 75 per cent of judges are privately educated. And the report is right to point out that informal admissions procedures in the professions, like internships and work placements, can be a back-door means for the children of well-off individuals with contacts to secure sought-after jobs.

Unfortunately, Mr Milburn’s prescriptions for reform focus, to a dispiriting degree, on the institutions that are gatekeepers to the professions: chiefly the universities, which are advised to take the social backgrounds of candidates into account. The professions themselves are advised to be more transparent about their make-up in terms of social background and race.

But the overwhelming reason why people from less well-off backgrounds fail to enter the professions is that their education falls short of the standards of private schools, or indeed of the best state schools. The golden age for social mobility was the era of the grammar schools: before their abolition, more students from state school entered Oxford and Cambridge than from private schools. The proportion of senior professionals from ordinary backgrounds would be still smaller if former grammar-school pupils were excluded. A government that really did value social mobility would consider some means of reinstating this ladder to enable bright children to make an escape from a low-aspiration environment.

But no major party favours selective education so state schools must be obliged to raise their game. Mr Milburn, like the Tories, favours the expansion of city academies. Beyond that, why are so many state-school pupils directed towards soft subjects, leaving foreign languages, single science subjects and classics to independent schools? The truth is, raising academic standards is still the most useful thing the state can do to diminish the class divide.

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