Book Review in The Tablet December 2022

Peter Hitchins (Bloomsbury Continuum, 224 PP, £20)

Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

In April 2002, I took up my post as the headteacher of a Catholic secondary modern school in a leafy English city. In the first 12 years of my career I had barely registered that grammar schools and secondary moderns still existed. Now I was in at the deep end, taking on a sinking secondary modern, while the single-sex grammar schools in the city sailed serenely forward.

I always felt that our school was missing a quarter of its pupils: the most able, at least by certain metrics of intelligence. The children who joined us having nearly made the cut for the grammar schools suffered an enduring sense of failure. The parents in the city who had the resources prepared their children for the entrance exam to the point of stress. Children from poor backgrounds rarely had a chance. I picked up A Revolution Betrayed no friend of grammar schools.

The revolution of the title is not the kind a Marxist would have in mind. It’s a “change at the top”, indeed, but it’s the replacement of the old privately educated class with an “intellectual elite” formed by the “rigour” (a favourite word of Hitchens, never really defined) of a grammar school education. Some of the research from the 1960s which Hitchens draws upon shows that working-class children who went through the grammar school system often ended up wishing “to preserve a hierarchical society and all its institutions”. Hitchens thinks this is no bad thing.

The failed revolution, Hitchens mourns was not designed to change much, but to put a new cadre of intellectuals in charge, a triumph of meritocracy, with no concern for any resulting inequality. His argument would have been greatly enriched if he had engaged with the work of Michael J. Sandel in The Tyranny of Merit. The focus for Sandel is precisely on those “left behind” when the talented have climbed the ladder, never to return. He cites the resentment of those abandoned by the meritorious elites as a key driver for the return of populism and its baleful consequences such as Trump and Brexit. Some of Hitchens’ arguments will rile many of those (like me) who work, or worked, in non-selective schools. He laments that the “dissolution” of the grammar schools (ridiculously compared to the dissolution of the monasteries) has condemned many able children to the “bad teaching and indiscipline” of comprehensive schools. In the crude binary of his argument, grammar schools were trans- formative havens of intellectual rigour, authority and tradition, while the subsequent comprehensive schools are a caricature of post-1960s liberal mayhem. He offers a Who’s Who of grammar school alumni, but not one of the many more who thrived in the comprehensive system.

The broad brushstrokes of social conservatism are jarring. Throughout, he refers to “the poor” and, with little concern for definition, valorises tradition, hierarchy, rigour, excellence. The grammar schools at their zenith were an “escape route” for the talented poor from a lifetime of drudgery and disappointment. Another casualty of the cultural vandalism of the egalitarians is the old canon of “expected and accepted knowledge”. Who chose the canon, or for what ends, is never explored.

Hitchens does, however, ask his own awkward questions which the political left and those in Catholic education would do well to consider. Those who are opposed to academic selection at 11 need to answer for being in favour of selection at 16 on entry to sixth form, and then at 18 for university. I have known many Catholic pupils rejected from their own schools at 16 because they did not have the academic qualifications for what was on offer,

which was often a narrow menu of A level courses. It’s far from impossible to provide other suitable courses and not just rely on the local FE college to cater for the “non- academic”. There are awkward questions too for the left, such as why did you destroy the merit-based grammar schools in the 1960s and leave the wealth-based private schools untouched? Or why did you send your child to the type of selective school you were actively campaigning against (Shirley Williams, Diane Abbott et al.)?

In the chapter entitled “A Chronology of Grammar School Education, Its Growth, Destruction and Ghostly Afterlife from 1868 to the Present Day”, Hitchens provides an accessible and helpful overview of educational history in the UK (mostly focused on England). He draws upon a number of studies showing that the non-selective system has its own ways of being selective. I well remember one open evening (in my second headship) when a prospective parent told me they had bought a house in our catchment area just to get their child into the school. I was thrilled at the time, but feel less so now. Hitchens quotes a Sutton Trust report showing a house price premium of about 20 per cent attached to living in the catchment area of a highly rated comprehensive.

Hitchins acknowledges that it is too late to make a serious case for a return to the hey- day of grammar schools, but that doesn’t stop him reflecting that the “power to give good schooling to the poor” justified their existence and would “justify their restoration”. In my lifetime in Catholic education, I can testify that good non-selective schooling is entirely possible with good leadership, good teachers and enough resources.

The secondary modern school I joined in 2002 was not sinking because it was a secondary modern school. It was in trouble because of previous weak leadership. It is thriving to this day thanks to a succession of good leaders inspired by a gospel vision of human flourishing. But I can’t help thinking how much bigger and better it would be if it weren’t for those grammar schools, the remnants of a failed revolution.