It is interesting to compare Will Hutton's views with Keith's.
Brian McAndrews -------------------------------------------------------- Now is the time for some true class warfare Will Hutton Sunday November 25, 2001 The Observer Is there anything more noxious than the English school system? Every year, the league tables are published and every year there is the same bleak result. Those names we know so well - Westminster, Winchester, St Paul's - sit at the top. An odd state school is represented in the top 100, but the league tables tell us what we already know. To the well-off will be given; to the middle class smart enough to move to the right catchment area will also be given; but to be born poor is to stay poor. It's the long-standing scandal in English life. English private schools have always been one of the great production sites of the class system, but over the last 30 years they have solidified their control on education in a way we children of the Sixties thought was impossible. They have become manufacturers of examination success. Even the most egalitarian of university admissions officers accepts that their products are admitted by merit. I follow two league tables in particular - the FT top 1,000 schools, based on A-level results, published early in October, and the Government's league tables of GCSE results for England, published last week. When they were first published, the tables seemed such incontrovertible evidence of educational malfunction and inequity that I thought the new transparency would be an agent of change in itself. Instead, they have become keenly watched by every parent shopping around for their children's best interest and have thus become an instrument of solidifying the grip of the top 200 independent schools on the education system. The FT 's table is particularly illuminating. Occasionally, an exceptional school moves sharply up the rankings, but in the main what is remarkable is the stability of the placings. The independent schools are in a fierce battle to make sure they stay in the first division and don't move down the table; the penalty in lost applications, fee income and status is almost immediate. And to wage the battle they have a formidable array of advantages. They enjoy the best teachers, with as many as two- thirds educated in the top 20 British universities. They can raise their fees steadily. They can select their candidates. They have a growing endowment income from their benefactors. They have remarkable sporting and extra-curricular activities. And they recruit from a middle class obsessed by perceived educational and social advantage. But one of the more interesting aspects of the league tables this year was that they began to expose the irrationality of much middle-class decision-making. Although the private system on average is outperforming the state system, there are a growing number of individual state schools whose rate of improvement is not only outstripping that of their local private schools but beginning to place them in the same examination ballpark. A comprehensive such as Oxford's Cherwell, north London's Hasmonean or Haybridge in the West Midlands are all achieving better A-level results than many famous private schools with fees of �12,000 or more. What's more, given that they are non-selective, the average results achieved by middle-class students at these comprehensives - given the tendency of children from middle-class backgrounds to do relatively well - will be better even than the already high average. In other words, they will be doing as well as their peers in any private school in the top 50, despite those schools' advantages. If a child has special learning difficulties it is probably worth paying the fees, but otherwise much of the middle class is being suckered. In north Oxford, for example, the only reasons for a middle-class parent not to send their child to the Cherwell are snobbery, misplaced guilt and irrational fear. The Government's figures for GCSE results confirm the trend. City technology colleges, beacon schools, straight comprehensives and the new specialist schools are all beginning to turn in remarkable results - along with the state grammar schools which nearly always did - even though the overall average of pupils in the state system getting A* to C is a miserable 50 per cent. But compared to the 25 per cent average in the mid- 1980s even that is a great improvement. This should be a bridgehead for the state sector to relegitimise itself, but something more ominous is happening. The middle class is beginning to realise that much private education, especially in the second rank of private schools, is a con. House prices in the catchment areas of good state schools are soaring, so that part of the reason for their rate of improvement is less their leadership and teaching but more that their intake is parented by ambitious middle-class parents who can see a bargain and who like the feistier and less class-bound atmosphere that surrounds a good state school. Increasingly, educational advantage in Britain is following household incomes, either through school fees or sky-high mortgages. What to do? The conventional liberal Left answer has always been to abolish the private schools, but they are too valuable an educational asset for that - and choosing to pay for your child's education is a basic human right. It would be smarter to open them up. Rather like NHS consultants have always been allowed to work a proportion of their week on private practice as long as the majority of their work is public, private schools should continue as fee-paying institutions on the condition that the majority of their intake is non-fee paying. The old assisted places scheme could be reintroduced, expanded and democratised and private schools thus turned to public advantage as befits their charitable status. Above all, the bottom tier of state schools needs a massive infusion of resources. If Westminster charges �13,305 per pupil, Winchester �17,442 and St Paul's �11,085 to deliver the same results achieved by the stronger pupils in our best comprehensives, then that is a benchmark for the kind of resources needed by our poorly performing schools. We must pay teachers at them the high salaries needed to compensate them for some of the most arduous work in the UK. Gordon Brown will unveil his pre-budget report this week. Imagine the shock if he were to pledge to find the taxes to pay for such an educational system. What a chance it would offer the millions of children permanently at the margins of our system. And what a pleasure it would be to see a comprehensive at the top of the FT 's list of top schools.
