Teach a man how to fish

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you’ve fed him for a lifetime.” School is where society teaches its citizen’s how to fish, in the UK and England in particular the state provided sector hasn’t been doing too well in its stated aim. If the measure of success is in the proportion of state-educated citizens in the most prestigious and influential roles such as politics, law, media, culture and business.

The recent furore whether the government should reintroduce grammar schools is very interesting especially as a parent. For those who may be unaware as best as I can understand it the UK educational sector has two main classes of providers. The state provides education through faith schools, academy schools, free schools, local authority controlled comprehensive schools and a few grammar schools. The private sector is the other main provider via what are confusingly called public or independent schools which are fee-paying.

In terms of numbers, there are roughly half a million private-sector educated pupils versus 8.56 million educated by the state. In my time in the UK, thirteen years and counting on and off, I have observed that the upward rise on society’s greasy pole after A-levels usually includes passage through the Russell Group universities. The Russell Group of universities are the best teaching and research universities in the UK. Even within the Russell Group there is another hierarchy atop which sit Oxford and Cambridge. Graduation from a Russell Group university lowers the barriers to entry to the top of the main professions in society.

The financial crash of 2008 has caused British/ UK society to pause and look at itself in the mirror, and the picture is not rosy. An increasingly unequal society where your chances in life are more directly related to the status of your parents and where those at the bottom see their chances of rising to the level their ability will allow by student fees and unpaid internships for entry into the more prestigious and influential professions. Social mobility is a two-way street and those at the top are prevented from falling down by low taxes on capital, which allow the benefits of inherited wealth to continue compounding, and well know humans are not good at acknowledging the power of compound interest.

For society to function well it needs those two well-worn metaphors, the carrot and the stick. The carrot that regardless of your starting point in life anyone can make it to the top on the strength of their ability and the stick that if you don’t play by the rules there will be a swift levelling action administered by the legal system. If that doesn’t happen or is seen to happen the ties that bind a nation together begin to weaken and fray.

The new Conservative government of Theresa May has talked the talk in addressing the lack of social mobility in the UK and one of the first policies that has been floated has been the re-introduction of Grammar schools. Grammar schools are academically selective schools that take the best applicants at the age of eleven or mostly in Year 6 of primary education. Given that the children who are likely to excel at exams at such a young age are a self-selecting group of the academically engaged, those with interested (pushy?) parents and those who are genuinely academically talented, the results for entry into the elite universities and Oxbridge are impressive.

Funnily enough the biggest pushback to the proposed policy has been from commentators at the liberal end of the spectrum who cite research that Grammars neither raise standards across the state sector nor do they help poorer students. The research, from what I have seen, is based on the current system where there are a less than 170 Grammar schools which are concentrated in a few counties in the whole of England.

That does not seem a fair comparison, everyone knows where the grammar schools are and parents trying to give their children the best chance in life have done everything in their power to ensure their offspring get in, tutoring, buying houses in good school-catchment areas and discovering a long lost faith in Christianity to get their children in faith based schools or Grammars. The private sector despite having a majority of independent schools classified charges very uncharitable fees which the majority of parents cannot afford. The effect is that the areas with good state schools are self-selecting for parents who are unable to afford private sector school fees but can either afford to buy a house within a good school catchment area or meet the mortgage payments required, either way poorer students are not getting a look in. In 2012 and 2015, the counties/boroughs with the best state schools included Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham, Richmond on Thames and Westminster. Hardly areas that are scenes of social deprivation, which shows that the current system is a selection by ability to afford housing in good areas.

I don’t see any harm in government trying to improve social mobility, the system as it currently is fails those unable to afford expensive housing. The current comprehensive education system has the sheen of fairness while those who can afford to, game the system. An academically selective option in education is at least honest about how it goes about selecting the future leaders of tomorrow. Currently the doors of opportunity are slowly closing to those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder and no amount of virtue signalling from commentators will help those at the bottom have a better shot at occupying the same lofty positions that commentators have.