Critical Mass: the research that supports the ideal of comprehensive education

The Guardian, September 1999

At its root, the idea of a comprehensive school rests on the possibility of using bright middle class children as an asset for the educational system, to be distributed like fertiliser to help the poorer children grow. But does it work?

The clearest evidence was captured by researchers at Edinburgh University in 1996. They studied comprehensives in Grampian and found: “The attainment of all pupils in a school is enhanced if the school has many pupils from advantaged backgrounds.” But in the same conclusion, they also pointed to the potential problem: “Conversely, the attainment of all pupils in a school is depressed if a school has few pupils from advantaged backgrounds.”

From the point of view of a middle-class parent, that one conclusion contains both the thrill and the threat of comprehensive schools, the prospect of their bright child either soaring and taking others with it or sinking beneath the weight of other children’s disadvantage. For education researchers, it raises a key question: at what point does the mixed composition of a school or a classroom move from being constructive to destructive? This question of the ‘compositional effect’ lies unarticulated beneath much of the political debate about the future of state schools: the rights and wrongs of selection, the future of grammar schools, the viability of comprehensives.

As the former head of an inner London comprehensive, Margaret Maden has seen this in practice. As the head of the Centre for Successful Schools at Keele, she has studied it. Her conclusion is clear: “If you have something around 20 to 25 percent in a class or in a school who are well motivated and come from homes where it’s instilled in them from very early on that education and learning matter and are fun and make a difference to your life, then that makes the progress with less well motivated children and families much, much easier.

“When you get a concentration of children – you can call them disturbed or disadvantaged – there is a critical mass of children who will wreck any school. I will defy any teacher to teach when you have got more than 30 percent of kids like that in the school…. Beyond a certain point children will not succeed educationally if they are concentrated in a school where the majority of children need to be persuaded that education matters.”

Her conclusions are supported not only by the Grampian research but also by a 30-month project for the Economic and Social Research Council, which examined the results of 94 different schools and which also confirmed the educational benefits of a balanced intake. Researchers in New Zealand two years ago came to the same conclusion. The positive advantage of a balanced intake is stressed by Howard Glennester, Professor of Social Policy at the LSE, who has concluded: “Pupils from ‘uncreamed’ comprehensives do better in examinations than those in selective areas.”

If this is right, then the case for selection or for retaining grammar schools is profoundly weakened, since the creaming off of the brightest 25% actively undermines the academic outcome for the remaining 75%. This selection breaks almost entirely along class lines: in May, the government released figures which showed that selective schools and grammar schools have almost no poor children, with less than 1% of their pupils being entitled to free meals.

And so, for the middle-class parent, the moral agony is increased: as a result of this ‘compositional effect’, their decision to avoid the failing state school in their area, becomes an active ingredient in that school’s failure. And yet, for as long as their middle-class neighbours continue to avoid the school, their lone child could struggle if the school’s intake remains unbalanced. The real problem is that the decision now has to be made amidst a national shortage of comprehensives, caused originally by middle class flight and now institutionalised by the reforms of the late 1980s in a system which tends overwhelmingly to produce the wrong mixture of children in our classrooms.

Additional research by Helene Mulholland