Once upon a time, in the late 1960s, well-meaning politicians accepted the
most progressive idea in the history of British education. They decided to
establish a national network of new schools which would deal equally with
all children, providing a free secondary education for all students of all
backgrounds, without favour of class or ability. They called these new
schools ‘comprehensive’.
It was an idea with a powerful anger behind it, a disgust at the old
two-tiered system in which children were segregated at the age of eleven:
those who were most in need of education were tipped into second-class
schools with sparse resources and no sixth forms, while those who naturally
were most able were given more resources and their own A-level classes. The
second-tier schools were stigmatised, together with their pupils. The fact
that middle-class children tended to prosper in this system while the poor
failed, rubbed political salt in the social wound.
Ever since then, this brave new idea has been swarming with controversy. It
has been accused of penalising the brightest children, of fostering a
culture of non-achievement, of allowing egalitarian dogma to smother
educational opportunity. It has been blamed for the low levels of literacy
and numeracy which have left Britain struggling in international league
tables. For a mass of families, the most trying moral and parental question
before them remains whether or not to entrust their children to this
once-favoured system. The government remains beset by hostile questions
about its current performance and its future prospects.
And yet, this long and fevered debate has begged its most important
question. The underlying issue is not whether comprehensive schools are good
or bad but whether they even exist. There is almost no voice in Britain now
to claim that our state system is adequate. But is it a system of
comprehensives, or is this a system whose weaknesses have a very different
origin? Consider the case of Sheffield, political home of the current
education secretary, David Blunkett.
More than any other British city, Sheffield wears its social divisions on
its sleeve. Roughly speaking, the working class – with or without work -
live in the old housing estates and crumbling red-brick terraces of the
North East; while the affluent middle class live in the green and pleasant
suburbs of the South West, known in the city as the White Highlands. Such a
clear separation means the social tensions behind the classroom scenes are
peculiarly easy to see. The city also has relatively few private schools,
and so the education game is played almost entirely within the state sector.
This is the tale of two comprehensives. The first is Abbeydale Grange, whose
struggle to deal with an intake of poor children who come mostly from the
centre and North East of the city was described in yesterday’s paper. It is
a classic example of a struggling inner-city school, the kind that is often
held up as the clearest evidence of the failure of the comprehensive ideal.
The second is Silverdale, the jewel in the city’s educational crown, a
school whose consistently high academic achievements have made it one of the
most praised in the whole country. It is the kind of success story which is
often used as a stick to beat those who lag behind it in the league tables.
Now go back thirty years, to the dawn of the comprehensive system in
Sheffield. The first thing you see is that the picture is flipped on its
head. The top school in the city is not Silverdale but Abbeydale Grange,
newly created out of three old grammar schools, two for girls and one for
boys. It is a model of old-fashioned order and high-octane academic
achievement, with enviable results in O levels and A levels. And Silverdale,
well, Silverdale is struggling, because although it now enjoys the title of
‘comprehensive’ and is acquiring a new sixth form, its reputation is rooted
in its history – as a charmless secondary modern, better perhaps than many
other secondary moderns, but nonetheless a school for cast-offs.
The second thing you see – the really important thing – is the beginning of
a curiously English story. It features a little snobbery, a dash of racism
(generally unacknowledged) and a great deal of class politics. It begins
here, with the two schools setting out on their journey towards equality, it
unfolds over the next 30 years and it ends with a nasty twist in its tale.
In the beginning, of course, neither school was comprehensive in anything
but name and for several years, there was very little change. Each school
continued in the inertia of its old reputation: Abbeydale Grange was still a
posh school, attracting the children of the middle class; Silverdale was
still for those local middle class children who were less likely to prosper
academically. But by the early 1980s, something new was happening. The
intake of each school was beginning to fray at the edges.
Abbeydale Grange’s new catchment area cut a slice out of some of the most
deprived streets in Sheffield. The school was no longer protected by the
high fence of the Eleven Plus exam, and the city council had been
encouraging ‘ordinary people’ to enrol. The children of poor families began
to turn up in the playground. Some of them were black. A few of the white
middle-class parents made it plain that they did not like this and left. By
the early 1980s, the school’s numbers had fallen from 2,300 to less than
2,000. However, most were insulated from these new arrivals by the school’s
system of setting, which meant that only the brightest of the new arrivals
entered the classrooms of the white middle-class.
The city council, however, were concerned to help the children of their
constituents who complained that they were being pushed into the bottom sets
and streams of the old ‘posh’ schools. They started to push for the adoption
of mixed-ability teaching: the poor and the rich, the slow and the bright
would be taught together. A lot of teachers objected. They were over-ruled.
More white middle class families pulled out. The numbers at Abbeydale Grange
declined a little more.
In the background, the child population nationally had been falling, but
Labour councils like Sheffield (led by one D Blunkett under the slogan
Socialism In One City) had made a pact with the teacher unions whose
influence had grown as the old industrial unions had collapsed: there were
to be no teacher redundancies. The result was that schools were bloated with
spare capacity, and, although the city did its best to arrange balanced
intakes of students, parents from a school like Abbeydale Grange found it
easy to transfer their children to a ‘quieter’ school, in an affluent white
suburb, a school live Silverdale.
Freed from its second-class status by the removal of the Eleven Plus,
bolstered by its new sixth form, Silverdale had slowly become the natural
home for more of the children in its middle class neighbourhood. With its
new intake of well-motivated and well-supported children scoring strongly in
O levels and A levels, its reputation began to climb. It filled its spare
places. Abbeydale, however, with its classrooms beginning to admit the
children of the poor, who were tethered by disadvantage, saw its reputation
fade. The retreat of the white middle class picked up pace until, by 1985,
there were only 1,500 children on the roll.
At this stage, 15 years into their new identity, two points were clear.
First, neither school had yet developed a comprehensive intake. Second, the
changing fortunes of the two schools had nothing to do with their
educational performance. This was still a time when government and local
education authorities funded schools and left it for them to decide how to
behave. Unpestered and unsupervised, each school had continued to teach much
as it always had. At Abbeydale Grange, the same headteacher, WJ Grenville
Massey, had run the school in the same orthodox fashion for the first 13
years of its comprehensive life. And yet one had started to decline while
the other had started to thrive – simply because the middle class had
started shifting their support from one to the other.
Thus far, however, the change had been slow, an almost unconscious social
shift. Now, in the late 1980s, this steady smouldering burst into flames, as
the Tories in the Department of Education intervened.
First, Sir Keith Joseph played a hand. In search of savings, Sheffield City
Council had decided to close all the sixth forms in the city and to create
in their stead tertiary colleges. Sir Keith, however, was lobbied by parents
from the White Highlands and he ruled that, while schools in the rest of the
city might lose their sixth-forms, those in the South West – which happened
to elect the only Tory MP in the city – should keep theirs. It was a moment
of complete reversal. Silverdale, which as a secondary modern had had no
sixth form, now kept its A level students: they were role models for the
younger students, they supported better science labs and language labs, they
brought prestige to the school. Abbeydale Grange, once the plump and
well-fed grammar school, lost its sixth-form and was now officially and
visibly a second-rank school.
Then Kenneth Baker took over as education secretary. In a volley of changes,
led by the 1988 Education Reform Act, he created a market in state
schooling. The education authorities lost the power to assign children to
schools; parents alone would choose. The schools would test their children,
the results would be published in league tables, which would have a powerful
influence on this parental choice. The schools which attracted the most
children would be rewarded with extra funds: the vast bulk of the budget of
each school would now be decided simply by the number of students on its
roll. A flood of change swept through Sheffield.
By this time, South Yorkshire’s steel and coal industries had been torn to
ribbons by Thatcherism. Unemployment climbed. The property market collapsed.
Asian immigrants moved in to the disintegating inner city and the North East
of Sheffield, and sent their children to the local schools. There was a
surge of anxiety about falling academic standards and a new wave of
old-fashioned racial hostility. Abbeydale Grange suddenly found itself the
scene of a full-blooded white flight. Now there was nothing slow or
unconscious about it: by the early 1990s, the school which had once boasted
2,300 pupils had been abandoned by almost all of the white middle class and
was left with fewer than 500 pupils. In the White Highlands, Silverdale was
booming.
In theory it was open to the children of the poor families in the North East
to make the same move. This had never been easy. Children from the North
East who were bright enough for the posh grammar schools in the South West
had always felt trapped behind a social barrier. But now, the freedom of
choice which the government offered in one hand, was taken away with the
other. The Department of Education ordered cuts. Across the country, local
education authorities were instructed to improve the productivity of their
schools by slashing their spare capacity. Sheffield lost more than 30
primary and secondary schools. The spare places vanished and were replaced
by rules – adopted by almost every LEA – which stipulated that if too many
children applied for one school, places would be open to those who lived
closest to the school and to those who had siblings there.
Middle class parents fled from Abbeydale Grange and bought their way in to
Silverdale’s catchment area. No poor family from the North East could afford
to make the move. Children in the North East were left to make do with their
struggling local schools. All parents could choose, but some could choose
more than others.
Now, the two schools were almost completely polarised in their intake. Dr
Phil Budgell, former chief inspector of schools in the city, analysed census
data for indicators of poverty and wealth and translated it to the city’s
schools. His figures revealed that poor children at Abbeydale Grange
outnumbered the affluent by more than three to one. Affluent children at
Silverdale outnumber the poor by the same factor. Today, Abbeydale Grange
has one of the most disadvantaged intakes in the city: 53% of its pupils
claim free school meals, the most commonly used measure of poverty in
schools. At Silverdale, in the White Highlands, only seven per cent take
free meals – less than half the national average. Forty five per cent of
Abbeydale’s pupils have special educational needs, compared to fewer than 2%
of Silverdale’s.
Neither school now is comprehensive in anything but name. Neither school now
is any more comprehensive than it was 30 years ago. In those days, the
children were selected by examiners. Now, they are selected by estate
agents.
This same tide swept through all the state schools in the city. By the time
the 1988 Act had completed what the middle class had spontaneously started,
Dr Budgell’s survey suggested that only five of the 27 secondary schools in
the city could claim to have developed a comprehensive intake, with a
comparable number of children from both affluent and poor homes. The intake
of the other 22 was clearly imbalanced in one direction or the other, often
even more so than that of Abbeydale Grange or Silverdale. Some of the
schools in the North East were swamped by poverty: Fir Vale school, for
example, had some 55% of its pupils from poor homes and only 11% from
affluent; Waltheof had 50% poor and only 11% affluent.
And, give or take a little local detail, the same story has been told around
the country. Northern Ireland has never tried to go comprehensive; Scotland
has done so with some success, but in England and Wales, only a minority of
schools has succeeded in becoming comprehensive: sometimes they are in small
towns where there is only one state secondary and not enough social problems
to frighten the middle class into private schools; sometimes they have grown
through the cracks in big cities, usually by virtue of geographical
accident combined with a deliberate policy from the headteacher. But the
main story is the same, over and over again.
There are cities which have more private schools than Sheffield and where it
is the private sector rather than the suburban state schools which have
skimmed off the bright middle class children. There are cities where the
social geography is not as clear as Sheffield’s and where mixed areas – like
Wandsworth in south London – have introduced ‘aptitude tests’ to finish the
job which the local estate agents alone cannot do. The end result is the
same. After thirty years of struggle and strife, there is a national
shortage of comprehensive schools.
And this matters: not simply because the political will of the government
thirty years ago has been frustrated; nor even because those schools which
are not comprehensive are nevertheless judged as though they were. It
matters most of all because this divisive intake directly jeopardises the
educational performance of the schools and the children within them.
The evidence is overwhelming that the single most important factor in a
school’s performance is its intake: bright children who perform well can
lift the performance of others around them. If the bright middle-class
children are being siphoned off into private schools and a minority of state
schools like Silverdale, then children in the rest of the system will fail
to achieve comparable standards. Not because the system is comprehensive.
The reverse is true. The system fails because it is segregated, because it
leaves the struggling children to struggle alone. Look again at the pattern
of exam failure, analysed in detail in yesterday’s paper.
In Sheffield, just as the intakes are socially polarised, so the results of
the schools are academically divided: the ones with an affluent intake score
the high marks in exams; the ones with the disadvantaged intakes struggle.
Dr Budgell found that, with small variations, he could take the table which
ranked the poverty of the intake of Sheffield’s schools, turn it upside down
and find himself looking at the table which ranked academic success. At
Abbeydale Grange last year, 22% of the children managed to score at least
five A to C grades at GCSE. At Silverdale, 76% did so.
The headteachers at both schools are full of praise for their staff and also
pride in their results, but neither of them makes false claims. Abbeydale’s
results are lifted by a small group of very bright children. The
headteacher, Jan Woodhead, said: “We are very lucky in the sense that we
have still got the support of a number of middle class families, and we keep
them because we do a good job for their children.” The headteacher of
Silverdale, Helen Storey, is similarly realistic “I wouldn’t say we are
doing something wonderful here that they are not doing at Abbeydale. We do
many things in common with other schools to raise attainment. I wouldn’t
think we are radically different to any other school in that. You are quite
likely to be able to achieve more if you have 10% difficult children than if
you have 40% difficult children.”
Here is the truth which almost every teacher knows and almost every
politician denies: a school system which becomes as socially polarised as
Britain’s, is guaranteed to generate failure.
And it gets worse. Like the killer that has not been caught, the market
which was established in 1988 is still out there, stalking the schools. The
early damage was done by the combination of cuts and ‘parental choice’,
polarising school catchment areas by house price. But the market has other
means of attack and now, with each year that goes by, the polarisation
becomes worse and worse. The key to this is that when the children move,
they take the money with them. The successful school becomes richer; the
struggling school becomes poorer. This is more cunning than you might think.
It works like this. In round numbers, under the funding formula set up by
Kenneth Baker, a local education authority will now pay a school, say,
£2,000 a year for each child which is enrolled there. Every year, schools
compete with each other to attract new eleven-year-olds to start in Year
Seven in September. They look for them in blocks of thirty, the maximum
which most secondary schools are happy to see in one classroom. The
successful school, with its exam results published and acclaimed, can
recruit an extra 30 children and put an extra £60,000 into the bank. But it
does not cost an extra £60,000 to teach the 30 children. Providing it has
the classroom space, the school’s overheads remain the same. All the school
has to do is to hire an extra teacher, who might cost about £25,000, pay a
little more for heat and books, a total outlay of no more than £30,000.
The result is that the successful school not only expands and funds its
expansion but pockets a profit of some £30,000 which it can use to buy more
books or computers or spare time for its teachers, all of which may help it
to improve its performance, thus generating still better results and more
children for the following year. On the other end of the seesaw, the
struggling school is pushed further and further down: it loses 30
prospective students and loses £60,000 out of its budget; it can save some
money by making a teacher redundant but still it has to find some £30,000 of
cuts to balance the budget, thus reducing its chances of lifting its exam
results. And every year, the results are published in all their misleading
glory, ensuring that the reputations of the schools become a little more
polarised so that their fortunes can become a little more divided.
When Jan Woodhead took over as headteacher at Abbeydale Grange in 1994,
white flight had left the school insolvent. It was surviving on an
accounting muddle: with earlier cuts, they had closed a building, but they
were still being paid to heat, light, clean and maintain it. “The school was
dying,” she says. To make matters worse, John Major’s government was still
squeezing education budgets, and the more successful schools in Sheffield
were trying to protect themselves by recruiting extra children and they
targetted Abbeydale’s possible intake. The school needed at least 120 new
children to survive but, in September 1995, the market delivered only 73.
The next year, the market delivered Abbeydale only 56. It was the bright
children from the aspirational families who were making it through the
appeals process to reach other the White Highlands. The struggling school
was losing the best of its intake, and it was broke.
By 1997, Abbeydale Grange was a quarter of a million pounds in debt. The
LEA, recognising that if the school closed, it would still have to support
these children, came to its rescue with £180,000. The school cut the
remaining £70,000 out of its budget, slashing its management and stretching
its teaching staff so severely that within months they had to reverse the
cuts in order to keep the school running. Last year, the LEA simply licenced
the school to run at a loss. The system does not deliver. Jan Woodhead said:
“The funding formula is based on the concept that you have your basic kid
who costs a basic amount of money. Here, that concept has been tested to
destruction.”
The struggle goes on. By 1998, Jan Woodhead had re-marketed Abbeydale
Grange, turning its loss of pupils to its advantage – “the small school that
makes a big difference” – and celebrating its success at assimiliating
different cultures. The shortage of places in the rest of the city meant
that numerous parents who applied for other schools were given places at
Abbeydale. In early summer, the school looked relatively safe, with 154 new
children on its list. But, across the city, Silverdale was trying to cope
with its own funding crisis by increasing its Year Seven intake from 150 to
180. Twenty nine families had appealed against their Abbeydale places,
asking to go to Silverdale. In search of funds, Silverdale decided not to
contest any of the appeals. By the beginning of September, Abbeydale had
lost all 29 children to its more successful competitor. To make the injury
worse, Abbeydale was already committed to hiring enough teachers for 150
children. More money lost.
This year, Silverdale publicly announced that it would not repeat the
robbery and agreed to recruit only 150 new students. Nevertheless, the
system did the damage. The LEA allowed 162 students to claim places at
Silverdale, assuming that some of them would drop out before September. They
had underestimated the extent of the polarisation: parents were not just
opting for Silverdale, they were investing all their hopes in it. Not one of
them dropped out. Then twenty three others who had been denied places,
appealed and four of them lived close enough to Silverdale to win. So they
had 166 new students – too many for five classrooms, not enough for six. The
LEA agreed that if Silverdale still had 166 children on its list in
September, they would pay for an extra classroom to house them. And if that
happened, there would be spare capacity for 14 more children – so more of
the appeals which had been lost would be reversed. And so it is that this
month (Sept) Silverdale has once more emerged from the muddle of the market,
with 180 new pupils while, on the other end of the piece of string,
Abbeydale Grange once more has lost its new recruits.
At Silverdale, headteacher Helen Storey offers no defence for the system: “I
phoned Jan Woodhead at Abbeydale. She’s spitting feathers – ‘all these kids
are going to come from me’. I’m not happy with it either. It’s not managing
the situation effectively. This awful polarisation is really very
unhelpful.”
The market has one more weapon with which to bludgeon the weak and wounded -
academic cleansing. Some headteachers are so anxious for their schools to do
well in the league tables that they get rid of students who are likely to
perform badly in exams. They can do this by illegally denying the difficult
child a place: all they have to do is to claim that they are full, and
nobody checks. Or, if the child is already inside their classrooms, they can
do this by formally excluding them, but that makes the school look bad. And
so secretly, they cleanse them: they call in the student’s parents, warn
them their child is about to be excluded and let them remove the child
voluntarily. This not only rids the school of the difficult pupil without
registering an exclusion, it also allows the cleansing school to keep the
income from that child until their pupil numbers are next officially
counted. “It is illegal and immoral,” according to one headteacher, “but it
is also quite widespread.”
On the other end of the cleansing, is a struggling school, which has
vacancies and cannot refuse to take a child who wants a place. In this way,
Abbeydale Grange, already struggling with a high proportion of difficult
children, last year received 60 more students, most of them with a track
record of disorder and disruption, many of whom arrived without bringing a
single penny of funding with them. In the black market in unwanted children,
a struggling school is a big buyer.
All state schools complain they are short of money. In Sheffield, even
Silverdale, with its booming intake, is running on a deficit of £170,000 a
year. If they balanced their budget, they say, they would have to close
their sixth form or slash the curriculum. It has no spare staff, it is
desperately short of facilities. It houses drama in a temporary classroom
which is rotting so badly that they can use it only occasionally. Helen
Storey said: “The system is so underfunded that everybody has some
inequality to deal with.”
But the schools with disadvantaged children are in an even worse state.
Apart from losing cash as their results fall, they are dealing with a
disproportionate number of children with special educational needs. In
theory, they bring with them not just the standard funding but also some
extra money. In practice, the Department for Education distributes funds for
Additional Educational Needs according to a formula which notoriously
undershoots its target. Schools are also given grants for a few children
whose needs are so great that they are ’statemented’ for help from a group
of agencies. This money can pay for a support assistant to work directly
with the child. The trouble is that schools have started to apply for so
many children to be statemented that LEAs like Sheffield have imposed a
ceiling on the amount of money which they will pay out, regardless of the
need which they schools say they have to meet. Jan Woodhead said: “The money
you get for a child with special educational needs is never enough to fund
the provision you have to make.”
At Abbeydale, the roof leaks, the drama department has no lights, the
cricket team has no pitch, the model pyramids in the maths room are made of
rolled-up newspaper, ancient fire damage still scars the wall of the science
room, last term’s trip to Alton Towers was cancelled because there were no
staff to take it, the boiler is broken, the driveway is crumbling, and, most
important, there is a constant, nagging shortage of cash for staff. The
headteacher is working an 84-hour week to hold it together. “Our finances
are surreal, “said Jan Woodhead. “We’re just not solvent.”
The point of all this is not just that schools need a fairer system of
league tables. The problem is much deeper than that. A ‘value-added’ league
table would only shuffle the order of the schools in the table, exposing
different schools to the real problem of the system, which is that it
attacks the schools who most need help. Very efficiently, the current system
identifies those schools which are struggling. It then robs those schools of
their brightest pupils and thus of their funds, guaranteeing that their
struggle becomes more desperate. The fact that these schools almost without
exception are struggling in the first place because they are sited in poor
areas with an intake of disadvantaged children means that these extra
burdens are placed almost unfailingly on the schools that serve the poor.
The converse is also true: those that serve affluent neighbourhoods prosper.
And so the school system divides along class lines. It is the very existence
of a market which is the problem.
It is all a very long way from the 30–year-old dream of a network of
comprehensive schools. In their place, we have developed a two-tiered system
in which the children who are most in need of education are tipped into
second-class schools with sparse resources and no sixth forms, while those
who are naturally most able are given more resources and their own A-level
classes. The second-tier schools are stigmatised, together with their
pupils. The fact that middle-class children tend to prosper in this system
while the poor fail, rubs political salt in the social wound.
“It is not standing still. It is getting worse and worse. It is becoming
more and more polarised. There is a horrendous backlash going to happen, and
yet there is almost a wilful blindness to it.” Jan Woodhead, headteacher at
Abbeydale Grange, said that.
“The blunt truth is that Britain is still, after all these years, a place
where class counts, where the best do not always come through and whose
institutions reinforce a sense of us as a country living in our past, not
learning from it.” Tony Blair said that.
The comprehensives were attacked at birth by the subtle power of British
class and then quietly smothered by the education reforms of the 1980s.
Which raises one more question. Was that deliberate? Did the Tories set out
to kill the comprehensives without ever admitting what they were doing? Or
was it all an accident? The man who knows is Kenneth Baker, now Lord Baker.
Tomorrow, he lifts the lid on the politics of education reform.
Additional research by Helene Mulholland
