Abstract
Not for nearly fifty years has the school system in England been so fractured and unequal or the vaunting enemies of comprehensive and equitable schools for all English children been so rampant and self-confident as those so powerfully placed in government through the Con-Dem coalition.
This grim schoolscape can very soon be gauged from a reading of Melissa Benn’s lucid, strongly committed, but very worrisome book, simply, but truthfully, called School Wars. Benn is the daughter of a remarkable, brave and brilliant mother, Caroline, who, notwithstanding that she was American by both birth and education, spent her life in England explaining, championing and defending, as well as analysing, comprehensive schools, also ensuring that, unlike many a New Labour demagogue, her own children received their full benefits. But Melissa has her own very singular and eloquent way of describing, in her concluding chapter, what she wants for all British children: ‘A service based on neighbourhood schools – housed in well-designed, well-equipped, aesthetically pleasing and properly maintained buildings, enjoying plenty of outdoor space – with balanced intakes and a broad, rich curriculum that will allow each child, whatever their talents, temperament or interests, to flourish.’
It is a precious vision and one in which millions of English people believe, and which belongs to all working-class families from all communities. Yet, it is being overdriven and destroyed by government-sponsored deformities, from privately controlled, yet state-financed ‘academies’, to ‘free schools’ run by businesses and religious organisations. In her particularly cogent chapters, ‘The politics of selection’ and ‘Going private’, Benn shows how this so-called ‘new schools revolution’, as backward as it actually is (and started by Blair’s New Labour administration), is ‘a canny political con-trick: the swift but steady transfer of resources from the needy to the better-off, in the name of the disadvantaged’. She shows how the present schooling construct is a multi-tiered system ‘offering a vast and confusing array of official school types’, from secondary moderns in those thirty-six out of 152 local education authorities that have still, after all these decades, retained the 11-plus examination and brutally divide children into academic minority and non-academic majority at the age of 11, to the elite, fee-receiving public schools (where most of the Con-Dem ministers were educated), which continue to assert a virtually unassailable right to transfer their students directly and unquestioningly to Oxford or Cambridge. The hopes and real progress achieved by the education reformers of Caroline’s generation are at dire risk of being scuppered by the policies and practices of all three British ‘mainstream’ parties to compound the mountain of inequality that is the present condition of our school system.
What Benn does most successfully in her book is to delineate not only the structures and types of schools that, within a monstrously competitive, examination-orientated and highly individualistic educational culture, are fast emerging from the Blair and Con-Dem universe, but how the very function of the school as a preparation for a co-operatively and humanely grounded life in England is being systematically eroded. She does this by not only setting down the ideas, models and plans of the new educational hierarchs and profiteers, but by comparing them to the comprehensive practices and principles developed in earlier decades, which she knows so well and breathes so freshly through her writing.
She also reveals invaluable insights into the new networks of educational interests upon which the developing models of schooling depend and profit. These are more and more enterprisingly entrenched in the rapidly expanding education market that Benn describes, where companies such as Amey are taking full advantage of all the opportunities offered by what she terms ‘state subsidised privatisation’. She illustrates how Amey covers a wide area of economic ground in both the private and public sectors, with more than 11,000 staff working in 200-plus locations, including aviation, defence, local government and railways as well as school services from the provision of school meals, caretaking, construction, school security and maintenance to the selling of resources for special educational needs and ‘school improvement’. What the company’s website prefers not to advertise is an extravagant and very unsuccessful foray into the sponsoring and managing of ‘academies’, with £25 million of state financing going to the Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough, which was eventually found to have, according to the government’s own OFSTED inspectors, English and Science results ‘among the lowest in England’.
Benn’s crucially timely account is full of insight about how privatisation and examination-led schools maintain and lead to further systemic social division, selection, exclusion and the dangerous narrowing and deforming of the curriculum. Yet her book is not an analysis born of, or leading to, despair or inaction. Her writing is redolent with a humane faith in a non-selective system and a belief that ‘public services should remain within the remit of a dynamic democratic state, at every level’. And democratic, locally accountable schools are at the crux of such a state, ‘binding different communities together’. The alternative is repellent - schools and ‘academies’ that are, ‘at their worst, dividing us permanently from each other’. It is this latter function that the present British government’s schools’ policy is pursuing; preserving and extending elitism, while implanting within the consciousness of young people not a love for learning as a necessary foundation for lives of social love and betterment, but more a tool for implementing the nefarious Thatcherite slogan of one particular Sheffield headteacher, who proclaimed during his daily school assemblies: ‘The more you learn, the more you earn.’ The educational philosophy leading to the new mould of British schools has to be stopped in its tracks for the sake of all our children and the rich diversity of their communities.