Knutsford is an ancient and comfortable market town, twenty miles south of Manchester. Its name comes from ‘Canute’s (or Knut’s) Ford’ – water clearly had a compulsive attraction for the good king. The town was billeted by Prince Rupert’s marauding army during the Civil War, and was the ‘Cranford’ of Mrs Gaskell’s novel – the town centre, with its surviving cobbles and arches, and the heath facing the Georgian Gaskell home would still be recognizable to her mid-nineteenth-century neighbours. Its two narrow main streets – Princess and King, known locally as ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ and studded with classy clothes boutiques – indicate the affluence of many of its modern residents. A few miles away Jodrell Bank telescope tilts towards the heavens, and the town and surrounding villages provide, in country houses, up-market corporate headquarters for several national companies. Other professional and business people commute to Manchester.
But to the east – past a green shed on which a freshly painted sign intriguingly offers ‘clog-mending’ – a Manchester overspill estate called Longridge borders the tamed Cheshire countryside. Its residents have been plucked from the dingier Manchester slums, and at night many congregate somewhat morosely at the Falcon Bearer pub, the estate’s sole amenity. When news reached one drinker that his wife had been rushed eight miles to hospital after a fire at their home, he stoically held his ground at the bar – there was still half an hour’s drinking time, and why waste good beer money on a taxi? – reasoned this transplanted Andy Capp. While I was there, a senior policeman announced that, after a local crime, they always searched first for culprits in Longridge, which may have been good policing practice, but was shocking PR. The estate was up in arms.
There is little to bind these disparate communities together. The overspill residents find the town’s bijou charms alien and expensive; while prosperous Knutsfordians seldom head their Volvos or Porsches beyond the executive estates in which the town nestles, unless perhaps to drive a cleaning lady home. Two Englands exist cheek-by-jowl, yet – with the exception of a few people coming together in one common institution – see or know as little of each other as they did before the town planners ripped up the Manchester terraces and exported the tenants. That binding institution is Knutsford County High School, the town’s comprehensive and only secondary school, which lies a few hundred yards beyond Mrs Gaskell’s home on the opposite side of the town from Longridge. Across the open fields one can just hear the distant hum of the M6; a more severe blight, suffered by rich and poor alike, is the unholy din of planes labouring into flight from Manchester Airport. It was to the school that I had gone to investigate whether the comprehensive ideal, so bitterly denigrated by so many, could – in circumstances that gave it a sporting chance – stretch the bright child and fulfil the dull.
The comprehensive conundrum lies at the centre of a web of national anxieties. When my family was about to come home from the United States, one insistent question peppered the inquiries of our relatives and friends. ‘What,’ they asked, ‘are you going to do with the children?’ The question was swathed in layers of unspoken thought, touching class, ‘standards’, political philosophy, accent and aspirations. Nowhere has such a deep seismic fault opened in Britain as that between state education, symbolized by the horrendous populist caricature of the comprehensive school, and private fee-paying schools, which are building as fast as they can to cope with swelling demand. More than forty years after the 1944 Education Act had promised decent secondary education for all, British children each morning depart to thoroughly separate experiences, so perpetuating differences between us which are no longer even quaint.
Businessmen and industrialists, pragmatically concerned more with the quality and abilities of school-leavers than with the nature of the system, know there is a gathering emergency. The week I returned from Knutsford, Sir Peter Parker, the former British Rail chairman, called for a ‘war cabinet’ on education. ‘Somehow we must see the educational crisis in terms of a national emergency … disaster stares us in the face for the 1990s,’ he said, pointing to the critical shortage of first-rate teachers, especially in maths, the early school-leaving age in comparison to Britain’s industrial rivals, and the failure to educate adequately the least bright forty per cent.
None of Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet educates their children in state schools. A teacher wrote to me: ‘Those responsible for administering and financing the system have decided that it is not good enough for themselves … would you buy a Ford car if you knew that all Ford managers bought Japanese cars?’ The gulf isn’t just in quality, but in kind, as if working- and lower middle-class children still do not require the critical intelligence and cast of mind that most professional people wish for their own children.
Although, by the time I began this inquiry, one son had completed a year in a comprehensive, I felt I was little wiser about whether these schools – to which more than nine out of ten British schoolchildren go – ‘worked’. So much of the concept and the practice was alien to my own distant experience at a famous public school a quarter of a century ago. There and then the aim had been – in monastic isolation – to turn out people with an education which would prepare the best to be top civil servants or lawyers. Such an education takes a tight grip on the psyche, not as strong as the Jesuits’ grip, but real enough. Surely, our prejudices tell us, one cannot be truly ‘educated’ without learning large chunks of Wordsworth or Shakespeare by heart: ‘poetry’ now means free-form composition without rhyme or scansion – my eleven-year-old son thought that if you put a capital letter at the start of each line, you were a poet; and an educated man is one with Latin tags at the tip of his tongue. But a comprehensive – taking children of every ability and origin – cannot be expected to provide the high flyer with the environment of Winchester or Manchester Grammar School, or to achieve on behalf of its pupils all a grammar school did and more. Comprehensives are new beasts, not yet fully fashioned, and certainly not yet fully understood. It does them a grave disservice to judge them for what they are not.
The casual evidence is startling in its contradictions. There was the sixteen-year-old girl at Woolworth’s, eight months on the job, without the self-confidence to look a customer in the eye, monosyllabic, and inefficient to the point that I had to suppress a strong urge to shake her. She had an infuriating way of expecting the customer to know the procedure – perhaps because she was too inarticulate to make herself understood – then muddled her own part, so that minutes were wasted while a supervisor came to sort out the nonsense she had made of her till entry. She was, my son told me, a former pupil of his school. With such examples in mind, a British teacher, who had worked much of his life in the United States, wrote to me asserting: ‘The neglect of education in England, except for a thin line of the truly privileged, is perhaps our supreme national disgrace.’
Yet at Oxford, where I had gone to report Olivia Channon’s death from a heroin and alcohol overdose – not a good advertisement for schooling of a very different sort: her drug problems were said to have started at a public school – I met well-adjusted, bright former comprehensive students who swore by the system that had educated them. Indeed, a radical chic had seized the university, and ‘cred’ points were gained for not going to the ‘right’ school. No one, I was told, was more determinedly proletarian that the Wykehamist leader of one of the university’s main Marxist groups. It was bad form to embarrass public-school boys by quizzing them on their educational origins.
But the difficulty in seeking dispassionate information about comprehensive schools is that it is impossible to find a typical school, and hard to find a representative one. In inner cities I could have visited ‘sink’ schools – though these are seldom measured against the problems with which they must contend: some of the apparently crazier manifestations of anti-racism, for example, are sincere attempts to cope with schools where well over half the pupils are black or Asian. In the depths of Surrey, on the other hand, there is no doubt a comprehensive school exclusively peopled by the children of accountants and stockbrokers. What I needed was a school that had enough advantages to give its pupils a fighting chance, while it was not so exceptional that it would instantly be dismissed by the agonized reader with the thought ‘of course, if I lived there I’d have no problems with the local comprehensive.’
A friend had alerted me to potential comprehensive school disasters. His own two daughters had gone to a well-considered London comprehensive – ironically, he had pulled strings to get them in. He told me: ‘Violence was endemic with middle-class kids – the “melons” – being picked on as individuals and attacked as groups.’ One daughter got caught up in a murder case – a former pupil killed another – and was threatened by the killer’s sister, who was in her class, when she had to give evidence. His second daughter ‘joined a group of disaffected punk kids who didn’t work, played truant, took drugs, went shoplifting, etc., and finally dropped out of school altogether.’ Another parent wrote a moving article in the Guardian about her own son changing from ‘a willing, enthusiastic child to a surly, unhappy individual, who didn’t want to get up in the mornings.’ She quoted a poem by her son:
He is the outsider
he one they all mock
He is the one they can’t accept
Just because he is different
Because he works hard
Instead of talking
Because he’s interested
In school work.
He gave up in the end
He just wanted to stay at home.
I was that outsider
I was the one they couldn’t accept
I was the one they mocked …
Knutsford was suggested by John Tomlinson, Professor of Education at Warwick University and a former Chief Education Officer for Cheshire. He is a passionate and committed man, who might do wonders for the image of state education if he got the sort of media platform offered to the glamorous heads of big public schools. Even the Observer invites public school rather than state school headmasters to write on the problems of the state system. Our collective anxiety over comprehensives, he pointed out, ‘is that the ideal runs counter to our national tradition and philosophy. Society is hierarchical and divided, while the schools attempt to treat people of differing abilities according to their needs in a common community.’
Such is the tarnished standing of the media with many teachers, I knew I would have to persuade the school I chose that I did not have horns and would not be making a beeline for kids smoking on the playing field. The Knutsford head, Mike Valleley, was nervous: ‘What “control” would he have?’ he asked. Three of his senior colleagues wanted to veto my visit. They were fearful that reporting the continuing effects of the long teachers’ dispute – at that time officially over at least for a while, but still causing the senior school to be locked at lunchtime because of lack of staff cover so that children wandered the town centre – or mentioning scarce resources would cost them students. Mr Valleley was terrified of litter being featured: ‘It’s the one thing the local press will seize on.’ But he clearly saw that exposing his school to a writer was a test of self-confidence that he and the school ought to be brave enough to take.
My first (and later confirmed) view was that Knutsford could stand the scrutiny. It became a comprehensive in 1973 through the amalgamation of two secondary-modern schools, each standing in generous playing fields – Mr Valleley, like an eighteenth-century landowner, was master of all he surveyed – and linked by a path that runs between a field of clover and pleasant suburban gardens. The town never had a grammar school: eleven-plus scholars had had to travel. As well as drawing children from the town’s divided communities, the school takes pupils from outlying villages, so the school’s catchment area is socially mixed. Although a quarter of local parents pay for their children’s secondary education, the school is ‘comprehensive’ in that it is the only state secondary school, takes both sexes, and educates pupils to A level.
A sixth-form block and sports facilities (which include an indoor swimming pool and are shared with the community) were added to the former boys’ school – now the upper school. The newer, former girls’ school – now the lower school for eleven- and twelve-year- olds – has such thin floors that it frequently sounds as if indoor hockey is being played upstairs. Paint has been at a premium since the school’s opening, and the litter – as in most schools – blights the grounds. But there are well-maintained lawns and shrub gardens. In the autumn sun, as teachers’ voices drifted through open windows, it seemed a positive and congenial school in which to pass one’s youth and learn. Children are well-mannered – no bowling strangers over in the long corridors – and usually wear smart school uniforms. Sixth formers are allowed mufti – jeans, sneakers and T-shirts. Several of the staff are distinctly snappy dressers. One senior woman would have perished at the thought, but she would have looked in place on a Conservative platform. Discipline, I sensed, was not a great problem. At one assembly I attended, five boys were singled out for having played hoaxes on parents, including one with a heart condition: the offence was being taken as seriously as it would have been at any school. Sanctions include detentions and suspensions, and I was told that the school would not hesitate to remove a child who was a disruptive influence.
Knutsford has just under 1,300 pupils, two hundred of them ‘refugees’ from a neighbouring authority that still has selection, a number of whom passed the eleven-plus. The mother of one such boy told me that, ironically, they had moved to the selective area because they once thought ‘comprehensives were the bottom of the heap’. Now, having rejected the old-fashioned limitations of their local grammar school and the divisiveness of selection, they are ‘terribly, terribly impressed’ by Knutsford. The two hundred in-comers have buttressed the school against the worst effects of falling rolls, which, in causing widespread school amalgamations and closures, add to the national crisis of morale.
Mr Valleley, who had been at the school since 1981, was the son of a Manchester printer. He is married to a senior county education official, and was a potter by training. He is a neat, fastidious man, who wears sharp suits and coloured shirts with contrasting white collars. Almost his first act on arriving at Knutsford was to refurbish his office – ‘it had looked like a National Insurance office’ – leading to staffroom jokes about the ‘presidential suite’. Local public relations became a priority. ‘What was presented in the classroom was sound and good, but the physical environment wasn’t as attractive. The school didn’t have status in the community. The public needed to be told “this is a damn good school. I am quite prepared for us to be compared to anyone,”’ he said.
While Mr Valleley persuaded his governors and colleagues to accept me, I talked with pundits and friends, worrying the comprehensive question back and forth. In my mind I had a model of what ought to be achievable – the standards and character of the traditional American high school, for the United States has built an extraordinary democracy on schools that educate all the children in a community. A decent common education has been a central part of the American heritage. Yet the British, with our self-deluding superiority to most foreign things, sneer at American standards. (‘I seldom find that American practice is relevant to what we do here, Mr Chesshyre,’ a local authority administrator had said to me a few days after we returned.) Two American friends in London had taken their children away from British schools (one private, one state) and sent them to the American School because they found their children uncherished and British teachers unresponsive. One said: ‘Mary had only been at the American School for a week when I heard her singing in the morning. I suddenly realized that she hadn’t sung like that for a year.’ The other, who had sent her daughter to an English school for five years, said she was at last able to conduct a proper and equal dialogue with teachers. The English school had kept her at arm’s length.
American schools are more accessible to parents, and American children are maturer and more self-confident than their English contemporaries. In the States fourteen-year-old boys look one in the eye and speak up: here they shuffle and mumble, or remain silent despite being bowled slow conversational full tosses. One British child – recently returned from the States – was selected for an inter-school current affairs quiz. He had mugged up the newspapers, and his team had swanned through. His parents noticed that he was far more casual in preparing for the next round. Why? they asked. Because, he replied, we’ll win if I just glance at the headlines. Within a few weeks of getting back to the Britain, the boy’s desire to do his best had been blunted.
So what was going wrong? Society, through politicians and the press, was devaluing the system, which itself, in places, appeared bent on suicide. As a rule of thumb, private education was portrayed as good and state education as bad. ‘Me first’ had become an acceptable philosophy. In such a climate what could be more respectable than ‘to do one’s best for one’s child’? Indeed, it was self-indulgent to do otherwise and almost public-spirited to educate a child privately. Did not the nation need thoroughly educated citizens? By paying, parents could ensure it got them, and at the same time relieved the burden on the public purse. In education it was to be BMWs for those who could afford them, and a clapped-out, erratic public bus service for the rest. More fool he who waited at the draughty bus stop when he could afford a car.
Almost weekly some crazed teacher or administrator threw raw meat to the eager press. Certain education authorities appeared determined to promote homosexuality, Marxism and a brand of antiracism that replaced ‘Baa baa black sheep’ with ‘Baa baa green sheep’. An enthusiastic headmistress at a primary school banned the egg and spoon race as too competitive, and sports fields grew dandelions or were sold as building sites. When the BBC announced it was taking the jaded radio programme, ‘Top of the Form’, off the air, right-wingers refused to believe that the decision had anything to do with programming. It was axed, they said, either because the competition was too cut-throat for pinko BBC tastes, or because children were now too ill-educated to answer the questions. The satirical radio show, ‘Week Ending,’ had a mock contest between Che Guevara’s and St Mugabe’s comprehensives in which everyone won, regardless of whether they knew the answers.
‘How the dream of comprehensives turned into a nightmare,’ I read in the Daily Express. ‘Twenty years on, the chickens are coming home to roost … a growing number of parents, politicians, academics and pundits are passing judgement on the all-in system … and they are finding that it has failed.’ The Sun, determined to promote sound cultural values amongst its readers, complained: ‘Britain’s comprehensives are coming out bottom of the class.’ These perceived failures lay, according to such papers, at the heart of many of our national ills. The Sun (in an article on education) had discovered ‘the emergence of a new breed of young thug seemingly unaware of the difference between right and wrong’. (The old breed presumably knew, but ignored, the difference.) A government minister said in the aftermath of one soccer riot: ‘Our teachers have much to answer for.’ Even the Education Guardian ran an article under the subsidiary headline: ‘Whenever I hear of a criminal brought to justice I always feel the real criminals go free.’ The ‘real criminals’ were, of course, the teachers.
My own first dealings with the school to which our children would be going were dispiriting. In America our eldest son had been in classes with children eighteen months older than himself. Back in London, he faced repeating a year of schooling. Accustomed to American flexibility – there was often a three-year age span in classes – we challenged this ruling in order to prevent him losing momentum. The school claimed it hadn’t the authority for such a decision, thereby illustrating why fee-paying schools have been able to pinch the word ‘independent’ to describe themselves. A senior teacher told me that the education authority made no exceptions, and would even separate into different years identical twins born a few minutes either side of midnight on 31 August, the crucial cut-off date. It was so clearly untrue, and implied such a contempt for parental rights and concerns, that I have never been able to take that particular teacher seriously again. I next had an interview with two borough officials, a young assistant director who appeared to agree with much of what I had to say, and an older woman. Each time the young man got close to conceding a point, his companion would intervene sharply, like a sheepdog attending to a straying lamb. ‘Mr “X” has not been with the authority long enough to interpret our policies,’ she ruled, her mouth snapping shut with a determination that eventually silenced us both. Although she would not move my son, she would, she said, inform the school of his academic standard – which obviously I had already done – so that he could be placed in suitable subject sets. Nothing happened. He spent the next eight weeks tediously working his way through the system, before arriving, somewhat disenchanted, in his final groups.
A year later my second son, in the company of a lively bunch of children from his primary school, entered the same comprehensive, borne along by a sense of excitement and curiosity that was, if anything, heightened in his first few weeks. He would come home bubbling with enthusiasm for what he had been doing, shoving his exercise books under my nose before I could get my coat off. The phone became a hotline as his friends exchanged notes on homework. He auditioned for Oliver, and got a place in the chorus, was selected for his year’s soccer team, and embarked on community projects. I could not have imagined anyone making a more positive start in any school.
However, in our London borough 28 per cent of children do not go to local authority schools. In our street the figure is far higher: each morning the Volvos – yes, they usually are – sweep up and remove the neighbourhood children, some of them tiny things in elaborately striped blazers, caps and ties. Of course, those parents have the right to pay school fees, but how many of them give the alternative any thought? The head of a prep school in a town near Knutsford, who had himself sent a daughter – now at university – to his local comprehensive, told me: ‘Many parents have made up their minds. They do not realistically assess what the comprehensive might offer. They don’t even go and take a look.’ Then he added with a smile that, since his livelihood depended on their business, he wasn’t complaining. But I do. Every time a child is withdrawn from the state system, that diminishes the national drive to have the best. It is death by a thousand drop-outs.
Paying school fees assuages the consciences of the very busy. A friend, a television news correspondent and a workaholic, whose wife also works, decided that they couldn’t give their children the additional support that he believed state education would require. Although he is such a strong Labour backer that I once suspected a future Labour government might elevate him to the House of Lords and make him a minister, he felt nonetheless it would be unfair for his children not to be at the sort of school that – as he perceived it – took care of all their needs. He certainly escaped the agonizing over whether to speak up when things go wrong that similar people who do choose state schools often go through. These are the solid citizens who devote an immense amount of time to their schools – dispensing wine and cheese and organizing the annual fête – yet do not have the impact on what takes place inside the school to which their commitment should entitle them. They suffer from English reticence, but also enter a subconscious conspiracy not to draw attention to things that go wrong. They have a doubly vested interest in the school’s reputation, which they fear will be damaged if unpleasant truths are aired. Their child is at the school, and their judgement is on the line. They do not wish to give succour to those who might say ‘I told you so.’ But their inhibitions deny them any real say in how the school is run. In the United States there is no invisible line on the ground beyond which parents may not step; Parent-Teacher Associations are formidable bodies whose function is not simply to raise funds for mini-buses. British teachers like to talk of ‘partnership’ – they reject the concept of parents being ‘consumers’ of education, because that relationship presumes rights which most teachers would not be prepared to concede. But the present partnership is chronically unequal.
A few days before John Rae retired as headmaster of Westminster School, I talked to him about the introduction of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). Dr Rae, now director of the Laura Ashley Foundation, which gives grants to educational causes, was almost apocalyptic in his perception of what’s happening to our state schooling. ‘We are in danger,’ he said, ‘of getting a larger and larger semi-educated mass, while economic prospects grow worse. The fabric of social life is beginning to crack.’ He added: ‘Not enough state schools are well run, work smoothly or have good teaching. They go on about new exams, but the reality, for God’s sake, is that the teacher doesn’t keep order. Teachers are badly paid and under-respected, déclassé … pseudo-intellectuals. Too many have a chip on their shoulder and see parents as a threat.’ When reported in the Observer, these remarks provoked the predictable wrath of teachers. But the poor morale of teachers is a consequence rather than a cause of the chronic unhappiness within British schools. Dr Rae asked: ‘Are the British at heart afraid of releasing the potential of all their children? I think they are. We are still essentially rather aristocratic in our concept of society. We still don’t believe in the great mass of what we used to call working-class people having the talent or ability to do anything other than unskilled jobs or play football. We fear a society in which we tap the talent of this great mass, because it is going to threaten our secure middle-class set-up, and it might threaten our rather cosy cultural elitism as well.’
Historically, schooling was rationed in Britain: so many first-rate educations for our leaders and colonial administrators, a few more second-rate for our managers and business people and fifth-rate for the rest. Anything better for the masses might create discontent or even political instability. Why clutter with dangerous nonsense the head of a man whose allotted role in life will be to dig ditches? (‘Education,’ declared a nineteenth-century MP, ‘would enable [the poor] to read seditious pamphlets … and render them insolent against their superiors …’)
Now we have potential instability for the opposite reason. Not enough Britons are adequately educated to fulfil their own aspirations or the necessary tasks of a high-tech society. Our rivals streak ahead because they do not suffer from damaging inhibitions about the potential of people. The Japanese will produce 400,000 more qualified engineers than Britain in the next five years. A Japanese engineer/craftsman is likely to start work at twenty-one rather than at sixteen. In West Germany, shop-floor engineers are considered ‘professionals’. Many British children who do get a good education get the wrong one – too narrow and academic; but the broad majority leave school with stunted imaginations about their own possibilities, bound for an uncomplaining, but often unfulfilled, existence. A small minority – the notorious ‘yobs’ – emerge unscathed by learning, hostile and aggressive.
In his book, The Challenge for the Comprehensive School, David Hargreaves, chief inspector for ILEA (Inner London Education Authority), conjures up a telling image of what goes on in the back rows of our worst classrooms. Through the eyes of two average girl students, lessons are like ‘very dull television programmes, which could not be switched off’. Occasionally the programme was interesting or loud enough to catch their attention, but never for sufficiently long for them to grasp the essential elements of the plot. ‘The girls had lost track of the story long ago … they talked through the broadcast whenever they could … the easiest form of resistance was to treat the lessons as background noise which from time to time interrupted their utterly absorbing sisterly gossip.’ Mr Hargreaves concludes his apposite metaphor: ‘In many respects it is a marvellous anticipation of their adult roles, where features of school will be replaced by the noise of a factory, the intrusions of the supervisor’s exhortations, the monotony of unwanted routine jobs.’ It is not surprising that attempts to converse with them are doomed. The majority of American school-leavers are, by comparison, stimulated rather than daunted by school – most of them having survived and thrived until they are eighteen.
The educations Mr Hargreaves wrote about are an assault on the self-respect of children. He added: ‘In response [to this assault], the pupils set up an alternative means of achieving dignity and status by turning the school’s dignity system upside down.’ Hence yobbism. Dr Rae ended with the words: ‘Do we have to believe in some racial theory whereby the Japanese are born better at maths? It is a well-worn cliché that the most vital national resource is the people. In practice, it’s a fraudulent claim. If we pursued our latent human talent with the drive and energy with which we pursue North Sea oil, wow, think of it! Then you really could say “the British are coming”.’
Another fraudulent concept is ‘choice’ as a remedy for poor standards. Further choice, as outlined in the 1987 Conservative manifesto proposal to allow schools to ‘opt out’ of local education authorities – giving mobility to the already mobile – would lead to greater polarization between the best and the worst in the schools. Those who could ‘work’ the system would do so, adding another tier of opting-out parents to the six per cent who now pay: the children of those who couldn’t exercise that ‘right’ would be more thoroughly segregated in sink schools. Choice, said Mrs Joan Sallis, the national organizer of the Campaign for the Advancement of State Education, means that he with the longest arm reaches the highest shelf. ‘It is a nice word for a nasty process.’ A few parents are candid enough to admit that choice is about advantage – the right school tie, influential friends, an acceptable accent – as well as about a decent education. Put crudely, people pay school fees to get their children ahead in the rat-race. A stockbroker, responding to a survey, was honest: ‘Everything is at the margin. I believe that the school will give my son a 5 per cent better chance, and he may just need that 5 per cent.’
Mrs Sallis, a ruddy-cheeked woman who looks like a farmer’s wife, is a beacon for parents who are privately concerned that the stockbroker may have got it right. She stomps the country encouraging parents to start support groups for state education, and fires them with her own example – all three of her children, products of state education, have succeeded in markedly different ways – one as a high-powered mathematician, one as a garden designer, and one as a personnel officer in the NHS. Mrs Sallis comes from aspiring working-class Welsh stock; her father was a coalface worker for forty years. Education for her was the route to better things. There were always two fires lit in her home – one for the family and one for the children doing homework.
She became a civil servant and was bound for the top when she decided that raising children is a full-time pursuit. ‘I wanted to deliver every spoonful of egg myself.’ When her children were still young, she moved to an affluent London suburb, and was ‘morally shocked’ to find that local schools were ‘a soup-kitchen service’ in comparison with the fine parks, public buildings and lavish private homes. ‘The attitude was that people who used the schools presumably couldn’t afford anything better, and therefore ought to be grateful. “If you can’t afford private schooling, don’t grumble. If you can, you opt out.” As a well-dressed, well-spoken, caring mother, I was regarded as a lunatic to be using the local schools,’ she said. Mrs Sallis possesses a determined Welsh egalitarian spirit, which makes her hostile to the privileges and snobbery that are inextricable from private education. ‘There is no more class-ridden country than ours,’ she said, ‘and no other country has such prestigious private schools: they provide not just an education, but a passport to a way of life. We grovel before people who are meant to be socially OK.’ An American friend living in London said: ‘A sixty-year-old gets an important new job, and the first thing the papers mention, for God’s sake, is what school he went to.’
Mrs Sallis also objects to fee-paying schools on educational grounds because many of them work on the principle that ‘academic success is the only sort worth having.’ In 1986 the historian Corelli Barnett, who argues that public schools – by creating an out-of-date elite with a soul above industry and commerce – are responsible for our industrial decline, told members of the Headmasters’ Conference (the body that represents public-school headmasters): ‘For more than a century, your schools have done much to bring Britain down as a trading nation.’
Certainly when I was at such a school, only those who ‘failed’ academically entered industry. One boy, interviewed by a small family firm, was asked almost exclusively about his golf. The owner wanted a congenial companion, not a whizz kid. The business went bust a few years later. Middle-class parents are still gravely embarrassed by children who ‘fail’ in the conventional sense. How often you get, as Mrs Sallis said, ‘a long spiel’ why Sarah is a hairdresser or Charles a decorator. No other country has these hang-ups: Americans would expect such children to win out in their chosen careers, and become millionaire hairdressers or decorators.
Recently, I met a middle-aged architect, who in the fifties had been a pupil at Tulse Hill in south London, one of the first comprehensives. He was transferred there from a technical school and, in his own opinion, would today be a carpenter but for the stroke of luck of Tulse Hill opening on his doorstep. ‘For the first time,’ he says, ‘I was trusted with control over the design of what I was doing.’ That trust opened a new world to him. Thirty years later, we still agonize whether comprehensives can bring the best out of bright children. Now that 90 per cent of secondary-school children attend such schools, surely it is time to be positive. Even the few who are educated elsewhere must live amongst a majority who will go to comprehensives: private school alumni don’t travel in separate compartments on the Underground. Barbara Simons, a deputy head at Knutsford, said: ‘Every child has a birthright to go to a “good” school. If your child doesn’t feel it is a good school, you have taken that right away from him.’
People who are sensible in all other respects fall prey to the endless propaganda pumped out about comprehensives. A well-spoken woman at a local action meeting on state education could hardly contain herself. ‘What does one do?’ she asked desperately, ‘with that amount of panic and fear? What does one say to the people who are not here, who are sending their children to private schools?’ A ‘Good Schools Guide’, published by Harpers and Queen, caught the tone of the social forces at work. ‘State school pupils are sloppy, spotty and louche,’ while ‘in private schools, manners are good and the pupils are clean and polite.’ Almost every action taken by Mrs Thatcher’s government, from the assisted-places scheme – which, even if one believed in its validity, would, in Dr Rae’s words, be like ‘trying to cure a famine by taking a few children to lunch at the Ritz’ – to the proposed Crown Technology Colleges, has been an assault on the resources and self-esteem of the comprehensive system.
The head of an academically successful comprehensive was told by Sir Keith Joseph, then Education Secretary, that it was necessary to have ‘centres of excellence’. ‘Did he not realize that we’re sending scientists to Oxbridge? What happens to our standards? Didn’t he know of the academic achievements of comprehensives?’ the head asked in despair. He added: ‘The government indulges in massive bloodletting, and then expresses surprise that the patient is anaemic and lacking his usual energy.’ Measurable standards – passes at O and A level, for example – have risen gently, but consistently, since comprehensives were introduced. The total of successful Oxford candidates from state schools in absolute terms now matches that from independent private schools.
Political pressures on what goes on in the classroom receive a massive amount of media space. In a minority of areas these pressures are real enough. One head teacher, who asked to remain anonymous so as to avoid retribution, told me: ‘I am attacked because I have a “grammar school” ethos, whatever that means. Is it because I fight to prevent standards collapsing? There is now an inverted value system. Anything that corresponds to what successful schools used to do must be bad. “Standards” are the encrusted imposition of bourgeois values, and we who pursue them are assailed for “betraying the system”. We are expected to apologize for pupils who do unusually well.’ He had even been attacked because his school was praised in print for standards of behaviour that might be found in a public school. His was not an area where one would have expected a political assault on good schools. Another head – responding to, rather than resisting, such pressures, but otherwise apparently sane – told me that he never advertised Oxbridge successes to the rest of his school, ‘lest we seem to value that student more than, say, the capable musician’.
The besieged head continued: ‘Ideologues love to see things in confrontational terms, as if high standards for some impoverish the rest. It is a dangerous notion that the English don’t need to compete and defeatist to think we should simply aim to be at peace with our own social engineering consciences. It is no good fudging the issue. Everyone has to know that he will only succeed the hard way, by being genuinely competitive. Precision is necessary to be a surgeon, a manufacturer of engineering equipment or a sports star. Alternative attitudes are a sad reflection on beliefs in the potential attainments of comprehensive children.’ The several heads of comprehensives and the educationalists I met – perhaps because not protected by anonymity – were not so forthright, but they subscribed to the same philosophy. The unnamed head always teaches at least one bottom ability group himself, and savours achievements like getting a semi-autistic child through one CSE. Education, he said, is bedevilled by having to fight the battles of twenty-five years ago. Parents, politicians, administrators look back to when they were at school, which was either a golden age, and therefore to be restored, or a nightmare, the last vestiges of which should be destroyed. Many of our most influential citizens were the successful products of grammar schools. Often they forget the failings of yesterday’s system – the high drop-out rate at sixteen of working-class pupils, the misery of the eleven-plus, the appalling provision for those who failed it. Even exam results were less shining than we remember: in 1960 research by the National Union of Teachers found that 25 per cent of grammar school pupils left with fewer than two O levels, and 50 per cent left with only four – yet these were the ‘selected’ academically bright children.
A Knutsford parent from a small Welsh town recalled grammar school boys fighting secondary-modern boys on the common that divided their two schools. Each regarded the other group as foreign and hostile – as green men from another planet. The eleven-plus institutionalized two societies, separating children inefficiently and divisively at the age of eleven. The comprehensive pioneers rejected such divisions. Professor Tomlinson, of Warwick University, said: ‘If you mix people thoroughly, you will introduce the bright not only to an understanding of practical problem-solving, but also to appreciate that people who operate in that way make just as effective a contribution to society.’ His vision is of a better society: ‘The ideal is to develop people to the maximum of their capacities, and prepare them for a diverse culture in which all are valued and give service. “I am an individual with a personality and skills to develop, so are you.” So relationships are built on negotiation, not on power and aggression. Successful economies grow in societies with strong social cohesion, where management and shop-floor are not at one another’s throats. We do not have a generous view of each other. We believe in limited potential, especially of those who do not dress or speak well.’ I discovered a Japanese saying when I visited Japanese factories in Scotland: ‘It is better for one hundred men to take one step, than for one man to take a hundred.’ The English have long worked on the opposite thesis.
Even the word ‘comprehensive’ is a liability, conjuring up a largely discredited era – tower blocks, Harold Wilson, new towns, plate-glass town halls and ‘white hot’ technology. To the British, ‘equality’ instinctively means levelling down; the creation of a grey, uniform society along East German lines, not the dynamic release of potential, which American equality strives towards. Belatedly, we have tried to undo the terminological damage. Local authorities call their systems ‘all ability’ or ‘secondary’, and individual schools replace the word ‘comprehensive’ with ‘high’. If we had only called them ‘high schools’ from the beginning, maybe the name would have assuaged British snobbery, and we might have had a fighting chance to create community schools like those of our democratic rivals.
We forget now, so extreme is the debate over comprehensives, that they were created to cater for enhanced public expectations, rather than to satisfy the whims of left-wing Utopians. George Walker, the head of The Cavendish School, Hemel Hempstead, and formerly a moving spirit behind the York-based Centre for the Study of Comprehensive Schools, is also one of twelve state heads co-opted to the Headmasters’ Conference. He said: ‘Twenty years ago people had colour televisions and enjoyed foreign holidays. The expectation of a better school went with that. It was unacceptable to have all that material advance, and still get a letter saying that your youngster was going to the secondary-modern down the road.’ The first stage, reorganizing schools, was widely accepted. In the play Gotcha, one part of the trilogy Gimme Shelter, written in 1976 by Barrie Keeffe, the anti-hero, a yob about to leave school with such an undistinguished record that not a single teacher appears to know his name, complains bitterly about ‘this lovely comprehensive’, where the head speaks Latin to the sixth-formers. ‘Great school – great school,’ reflects one character, ‘going around talking in Latin all day. Great – that’s the way to get your head smashed in the factory.’ For those who could make it, unlike Keeffe’s ‘Kid’, it was a more optimistic age: pop stars, sports players, television personalities were creating a new breed outside conventional class divisions. Comprehensives were part of this break with the past. State education, the faithful believed, would become so good that virtually everyone would opt for it.
Wilson borrowed Hugh Gaitskell’s phrase ‘grammar schools for all’, which offended educationalists trying to create a new type of school, but reassured the middle classes. It was Mrs Thatcher, when Education Secretary, not the much reviled Shirley Williams, who signed the most comprehensive reorganization orders. In those early years, schools were trying to teach children of all abilities according to a syllabus created for the top 25 per cent. Schools within schools developed. The urgent need was to devise curricula to cope with schools that contained future Oxbridge scholars at the next desk to children destined for Youth Training Schemes. The best state schools began to move from the world of pure scholarship to one of democratic citizenship. Parents – and editorial writers – who had themselves been to selective schools became alarmed. Their children did not know who the Younger Pitt was, so they shot off to school meetings to find out what was going on. There they were assailed by jargon from teachers who seemed reluctant to let them get too close to the school. All professions, as Bernard Shaw said, are indeed a conspiracy against the laity. A second suspicion was added: not only had standards collapsed, but some form of unacceptable ideological manipulation was taking place. The system, it appeared, had been hijacked.
This was the agonized scene to which we returned from the United States – a lot of very concerned people fed nothing more solid than scraps of local gossip and blatantly prejudiced newspaper headlines. George Walker complained of the ‘lack of serious intellectual discussion’ about comprehensives, and that there had never been a Dimbleby or Reith Lecture on the subject, for example. The schools never won the hearts and minds of the people, and the concept never caught the imagination of the intellectuals.
My visit to Knutsford was an attempt to give classroom reality to some of these concerns. I was at the school for a week, far longer than any parent would be before making up his mind about whether to send a child, but not long enough fully to penetrate the hidden agenda that tells you what an institution is really like. The school fosters an obvious esprit de corps. Staff and pupils are proud and offer a visitor a positive image. I was very aware of the dangers of misreading the school: a former teacher had told me how his very poor school had always successfully closed ranks when an inspection was due. If any teachers, mainly themselves the products of grammar schools, had doubts about the practicality of the comprehensive ideal, they hid them. Many had experience in other forms of school – grammar and fee-paying – yet said persuasively they were totally convinced by the strengths of comprehensive teaching. Frank Walmsley, the senior deputy head, said: ‘Comprehensives are vastly superior for most, if not all, pupils. I am very clear about it. The more able are not at a disadvantage: they do as well, if not better, as in grammar schools. The world has changed. A good comprehensive will broaden their horizons and widen their later opportunities.’
Knutsford teachers were cautious about trumpeting the school’s academic record, though most acknowledged that ‘unfortunately’ the school’s reputation was largely based on university and A level successes. Seventy per cent of the children leave with at least one O level, 46 per cent achieve four or more, and 17 per cent – of the original ‘mixed ability’ intake – leave with three or more A levels. The school has 165 in its sixth form, 135 of whom are studying A levels. Each year it sends a handful to Oxbridge.
I met a group of six sixth-formers – four girls, two boys – three of whom were to try for Oxbridge. They were articulate, self-confident, ambitious. The school, they said, mixed well socially, though there was some bullying in the early days. They claimed they had more confidence than if they had gone to private schools. One said she might be a teacher because of the inspiration of her English teacher, which made the others laugh. Most had concrete career plans – one to be an economic geographer at the United Nations. A teacher told me later that the sixth was very left-wing – much as his contemporaries had been in the late sixties – but the pupils claimed to be a mixed bunch. One did say: ‘They just sit there groaning about Mrs Thatcher: it’s really boring.’
They were egalitarian in their own behaviour, rejecting the notion of prefects, for example. At a parents’ evening there was voluble concern at this lack of pupil structures. Many thought prefects could supervise lunch hours and cut down on litter and smoking. Feelings grew heated. The cry ‘why can’t they be like we were’ was taken up enthusiastically. The sixth-formers were aware of the shortage of resources – ‘outdated history books with pages missing,’ said one – and argued that the government ought to reorder its priorities: money for schools, not defence. They were also censorious of their less diligent contemporaries – ‘some go through the school wasting their own and their teachers’ time and the taxpayers’ money: it makes you mad.’
‘Carol’, a problem child, never made the sixth: in her early days at Knutsford she was frequently truant. Her father (Manchester overspill) draws a disability pension, and hasn’t worked for many years. When I visited the family, he was stripped to the waist, exhibiting a fine torso and some elaborate tattoos. Occasionally, he was shaken by paroxysms of coughing. His wife said she missed the cosiness of inner Manchester, but he was all for the wide open spaces. If he could, he said somewhat unconvincingly, he’d be a sheep-farmer in the Falklands. ‘Teachers are not old enough, and there’s not enough corporal punishment,’ was his view of Britain’s educational ills. Carol twice tried to kill herself. In her fourth year she was enrolled in a school programme known as the Knutsford Community Certificate, which involves attending college half a day a week and working in the community. She blossomed, taking a responsible role on a residential week away from school – younger children thanked her for her help, the first time she had been thanked for an achievement in her life, working hard for six months at a local hotel, and qualifying for a three-year catering course. She knew what she wanted to do – work for an airline – and, against considerable odds, looked set fair.
The next night I met ‘John’s’ mother in her modern ‘executive-style’ house. She and her husband are both graduates who went to private/public schools, and sent their children to Knutsford with some trepidation. John left with four good A levels to spend a year in industry sponsored by a multinational corporation before university. A primary-school friend of John’s – said to have been of equal ability – who went to a local fee-paying secondary school with a strong academic record, dropped out of the sixth form after one year and took a non-degree course at a college. ‘I haven’t heard of anyone at a private school who did better than John,’ said his mother, whose daughter got three A levels at Knutsford and also went to university. ‘I would tell anyone to use that school. If I had another child and could afford fees, I’d still send him there.’
How can one school get the best out of both Carol and John? Are they exceptions? Do pupils in the middle without any obvious special needs get equally stretched? Is there a trick to teaching ‘mixed ability’ classes, which, if only those educated in narrow peer groups could understand it, would set the national mind at rest over comprehensive schooling? I spent much of my time at Knutsford trying to find answers to these questions, sitting in on ‘mixed ability’ classes and talking with teachers. The aim is clear and laudable, and the problem simply stated. At one end of the ability range is the stock English figure of the professor who cannot change a light bulb: at the other, thousands of children leave school branded as ‘failures’ because the traditional academic courses offer them nothing. Michael Duffy, head of King Edward VI School, Morpeth, and a former president of the Secondary Heads’ Association, told me: ‘By being taught in the same environment, children have equality of esteem, opportunity and provision. It is not a question of levelling down: clever children are entitled to good teachers, but so are the others. By teaching high flyers and low attainers in the same context, we are equipping them for adult life in all its dimensions. Within the school walls we are hard-headed and realistic about different children’s abilities to learn. The key is the right lesson correctly delivered.’
Looking back on a ‘traditional’ education, it is clear that, as well as much first-rate teaching, there was a great deal of boredom involved in learning things that were either rapidly forgotten – whither has fled all that maths and Latin? – or redundant. Most of us also had hidden experience of ‘mixed ability’ teaching in such subjects as woodwork. I was extremely bad at it, and chiselled away ham-fistedly while some others turned perfect lamp standards on lathes. It never occurred to any of us that we were suffering because of the wide range of abilities in that group. So long as the instructor had time to get round us all, and attend to our needs, we were learning. Recently, I coached a ‘mixed ability’ soccer team, whose players ranged from kids who could kick the ball into the net with either foot from the edge of the penalty area to those born with the proverbial two left feet. It was fun, watching the children develop week by week, with no obvious disadvantages to either extreme.
At Knutsford all children start in the first year in totally mixed classes, gradually being ‘set’ in ability groups according to the nature of the subject. I attended a first-year French lesson. It was the last period of the day, the sun was shining, and rugby was being played outside the window. The teacher, Gary Frost, engaged the children individually, prowling the classroom. ‘Tu habites une ville? Oui ou non?’ This darting technique kept everyone’s attention, even those I had marked down as reluctant scholars. Everyone made a stab at one or two answers, or read words in French. The written exercise was to copy some statements – one girl had finished while a boy was painfully writing the first sentence – and then to use the same phrases to write about their own families. No one noticeably flagged. It would obviously become harder to give everyone the sense of being in the same race as the year progressed and the bright began to accumulate knowledge. But French is one subject that is set by the second year according to ability. I would not have been unhappy to have my child start in that class. In fact, one was then in a similar group in his own school.
History is cited as a subject in which new teaching methods allow pupils not only to go at their own pace, but also to learn techniques of far greater value than the ‘Plato to Nato’ string of dates. The aim is to teach children to handle evidence – primary and secondary – and to apply that skill in, for example, testing the accuracy of what they read in the newspapers. John Cloake, a history teacher about to take a class of fourteen-year-old GCSE students, said: ‘Our greatest asset is a child’s natural curiosity. So much of education works against that. We are not here to provide the answers. If I did, they would simply be chasing my version of the right answer.’ In his lesson, the children were studying the development of medicine. He wrote an open chart on the board, with spaces for explaining who treated illness, by what methods and why, in prehistoric, Egyptian and Greek times. The children were encouraged to relate those developments to what was going on in the wider contemporary societies. There were again painful discrepancies between the speeds (and neatness) of the pupils.
Later, Mr Cloake filled out the blackboard charts, drawing the answers from the children themselves. For homework – and I was told that these fourteen-year-olds would be expected to do about an hour and a half each night – they were to compare two contemporary Greek accounts of severe illness, and assess their reliability, accuracy and usefulness. ‘I am not looking for a lot of writing; I am looking for a lot of thoughts,’ Mr Cloake told the departing scholars. Again I had a son who was at the same stage on the same course. From what I saw and from what he told me, these lessons are a success.
Knutsford insisted that all pupils take one subject at GCSE that is not purely academic, which is a problem with many parents. Mr Walmsley, the deputy head, had a queue outside his office every ‘options’ night of parents needing to be convinced that their children can ‘spare’ the time from purely academic subjects. The school was strong in design and art – encouraged obviously by a head who was trained as a potter. They have had artists in residence; the spirit of one, said Jeff Teasdale, the head of the department and himself an artist, ‘still walks in the department.’
It is the boast of comprehensives that they are better prepared than are many private schools for the ‘new’ teaching ushered in by the General Certificate of Secondary Education, the sixteen-plus exam, which is based on the skills of learning rather than knowledge – what you can do, not what you know. ‘The pinnacle,’ said Mike Oliver, a deputy head, ‘is more demanding than O level.’ Teachers I met gloated over the difficulties they expect some private schools to have. One said: ‘Their teachers are actually going to have to talk to children, not sweep in, deliver a lecture, and sweep out.’ The gloating, however, ceased when the conversation turned to resources. GCSE is posited on an extraordinarily generous ratio of teachers, and in some subjects is inescapably demanding of equipment. Mr Valleley, Knutsford’s head, told of an instructional video showing a geography field trip, in which four pupils are being assessed by two or three teachers. ‘If we matched that ratio, we’d have to turn out the whole staff to assess our geographers,’ he said. Every teacher had a version of that truth. GCSE is judged by continuous assessment. Who teaches the children while that goes on? Class sizes have been growing. Steve Ings, a young science teacher, spoke of the difficulty of getting round twenty-eight children in one lesson instead of the twenty-one he used to instruct. Mr Valleley said the school would get £8,500 over two and a half years for new books and equipment – sufficient for the school’s bread and butter – instead of the £15,000 he would like. That shortfall is common to most schools. The PTA meeting that I attended was so concerned with this topic, which boiled down to the provision of books, that the chairman had to guillotine the discussion. A teacher crystallized the dilemma: ‘What is the good of, say, a video camera, if you haven’t got a spare body to take off a group of five or six to work with it?’
Knutsford had a first-rate teaching staff, young and enthusiastic – ‘I thought,’ said one, ‘that I could do a better job than my teachers did for me’ – quite happy, for example, to stay after school for a curriculum development discussion. Mr Teasdale attended one two days after his wife had had a baby. But the teachers were frustrated by limited resources and poor staffing levels. Several have compensated for the fact that nationally falling school rolls have meant fewer promotion opportunities by writing text books. Although many insisted that concern about money came after professional considerations, most obviously felt underpaid, and wondered where the next generation of teachers was to come from. Some complained that the children were spoilt. ‘Left to themselves, some of these children wouldn’t have the wits to live in a shed,’ said one. He added: ‘Teachers are not appreciated. The public thinks that we come out of university with our heads full of stuff that will last us for forty years. Parents want a lot for nothing.’
Mr Ings, whose two younger brothers – one an army sergeant – earned more than he did, said: ‘I am worried that I am going to burn myself out. I get emotionally tired, absolutely exhausted. But we’ve all invested so much time in teaching, we can’t afford pessimism.’ Several said they were hurt by society’s stereotyped view of teachers. Maggie Jones, the head of business studies, said: ‘People make bland statements that teachers get thirteen weeks’ holiday and finish work each day at half-past three. Nobody sees what it’s like – the piles of marking that you’re still poring over at half-past nine. It gets on your brain, and you don’t switch off. I get into all sorts of arguments. We get blamed for so many things. Surely there must be blame for everyone.’
Miss Jones was one of several who did not resume taking sports sessions after the original teachers’ dispute. Plenty of sports were taking place, but a widespread staff attitude seemed to be that if something was worth doing it was worth being paid for. Another teacher said that if parents wanted their children to play cricket, they should enrol them in a club, and not expect the school to provide teachers and facilities. The experience of the Thatcher years had turned them vehemently against the Conservative government. ‘The school isn’t full of left-wing, radical Trotskyists, but you won’t find anyone prepared to be an apologist for Mrs Thatcher,’ said one senior teacher. A colleague said: ‘The mandarin class is totally indifferent to the state system.’ He suggested that instead of spouting ‘unthinking nonsense’, critics should come into school for a week. ‘That would dispel their worries.’ If we are to get good teachers, we will have to cosset them. A head said to me: ‘If you had an eighteen-year-old, bright in maths, physics, computing or technology, would you encourage him to go into teaching? My God, no. You could probably count the number of physics teachers in training on the fingers of two or three pairs of hands.’ Teachers no longer enjoy the status of revered community figures, equal in esteem to the vicar and the doctor. My grandfather, a Midlands grammar school head in the early part of the twentieth century, had enjoyed that kind of respect in his town. School then was still the source of all learning: now children enjoy positive influences like foreign holidays, but teachers also have to contend with the sad fact that many of their charges spend more time in front of television than in the classroom. A teacher wrote to me that the ‘lack of social status’ was as bitter as the ‘constant denigration’ in the press and the poor pay.
An educationalist told me that her 26-year-old mathematician son was already earning four times as much as he would have been getting as a teacher. The daughter of one of the senior women staff at Knutsford was paid as much as her teacher father within a couple of years of starting as a financial analyst. Joan Gregory of the Centre for the Study of Comprehensive Schools said: ‘Those in the schools are the only teachers we’ve got, and if we don’t pick them up and dust them down, then we’ve got troubles.’
No school can turn every sow’s ear into a silk purse: there must have been ‘Carols’ at Knutsford who have fallen by the wayside, and ‘Johns’ who failed to fulfil their potential. I was constructively taken to task by an Observer reader after the paper ran a feature based on my Knutsford visit. She described herself as ‘an old enthusiastic teacher’, and accused me of writing a ‘panegyric’. She pointed out that there was no side-stepping the hard work that was associated with academic success in selective schools. ‘Everything will be boring for adults who, when young, were conditioned to be entertained without effort or concentration,’ she wrote. ‘The satisfaction derived from learning by rote your multiplication tables, or three theorems or King Harry’s speech before Harfleur – and fearing the consequences of not having learned them – would, if still present in our comprehensive classrooms, just tip the balance in the matter of their survival.’ But I can see very few people as thoroughly exposed as I was – whatever their prejudices – coming away from Knutsford or a similarly well-run school without believing that such schools can work. With more resources, greater public and political support, and a full range of children, they might do magnificently. As a nation, we cannot afford for them to do otherwise.