A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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In presentational terms, the most noticeable effect of not reporting unregulated international GCSEs in the measures of attainment is seen in DfE’s headline performance measure of the percentage of eligible pupils achieving five or more A* to C GCSE or equivalent qualifications including English and maths; the reported performance of affected schools is 0% on this headline measure. The absence of unregulated international GCSEs from the headline measure almost exclusively affects the published results of independent schools. We estimate that this issue might have affected the reported performance of up to around one-third of independent schools and the reported performance of up to around two-thirds of pupils in independent schools . Hitchens points to the declining share of Oxbridge entrants from independent schools after the introduction of the tripartite system: 62% percent before the Education Act 1944, falling to 45% on the eve of comprehensivisation in the mid-1960s. The representation of state (nearly entirely grammar) schools more than doubled in this period, from 19% to 34% (pp. 89-91), with the remaining places were filled by overseas students and students from direct grant schools.

Surely, some readers will criticise the author for failing to offer a solution to this great betrayal , and yet he does not because he admits that it is impossible. Hitchens also laments foreign language teaching which has essentially disappeared in state schools, aside from inadequate curriculums that cannot hope to elevate even the most exceptional students to fluency. Here he grimly echoes Melanie Phillip s’ All Must Have Prizes , perhaps the last serious book to confront similar issues almost three decades ago, which details how universities found students with A grade A-levels unable to translate basic passages. A key factor in the bipartisan betrayal of the grammars was the Conservative s’ failure to expand them in advance of the wholly predictable strain they would come under as the “Baby bulge” reached schooling age in the 1950s. It is astounding how this fact is almost universally omitted from increasingly irregular rows over the issue in mainstream media.However, this figure ignores the number of independent school pupils who sit ineligible iGCSE exams, which suppresses private school’s scores. The same summary document cautions that Next week, HEPI will be running a second review of the same book by a grammar school teacher that takes a different perspective on the arguments. Fee-paying schools continue to educate much of Britain’s elite. Only 7 per cent of British children are privately educated, but, according to a 2016 survey by the Sutton Trust, three-quarters of barristers went to independent schools; so did one third of MPs, over half of the partners at leading London law firms, and more than half of the editors of leading newspapers. Over the past 25 years, 60 per cent of British Oscar winners were privately educated, as were around 30 per cent of Oxbridge’s 2022 intake. It is striking that the book sees how hard individuals work at age 11 as a just way of determining their future, and views measuring academic potential as so straightforward that there is absolutely no reason to worry about the validity of such judgements. From the book’s perspective, you either believe education is for academic rigour, selection and knowledge or you believe it is for in social engineering in the name of equality. To protect academic rigour, it is insistent that we need to select people early and separate those who will be paid to think from those who will not. Anyone who dares suggest that such divisions might be harmful to society, or feels that determining people’s academic futures at such a young age results in a massive waste of human talent, are dismissed as deluded egalitarians. The book equally appears to have little time for anyone who wants an open education system in which people have chances to engage with knowledge at different points in their lives and find out how they can use it to contribute to society. Public debate usually frames education as an investment, and questions how to improve the quality of schooling so that today’s children earn more as tomorrow’s adults, or how best spread the investment between social classes so that everyone has the same shot in life. Hitchens’ book continues in that tradition, but I have presented enough information to show that education likely has little effect on earnings and that reorganising secondary education into grammar schools will likely not spread opportunity or boost the earnings of pupils who attend.

Taking leave of Downing Street in Oct ober, Liz Truss assured Britain that its best days were ahead of her. For our self-confessed cultural eulogist Peter Hitchens, they are long gone, not least due to the educational self-destruction detailed in his new book. There are few subjects these days that cause parents more stress than the education of their children.Reading the first two chapters one gets a sense of the depth of knowledge or research Hitchens can draw on. Any Zoomer or Millennial reading this is likely to learn a great deal about the history of the British left and the debate on academic selection which took place long before we were born. In his youth, Hitchens was a member of the International Socialists organisation (later the Socialist Workers Party), and he writes in the emphatic tones of a polemicist. He compares the closure of grammar schools, for example, to “the Dissolution of the Monasteries four centuries before”. But Hitchens also hints at the greater purposes of education - cultural transmission and the pursuit of academic excellence - as ends in themselves. He is on stronger footing when arguing these goals can be better achieved by segregating kids by ability. How can one be taught the English canon when slower children take weeks to grapple with Shakespearean English, or be trained to compare theories of history when ignorant pupils need to be taught the basic facts of the Tudor Dynasty and the Second World War over and over again? Hitchens also correctly suggests that grammars became an important issue under Harold Wilson because only a totalitarian regime could feasibly destroy private schools.

Hitchens never wanders into the bleary-eyed nostalgia the cultural right is routinely accused of. He mourns not for a pristine past, but a future that never was. Despite its shortcomings, Hitchens’ book reminds us that inequalities are found in other forms of education too. Are we going to stop well-educated people from passing on their combined cultural and social capital to their children? Are we going to prevent wealthy people from moving to certain areas so we can better manage the catchment areas for schools? Access to more rigorous schooling now relies on one’s postcode or wealth, which are innately connected, far more than it did when we still needed ration books.The Impact of Selective Secondary Education on Progression to Higher Education (HEPI Occasional Paper 19) Despite many of the poor arguments in the book, I actually support the reintroduction of the eleven-plus and grammar schools, albeit for different reasons.

These are not the only faults with the book. Readers are treated to Hitchens’ tedious inverted snobbery and numerous charges of hypocrisy levelled at politicians who send their children to private schools. He quotes a passage from a novel where an MP visiting officer cadets in the Raj asks who won the Battle of Plassey, and a grammar school boy amongst public school toffs is the only one who can answer “Clive, sir” (p. 81) as evidence of the positive and deserved reputations of grammar schools. But grammar schools (and by extension secondary moderns) were (and are) more numerous in wealthier areas of England , and the 25% weighting placed on grammar schools is an overweighting, as grammar schools outside of LEAs retaining the tripartite system draw from a much smaller percentage of the population. Hitchens admits that it is impossible to know exactly how Britain would function today if the grammars had survived. We can be almost certain that the potential of countless working and lower-middle-class children is being scuppered by the failed comprehensive experiment that leaves a third of Brits functionally illiterate. A key data point Hitchens relies upon, then, is based on corrupted data. Looking again at Table 3a of the same Excel file, we see that of the 71.7% of independent school pupils entered for GCSEs 64.2% achieve 5 A*-C grades (not necessarily including English and Maths) which equates to 89.5% of eligible pupils and exceeds the same statistic for comprehensive schools by 16.2% (69.3% of 97.2% is 67.4%). 2 A similar gap existed in 2006/07 when fewer independent schools used iGCSEs. And students from private schools dominate universities with high UCAS entry tariffs . The merits and failings of this book reveal a deeper paradigmatic shift in the right. Hitchens received his culturally conservative ideas from traditional institutions like the Church and the public schools which he attended. He’s unusual only in the sense that he never abandoned his once conventional beliefs due to the winds of change (apart from his interregnum as a ‘revolutionary communist’). He has since done more to transmit the knowledge and culture of Britain than probably any other public intellectual of his generation, and deserves credit for being an important link between his world and ours.in independent schools, pupils have continued to be entered for unregulated iGCSEs that do not count in performance measures and they have not been moved across to the regulated certificate versions.