Grammar schools are political marmite, loved or loathed depending on which side of the political divide you fall. Conservatives love grammar schools because of the private-school style education they provide for free; socialists loathe them because they stigmatise those who fail the 11-plus exam, and further embed class divides.
What’s rarely mentioned, however, is that when Labour tried to abolish grammar schools in the 1960s, it was to fulfil an election campaign to create “grammar schools for all”. The then Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson believed that everyone, not only the more intelligent, had a right to a first-class education.
Judged in principle, Wilson’s aim was praiseworthy. Grammar schools were not brilliant schools just because they were selective, but because they delivered a liberal education. As I describe in a new Civitas report, “Renewing Classical Liberal Education”, grammar schools characteristically taught a broad, knowledge-rich curriculum with subjects like Latin and poetry memorisation. They made use of internal academic streaming, house and prefect systems, prize-givings, mottos, hymn-singing, sports teams, badges, smart uniforms and strong discipline.
Grammar schools had arguably done this in one form or another for nearly one and a half thousand years: the first grammar school was established by Saint Augustine in Canterbury in 598 AD, making grammars far older than their fee-paying competitors, the public schools. It was only in the nineteenth century that most grammar schools became selective.
In enacting their abolition, Labour simultaneously embarked on a programme of comprehensivisation. Far from adopting the liberal curricula of grammar schools, the influence of progressivist ideology on comprehensives prevented their success. Key comprehensive education advocates like Robin Pedley despised the formal teaching found in grammar schools, and called for mixed-ability classes and “unobtrusive” teachers.
As a result, comprehensive schools shared almost none of the characteristics that made grammar schools great. In fact, comprehensives overwhelmingly subscribed to fashionable progressive ideas, including a child-centred education, limited discipline, limited academic streaming or setting, no house systems, and certainly no teaching of classical languages.
It wasn’t helped that abolition was done with a touch of spite: Labour’s private-schooled education secretary, Anthony Crosland, privately promised to “destroy every f***ing grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland.” The number of grammar schools quickly fell off a cliff. In 1947, as many as 38 per cent of secondary school children attended a grammar school. Yet from a peak of 1,298 in 1964, the total number fell to just 218 by 1980.
In an act of political defiance, several Tory-led local authorities launched protracted court battles to prevent their grammar schools from being abolished. By the time the Conservatives returned to power in 1979, and passed an act stopping abolition, it was mostly these staunch, die-hard local authorities that had any left. To this day, the 163 remaining grammar schools are over-represented in traditionally Tory counties like Kent and Buckinghamshire. They are, as Robert Peal points out in his book Progressively Worse, “historical anomalies from the political battles of the 1970s”.
There is, however, no reason not to retain the vision Harold Wilson misadventurously set out to achieve in the 1960s; a first-class education for all. As the knowledge-rich, evidence-based reforms of Michael Gove and Nick Gibb prove, serious improvements to schooling in England are possible. The OECD’s PISA world rankings show that English students improved from 27th in the world for maths in 2009 to 11th in 2022, and from 25th to 13th in reading across the same period.
What is more, the Conservatives’ free schools legislation led to innovative new schools. Most famously, the Michaela Community School in Brent, North-West London, achieved similar exam results to the nearby, fee-paying, Harrow School, partly by adopting a curriculum that teaches “the best that has been thought and said”. The West London Free School, co-headed by Robert Peal, aims to give children “the ability to participate in the great conversations that have been animating humankind for thousands of years”. These schools have only been able to thrive thanks to reforms passed less than twenty years ago.
It’s time, as Harold Wilson proposed, to make it the right of every child to receive a first-class education
But, as we argue in our Civitas report, there is further to go if classical liberal education is to once more be an entitlement of all. GCSE English Literature questions, for example, remain narrow and technical: in our research, we found that humane questions like, “show how two parts in this [poetry] anthology have charmed you with the beauty of their verse”, taken from the 1955 O-level exam, are no longer asked. Instead, the emphasis is on literary techniques (think similes, metaphors, alliteration etc.) with little space for pondering characters’ vices and virtues, or the revelations for our own lives that make great literature worth the effort of putting down your phone.
Reflecting our liberal education tradition, grammar schools emphasised a humane education that sought to initiate students into the “conversation of mankind”. We may have made some progress, but it’s time, as Harold Wilson proposed, to make it the right of every child to receive a first-class education. The way to do it is through renewing the liberal education tradition.
