Theresa May's Mask Slips in Grammar Schools Discussion

After Monday’s announcement that Article 50 will be triggered on 29^th March, and before the horrifying scenes that unfolded around Westminster Bridge and Parliament Square on Wednesday afternoon, Theresa May had a brief window of opportunity in which to focus on running the country.

The NHS might be in crisis and the Scots may be making a dash for the Second Referendum lifeboats, but Prime Minister’s Questions at noon on Wednesday gave Theresa May the opportunity to promote her pet project: the repeal of a 1998 law outlawing the building of new grammar schools.

Jeremy Corbyn, these days the only leader operating out of North London capable of making Arsene Wenger look popular, pressed the Prime Minister on the wisdom of spending £320 million to open the floodgates for new grammars, when her government’s funding squeeze has already imperilled the finances of some 9,000 state schools. Reciting a letter from Eileen, a headteacher who has seen her staff reduced to purchasing their own stationery for primary school classes, it was a well-directed line of questioning from Corbyn, who looked re-energised by the latest round of internecine squabbling within the Labour Party.

Theresa May set out her vision for education on Wednesday

With Corbyn pressing the Prime Minister on whether budget cuts would result in “larger class sizes, shorter school days, or unqualified teachers”, May pointed to grammar schools as one of the “choices” that will enhance opportunities “for every child”.

After the Leader of the Opposition converted an open goal by querying the value for money of new grammars when existing schools are struggling to afford pencils and notebooks, May hit back that Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary and Shadow General Attorney had both sent their children to private school, while Corbyn himself had benefited from a grammar school education. In the Prime Minister’s eyes, this was “typical Labour – take the advantage and pull up the ladder behind you”.

May’s response was at first glance a stinging retort, and was cheered by the Tory benches, but her lunging attempt to expose Labour hypocrisy actually served to expose the utter folly of expanding the grossly outdated grammar school model.

Her tone, focusing on the “the advantage” of private and selective schools, removed the pretence that these schools can function as part of a “diverse” and universal suite of education options. Her words cleared the smokescreen of parental choice, and laid bare the fundamentally elitist agenda of her proposed reforms: grammar and private schools – with their advantages in teaching quality, funding and academic prestige – are for the parliamentarian class, whether they happen to be coloured red or blue. All other schools are to be consolation prizes.

Corbyn noted that even former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan (by comparison a progressive rose between the retrograde thorn thickets of Michael Gove and Justine Greening) couldn’t bring herself to support the proposals of her party, noting in The Guardian that “all the evidence is clear that grammar schools damage social mobility”.

More than this, however, May’s personal slights against the Labour frontbench offer a preview of British society once grammars have been reintroduced to mainstream British education: a new dividing line of privilege between the “academic ” (officer class) and the “vocational / technical” (proletarian) streams of schooling. It will be a society in which the middle class grammar school students will progress smoothly to Britain’s elite universities, accompanied by a cohort of working class quota-fillers for the PR managers to focus on, while the rump population can quietly shift to second-class schools and pursue second-class qualifications in preparation for second-class careers.
     

With contemporary Britain already bitterly divided along economic, regional and cultural schisms, the temptation to further divide the population by educational background must be resisted.