ABOLISH SELECTION DOBSON URGES BLAIR
“If Tony Blair wants a radical education policy for Labour’s next election manifesto, he couldn’t do better than promise to end selection” says Frank Dobson MP. The former Cabinet Minister was speaking at a meeting at the Labour Party Conference organised by Comprehensive Future at the Creation Night Club, West Street, Brighton, on Wednesday 29 September, 1.OO pm.
Mr. Dobson said –
“All my adult life I have believed that allowing schools to select their pupils is rotten and wrong. When I was a child I was one of the fortunate. I got through the 11 plus and went from my village primary school to grammar school. I was the first boy from that school to manage it. But I knew then that some of my class mates at my primary school were just as clever as I was, yet they didn’t get through. So they were denied the opportunities that I got.
“Despite all the anti-comprehensive propaganda, most parents send their children to non-selective comprehensives – they are called local primary schools. It is mainly when children are about to go to secondary schools that selection and unfairness raise their ugly heads. People who support the present system justify it on the grounds of parental choice. But selection is the reverse of parental choice – the schools do the choosing not the parents. They used to do it by means of exams – grammar schools still do. But, in many parts of the country, selection is making a comeback. Some are doing it by interview, some by ‘structured discussion’ – which is gobbledegook for interview – others by testing for aptitude which is gobbledegook for exams. All of them boil down to trying to recruit children who will be easy to teach and help the school’s exam results.
“Most of these mysterious new selection techniques have crept in through the introduction of City Technology Colleges, Specialist Schools and City Academies. All these in turn were introduced in the newly-sacred name of diversity. They have demonstrated an eternal truth about us English – we can’t ‘do’ diversity without introducing hierarchy. That’s especially true in education which for centuries was run by people forming a secret society, I think of as the National Exclusionist Front whose motto was ‘More means Worse’.
“So, I say to Tony Blair that if he wants a genuinely radical policy, which keeps David Blunkett’s promise of no selection, he could do no better than pledge to abolish selection and then do it. Unlike too many recent Government initiatives, abolishing selection would be right and fair and would certainly be popular. It would be part of the progressive consensus Gordon Brown advocated on Monday. Poll after poll shows it would be popular with parents. It would be popular with teachers whose advocacy we could do with at the next election. It would also command the enthusiastic support of Labour Party members whose hard work we depend on in every constituency, especially in the marginals.
“Our policy needs to start from the recognition that we have a duty to all the children in our country. For all practical purposes that means all the children living in a particular locality. That duty is more important than any commitment to promote a particular type of school. Discharging that duty inevitably means ending selection – because any form of selection by one or more schools in an area has arithmetically inevitable harmful consequences for all the other schools.
“The Government’s School Admissions Code of Practice is welcome, but these guidelines should be turned into regulations that must be complied with. Local education authorities, which it should be remembered are elected by local people, should then have the responsibility for drawing up local admissions criteria which comply with the national regulations. They should do this after consultation with parents, teachers, schools and other local organisations. All schools funded by the taxpayer should then have to operate their admissions policy in compliance with the local criteria. Any special concessions which permit City Technology Colleges, Specialist Schools, City Academies, Grammar Schools or other schools to select pupils, whether by law or just in practice, should be withdrawn. Grammar schools would therefore be abolished. In the meantime, the present farcical grammar school ballots should be ended.
“The present system which permits partial selection is a mess – an unpopular mess. At its worst it leaves many parents confused and feeling they have been cheated. Many of them are right. They often have been cheated. I detested the 11 plus, but at least it was straightforward. A child did an exam and either passed or failed. It was unfair open competition - competition in the raw. Selection now is much more sophisticated, more unfair and very furtive. It usually pretends that it is not selection at all – it has become the selection that dare not speak its name. Instead, it masquerades as ‘structured discussions’ and schools claiming that they are testing for aptitude not for ability. Now here’s a question for a structured discussion. Has Wayne Rooney an ability to play football or an aptitude for it?
“Whatever selectors may call it, I challenge anyone who has a chat with an eleven year old not to notice their accent, their form of speech and body language. I challenge them to deny that such observations will lead them to come to certain conclusions about ability, social class and general attitude to schooling. I also challenge them to deny that they will use such factors to weed out the children they don’t want from the children they do. If they don’t do that, why do they bother to introduce tests, to conduct interviews or to erect ‘structured discussions’? Haven’t they anything better to do with their time?
“And we all know who will get the worst deal from these systems – working-class children, that’s who. It’s their parents who will be least well informed, least able to navigate the whirlpools and shallows of selection. One of the objects of selection - conscious in some schools, subconscious in others - is to get nice, well-motivated children and to keep out the difficult ones. And it’s not just me saying that. The Chief Schools Adjudicator is on record as saying –
‘Where a school can choose children it will, left to its own devices,
inevitably, drift towards choosing posh children’.
“I couldn’t have put it better myself. It is one of Labour’s historic tasks to end the class-bias in our education system. That way, all our children and our children’s children will benefit from the huge improvements the Labour Party is helping teachers, parents and pupils make in our schools. So come on Tony, end selection.”
