A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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There are other arguments in this book that feel contradictory or unconvincing. It is suggested that much of the egalitarians’ hatred of grammar schools came from a fear of ordinary people having access to schools that were conservative, hierarchical and Christian. However, the book also bemoans the significant role of church schools in the current educational system. Similarly, the claim that a school system based on academic selection would have led to the withering of private schools, does not fully cohere with the book’s view of a middle class which will do anything to ensure that their offspring maintain an educational advantage. That is unless it is assumed that the privileged will maintain their advantage in the face of such selection, which would totally undermine the claim that grammar schools had the potential to seriously challenge educational inequalities. Comprehensive Britain’ has laid waste to our once great universities, fuelled rampant grade inflation, and destroyed, perhaps forever, educational excellence and rigour. It didn’t have to be this way. For a short while, grammar schools offered the best education imaginable by selecting for prepubescent academic ability. This led to unprecedented numbers of working-class children joining the elite. If, in 1956, there had been an expansion of grammar schools to meet the baby bulge then this green and pleasant land would have been preserved and led to the abolition of nearly all private education. Instead, driven by the hypocrisies and bad faith of ‘the left’ and ‘egalitarians’, and the timidity and cowardice of the conservatives, this revolution was trampled under a communist approach to schooling: the comprehensives. No serious person can deny that this egalitarian education was inevitably of much poorer quality and led to spiralling educational inequalities.

Of course, selection across all age groups never ended at all. It has simply evolved into a more sinister species. Wealth is the “serpent” that corrupts the educational Eden , and the rich will always find a way to educate their own. Naturally, Hitchens largely ignores the Crowther Report of 1959, whose information was based upon much more comprehensive studies than those of Gurney- Dixon, including a detailed survey of all young men entering National Service between 1956 and 1958. In his conclusions, Crowther states flatly that “a majority of the sons of professional people go to selective schools but only a minority of manual workers’ sons do so” and he adds that “a non- manual worker’s son is nearly three times as likely to go to a selective school as a manual worker’s”. Hitchens even showcases the many stories of students who transferred to a grammar school after showing academic potential after age eleven. Of course, some bright children did not or could not transfer and were left disappointed by their failure to gain a grammar school place, but surely this is an argument that they should have been better expanded rather than scrapped?Grammar schools could more easily create a truly educated upper-crust of society than is currently possible with comprehensives. But the cultural transmission of our literature and history would require a national progressive government which is interested in using grammar schools as a nation building tool. Under a hostile government an academic grammar school could just as easily be used to inculcate Wokeness. 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.

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”. 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. The book’s focus on the harms suffered by talented working class pupils in the comprehensive system mean it has been warmly received by conservative pundits, who now offer a reactionary fusion of traditional merit-based conservatism and the identity politics of the white working class. However, Hitchens omits any mention of heredity, makes basic statistical and evidentiary errors, and ultimately fails to make a compelling case that social mobility has declined as a consequence of the comprehensive system. Hitchens doesn’t appear to recognise that most private schools are also academically selective and parental income is just an additional selection factor, nor that these figures undermine the idea that private schools provide an unfair advantage to the children of the wealthy. They are also prima facie implausible. The citation directs the reader to the Department for Education report Revised GCSE and Equivalent Results in England: 2014 to 2015 . The summary document cites slightly different figures to Hitchens, so we’re left to search through the nine Excel files for the statistics he’s referencing. In Main National Tables, Table 3b, we find the relevant figures for grammar, comprehensive, and all mainstream state schools. The figure for independent schools does not appear anywhere here, but it does appear in a HoC briefing paper which quotes the same source, so I will grant Hitchens the benefit of the doubt.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. There are too many examples to list, but his finest instance of misuse of statistics is when Hitchens argues ‘grammar schools greatly outdistance both comprehensive and private secondary schools’ and ‘the difference between comprehensives as a whole and private schools as a whole’ is ‘slight’ and cites figures that the percentage of students achieving 5 A*-C grades including English and Maths at GCSE are 96.7%, 56.7% and 58.1% for grammar, comprehensive and private schools respectively. Hitchens’ conclusion is that ‘selection by ability produces results far better than covert selection by parental wealth or religion’ (p. 95). 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. 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

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? 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. 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. Rather embarrassingly, Hitchens references a 1983 report that showed these intended “paradises of self-expression” still managing to academically outperform their comprehensive successors. This should put to bed the fear-mongering swathes of the comprehensive faithful still deploy about the SecMods in an attempt to dismiss the merits of selections.

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I went on to to teach in Comprehensives, for seven years, in East London, leaving to become a Chartered Certified Accountant in the Oil & Gas industry, and, owing to the paucity of education I encountered as a schoolteacher, I selected, by income, to put my own children through private schools, namely, Dulwich College and Alleyn's, (as I was not prepared to entrust their education to the state, for which my children remain ungrateful, indifferent to, and oblivious of what they avoided) where they both succeeded, academically, as far as the watered down syllabi allowed, with one of them graduating from a Russell Group University (Leeds), and the other eschewing university (which I think is a very good decision for most young adults today, particularly if it's not a Russell Group one), and relies on his well rounded social skills to make his way, along with a raft of mainly A and A* Grade GCSE O' and A' Levels. 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? As will be clear, this is an angry book. However, while it is full of righteous anger, it is not completely clear what was key to this unparalleled, although largely undefined, educational superiority of the grammar schools of the 1950s. At times, it appears to be academic selection but, at others, critics of grammar schools are accused of blurring ‘the boundary between dislike of examinations and the dislike of the schools that relied on them’ (p.163). So maybe it was about the schools themselves? But, no, the book is ‘not an argument for grammar schools as such’ (p.111). In other places, it seems to be the size of schools that is key, with both grammars and secondary moderns being seen as successful because they were much smaller than comprehensives. He also references the 1983 Standards in English Schools report by Caroline Cox and John Marks which, according to Hitchens, ‘shows pupils at secondary modern and grammar schools obtained more GCE O-level results than pupils at comprehensive schools – both nationally and in the same social group’ (p. 86). It compares achievement between comprehensives and a weighted average of grammar schools and secondary moderns, and finds that this reconstructed sample outperforms comprehensive by roughly 15% of the gap between grammar schools and secondary moderns. 1