I’m more than a
little confused about the education policy of the Conservatives in Wales. At one level, I welcome the statements made
this week that they don’t want to follow the policy of the English Government
in reinstating grammar schools, and that selection at 11 is divisive. But how much of a change in policy is this in
reality?
In 2013, they proposed
reintroducing the “best elements” of the old grammar school system into Welsh
education, but without re-introducing the 11+ exam. The meaning of “best elements” wasn’t spelled
out as far as I can see, but in essence, they were proposing a “dual education
system” where children were split into two streams at 14. “Best elements” seemed to amount to
“selection at 14”; if that isn’t what they meant, then I don’t know what they
were saying.
According to a BBC report, this was a proposal which didn’t
find its way into their manifesto for the 2016 election. However in the leaders’ debates prior to the election, Andrew RT
Davies was still making the same vague and unspecific argument for
incorporating the “best elements” of the grammar school system into the Welsh
education system. Again, if that did not
mean splitting pupils into two streams in some shape or form, then I really
don’t know what he was talking about.
What they did
say in their 2016 manifesto (albeit by implication rather than outright
statement) was that they were still wedded to one key element of the 2013
proposals, namely that there should be a new post 14 phase in education
allowing the promotion of a more skills-based approach. It sounded to me then, and still does
re-reading it today, as though they still intended to introduce some sort of
differentiation into two streams at 14, although it wasn’t made clear whether
their intention was to achieve that by pupil choice or through some form of
selection.
Nothing in
their statements this week says that they’ve backtracked on their post 14
proposals. My suspicion is that the
apparent opposition to an 11+ exam isn’t the change of heart as which it’s been
presented, and certainly isn’t actually opposition to selection at all. Merely changing the age at which selection
occurs or the form which that selection takes isn’t the same thing as opposing
selection in principle.
There is an
underlying ‘truth’ behind the argument for grammar schools, and that is that
not all children respond well to a particular approach to learning and not all children have a natural aptitude for all subjects. However, the jump from that to a selective
system (or “dual system” to use the Welsh Tories’ preferred euphemism) depends
on accepting a number of other much less well-evidenced assumptions, namely:
·
That
there is a particular age for all children at which this difference becomes
apparent
·
That
it applies to all subjects
·
That
it cannot be coped with in a single learning institution and requires that
children be split into two distinct categories.
What the
evidence inescapably shows is that, however ‘objective’ the tests used to split
children into groups may be, one of the prime determinants of where children in
a selective system end up is parental income.
It’s not a 100% correlation, of course – a fact which supporters of
selection twist into a suggestion that selection supports ‘social mobility’. But for those who are not selected, it
actually entrenches social immobility, and it invests more in the education of the
selected. I’m not convinced that
the Tories’ position this week actually moves them very far from their
traditional stance in support of that.
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