Private education is not just a consequence of class privilege but is a condition
for it. J. Reilly illustrates how discrimination is built into the system and
why, under New Labour, it is becoming even more pronounced.
According to a recent
report by the Sutton Trust, working class children have less than ‘one in a
hundred chance of reaching the top universities’. On top of that though a mere
7% of all children go to private schools they gobble up 50% of places at Oxford
and Cambridge. At the last count this ‘magnificent 7%’ accounted for seven out
of nine senior generals; 33 out of 39 most senior judges; more than 120 of the
180 officers graduating from Sandhurst; half of the 18 permanent secretaries
running Whitehall; and just under half of the 94 grade three civil servants
then aged under 50.Taken together it is such staggering proof of institutionalised
class discrimination that it absolutely dwarf’s any known statistics of discrimination
based solely on race.
“People tell you there
is no class system. Let me tell you there fucking well is!” (Ray Winstone, The Guardian, 14.4.00)
Together with existing
discrimination, which has remained more or less constant since the General strike
in 1926, there is further evidence to suggest, even the meagre gains made in
the interim are being rolled back under New Labour.
Martin Johnson, incoming
president of National Association of School Masters/Union of Women Teachers,
not normally a bastion of radicalism, puts the charge bluntly: “We are back
to selection, a more subtle form of selection which brings in the marvels and
mysteries of the middle-class housing market”. This, he went on, “is the policy
of a bourgeois prime minister with absolutely no understanding of how ordinary
schools work”. (The Guardian, 25.4.00)
What does selection mean
in practice? It is built first of all on a simple foundation: the intake of
children. Every pupil who wants to enter top girls school Rodean sits an exam.
So the private schools are selecting talent from the outset. But they are also
developing it. It is no secret why private schools do more for their pupils
than state schools. Money. “If the government want state schools to offer what
we offer they are going to have to spend on each child something much closer
to the fees that our parents pay” says Head Mrs Metham. Roedean is paid £10,
260 a year for a day girl, roughly five times the amount an average comprehensive
is given for each pupil. Be in no doubt such institutions do, and are designed
to reinforce class privilege and thus power. But if they are so bloody clever
to begin with: why all the extras?
“Pupils at a school like
Westminster” for instance “enjoy all the lavish benefits, tiny class, sizes
personal tuition, nightly prep, awesome library facilities and sometimes staff
who are cosy with the ways of examining boards” according to Guardian columnist
Decca Aikenhead. “The resources are” she reports “literally limitless - and
yet a third of Westminster A-level results last year were not Grades A’s”. Given
their vulgar advantages - “if already so gifted to begin with” it should, she
continues, require “a miracle to end with less than straight A’s but most of
them do” In 1996 for example,” Eton sent 60 boys to Oxbridge which sounds impressive.
On the other hand 167 boys didn’t get in. If they need all that help just to
squeeze a place at Bristol, they are plainly not that clever:’ (The Guardian,
26 3.99)
(Bristol, is ironically
one of the universities cited by the Sutton Trust, where the chance “if you
are from the less affluent half of the population is only one in 100” – London
Evening Standard, 10.4.00)
Though accurate, the
observation that the offspring of the rich are not always naturally clever is
also ever so slightly to miss the point. It is not the function of the hothouse
atmosphere she describes to “actually help individuals to realise their full
potential”. Even within these narrow confines egalitarianism is not at all the
goal. Of course private education is a consequence of class privilege, but as
the earlier statistics show, it is also an essential condition for its preservation.
In addition to the veneer of being born to rule; the notional sense of inherent
and effortless superiority which is equally carefully fostered, is believed
invaluable in sustaining the social and political status quo, particularly in
times of crisis. What, in political terms this amounts to is nothing less than
a form, though perfectly legal, of - minority rule - in perpetuity.
But how with democratic
government is it allowed to continue to happen?
Apart from the usual
smoke and mirrors, it is done by creating, as in housing, the national health
service and so on, a complete alternative to the comprehensive system. Once
established, money and resources are then systematically siphoned off to feather
nest the alternative. In the case of education, resources that would otherwise
go to the other 93% are ruthlessly plundered to exclusively benefit the children
of the rich and influential. There is in Europe at present, no other country
where private schools represent a fully-fledged alternative to the schools system.
There are now in Britain, no less than 2,300 private schools with an income
from fees of £3.2 billion. On top of that many enjoy charitable status and pay
no tax on income at all. Which in effect means that the rest of us are - subsidising
them. Clearly private education is bought, and paid for by the rest of us, in
more ways than one.
All of which allows a
school such as Eton to spend £20,000 per annum on a single pupil. Almost nine
times the £2,372 allowed for a pupil in a state school.
But this money doesn’t
come from nowhere. Simon Szreter an economic historian at St John’s College
Cambridge found that in the last 20 years Britain has fallen behind just about
every other developed country in its investment in teachers for the state sector.
“No other democratically elected government in the modern world” he comments
has dreamed up this master stroke of actually disinvesting in the educational
resources of the nation”. (The Guardian, 8.3.00)
What’s more during the
same 20 years, because the Conservatives were cutting taxes and putting more
money into middle class pockets enabling more of them to buy their way into
private schools, private schools saw that it was financially and politically
advantageous to invest probably for the first time, in actively courting a wider
range of pupils. Government policy openly concurred with this. Of course the
more under funded, the worse the state sector got, the greater the clamour among
the middle classes to be let in to the ‘safe haven’.
That was the Tories right
enough. So what has Labour done about it?
Just over 18 months ago,
on July 14 1998 David Blunkett, Minister for Education, announced a spending
bonanza for schools. “The government is providing an additional £19bn for education
over three years from 1999 to 2002”. As the budget for the entire educational
establishment in the whole of the UK in 1998 was only £38.3bn this was a huge
increase. This he went on, would, in contrast to Tory policy, “give everyone
in our society the opportunity to realise their full potential”. In reality
for the first two years in power Mr Blunkett actually invested less in education
than the Tories had.
So what happened to the
£19bn. In reality it never existed. Like New Labour spending on the NHS etc
it is all largely a conjuring trick. It works like this.
In year one he had a
rise of £3bn. In year two, he had a rise of £3.5bn but he added in the original
£3bn, which he would still be paying from year one, and called it a rise of
£6.5bn. Then he came to year three when he had a rise of £3.3bn. But he added
in the £6.5bn which he had already committed to the budget in the first two
years and called it a rise of £9.7bn.Then he stood back and added-up the total
- £3bn plus £6.5bn plus £9.7bn. Hey presto! a - £19.2.bn bonanza. But this is
not the end of the conjuring. Not even nearly. Not content with the conversion
of £9.7bn into £19bn, Blunkett and his ministers have indulged repeatedly in
a second kind of scam. This time the money is recycled through a sequence of
different announcements by different spokespeople, each time pretending that
the unveiling is a fresh investment when in fact its the same old money.
Panorama exposed not too long ago precisely the same trick
being pulled on the NHS. But that’s not all. One of Blunket’s proudest achievements,
the highly successful scheme to cut the size of classes for infants aged five
to seven, is also exposed as fraud. In 1999 the prime minister was pointing
to impressive results, with 100,000 more infants in classes under 30.What Tony
did not say was that children in every other bracket - nursery, junior, and
secondary - were all being taught in classes that were even more overcrowded
than when Labour came to power.
Even supposing Labour
had the money, would they invest in schooling the many rather than the few?
You have to seriously
doubt it. At bottom New Labour are middle class nationalists. Blair himself,
genuinely believes in, and actively identifies with the struggles and aspirations
of Middle England. With that empathy, comes of course a contempt for all who
don’t share those vanities. Bigotry apart, the simple fact is that the money
is not there. Rather than face up to it, they choose to pretend that it can
be found without the painful business of taking off the middle classes, what
Thatcher stole for them, from the working classes. Instead they piss around
with half-baked schemes, mouth egalitarian principles, insist ‘poverty is not
an excuse’ and attack teachers for not raising standards when the school in
many cases is literally falling down around them.
In 1991 for instance,
as many as 2,000 state schools contacted the BBC’s ‘Children in Need’ project
for money to repair buildings and hire more teachers. Almost a decade later
and a full three years in power New Labour have not reversed these cuts. Why?
Simply because estimates
of the cost of repairing and replacing buildings which were neglected during
the Tory years are estimated to run as high as £20bn.The same estimate coincidentally
being quoted for the repairs to council housing after two decades of deliberate
neglect. Rather than stump up, Labour has decided to offload council housing
instead. Off loading the cost of educating the children of the occupants of
the flats is something Labour would also love to do. Again as there can be no
talk of restitution in regard to resources, the only question that remains to
be answered is how?
One of the principle
battering rams used to attack the very IDEA of state schooling, has not been
the systematic withdrawal of funding. That was merely the outcome from the posing
of the wider philosophical question on whether or not the children of the working
class, needed beyond a rudimentary level, to be educated at all. Unless prepared
to take on board the reality of existing society, being at a fairly basic level
fundamentally unjust, then broadly speaking, everybody is already, with some
minor adjustments, in their rightful place. Any attempts to fundamentally alter
the status quo, was to fulfil the political ambitions of, in the contemptuous
words of Kenneth Baker, those who would “seek to use education for social engineering”.
On the eve of the Second
World War working class children were still entitled only to elementary education
to the age of 14, with 10% managing to graduate into county grammar schools
and the like. And that was it. Now the post war impetus to encourage the working
class toward higher education has stalled. Simply because if you deny the role
social justice played in education, you remove any logical justification for
universal schooling. Politics apart, it makes no economic sense at all.
Back in 1985 some bureaucrats
in Whitehall publicly flew that very kite. Might it not be a good idea they
ventured tentatively, if the school leaving age was dropped from 16 to 14.After
all, as they explained: “There has to be selection, because we are beginning
to create aspirations which society cannot match... if we have a highly educated
and idle population we may possibly anticipate more serious social conflict.
People must be educated once more to know their place.” (Red Action, issue
20)
American academic Charles
Murray author of the Bell Curve would certainly recognise the logic.
His highly controversial book published in 1994, is based precisely on the premise
that “our place in social pecking order depends on our IQ, which is genetically
and racially pre-determined and cannot be much affected by schooling environment
or class”. Another who not only agrees in ‘nature over nurture’ but is happy
to admit it is “the fundamental roots of my beliefs” (The Guardian, 20.5.00)
is BNP leader Nick Griffin. On May 9 under the title The Growing Threat of
the Underclass Murray spoke at the Church House in London in a debate sponsored
by the Sunday Times. Sharing the platform with him was Home Secretary
Jack Straw. Hundred to one against and counting..?
