The worst result

This week, the GCSE results envelope landed on doormats across the country. The results ought, on any rational basis, to shame the nation. Never mind how well or badly pupils may have done individually, taken as a whole the results point to a chillingly predictable trend for anyone in a comprehensive school. A pupil can look at their postcode, and see where it ranks in the government’s Index of Multiple Deprivation. If they live in a relatively prosperous area, they can be expected to have done fairly well. If they live on a sink estate, the odds are that they will have done badly.

Parents have long known about this link, which is why so many go to such lengths to rent property in more affluent catchment areas a year before their child is enrolled in school. But the full extent of England’s horribly unfair system was demonstrated recently in a study by the Financial Times. It plotted pupils’ wealth against their exam results, and found a near-perfect correlation. The richest can expect, on average, straight Bs in their GCSEs, while the poorest can expect straight Ds. Proof, if any were needed, that the comprehensive education system has become the greatest enemy of social mobility.

The shocking failure of the education system to give poor children the same opportunities as wealthier ones ought to cause national outrage. But what has political debate focused on this week? Sports fields. It is as if politics is now scripted by satirists. The Labour party has been trying to make political capital out of the Olympics and has taken to attacking the government over the fundamentally trivial issue of the sale of school playing grounds. As the head of the Harris Federation chain of schools points out in his letter on page 26, what matters is not the size of a school’s outside space but its access to sports facilities.