Was the closure of the grammar schools really such a tragedy?

In 1959, the public (i.e. private) schools were responsible for 55 per cent of the Oxbridge intake. By 1967 they were down to 38 per cent, with the majority of places going instead to the grammar schools. Four years later Anthony Sampson welcomed how ‘the trickle of grammar school boys to Oxbridge has turned into a flood’, adding that ‘both in intelligence and ambition they compete strongly with the public school boys’. In short, a new, largely state-funded elite was now emerging to rival the familiar products of Eton, Winchester et al.

Yet at this very point, between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, successive Labour and Conservative governments were in the process of encouraging or permitting the conversion of most of the country’s academically selective grammars into non-selective comprehensives. But what if they had not? If instead this rival elite had continued to grow and prosper? No chillaxing David Cameron, no languidly entitled Jacob Rees-Mogg, no cakeist Boris Johnson, but a focused, industrious, unsentimental generation of meritocrats, able to take and implement the long scientific and rational view in the overall national interest?

Although Peter Hitchens does not quite go there in A Revolution Betrayed, he is in no doubt about the entirely negative consequences of what, with typical understatement, he calls ‘a transformation as shocking and swift as the dissolution of the monasteries four centuries before’. It is not that he is dewy-eyed about the grammars themselves, which he concedes were not only of varying quality but also had ‘something fearsome about them, with the whistle of the cane always in the background’. Yet he insists that ultimately what they were about was the pursuit of excellence, albeit sometimes within quite narrowly trammelled lines, and that accordingly something important – in essence, standards and rigour – was lost with their passing:

I think it is incontestably true that modern examinations are less testing than those of 60 years ago. I think it is also beyond dispute that modern universities have lowered the levels at which degrees are given.

At its heart, though, A Revolution Betrayed is a history book with attitude, not a polemic, and has much to offer about an undeniably fascinating and significant episode. For instance, how the postwar baby boom reduced the likelihood of getting a grammar school place, inevitably to considerable middle-class dismay; how Conservative politicians (arguably the true villains of the Hitchens version) picked up on the dismay and became notably tepid defenders of the grammars; and, perhaps most originally in terms of the historical debate, using personal testimony to show how the secondary moderns (for children who had failed, or not even taken, the 11-plus exam) were in evolving practice far from the lazy stereotypes of sink schools, blackboard jungles and factory fodder.

There are gaps. Although the book’s helpful chronology mentions that in 1963 – two years before Anthony Crosland, Labour’s education secretary, issued his famous/infamous Circular 10/65 urging local education authorities to go down the comprehensive route – the northern cities of Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Bradford had already decided to take that road, Hitchens is surprisingly incurious to dig deeper. He does not examine the circumstances behind those local decisions, made freely of any guidance from Whitehall. He also never quite gets properly to grips with the admittedly difficult question of parental attitudes. The historian Peter Mandler has recently claimed the existence of ‘a great social movement against the 11-plus’; whereas my own reading of the evidence emphasises working-class fatalism about whatever educational mechanism or provision was in place. We still await a fully satisfying, three-dimensional account of the larger story.

Such an account must deal with why the left had such sharply contrasting attitudes to grammars and comprehensives; and here Hitchens is at his most fruitfully provocative. ‘The egalitarians,’ he argues, ‘did not want ordinary people to go to schools which were conservative, hierarchical and Christian, imparting a traditional view of authority and knowledge.’ Instead, they wanted (in the disapprovingly quoted words of 10/65),

a school community in which pupils over the whole ability range and with differing interests and backgrounds can be encouraged to mix with each other, gaining stimulus from the contacts and learning tolerance and understanding in the process.

Yet on both counts, I wonder. Were not the opponents of grammars mainly motivated, at least in their own minds, by the inefficient crudeness of the selection process, by the misery (especially within families) it could cause, and by the glaringly unfair division of resources between the grammars and the secondary moderns? And was that 10/65 ideal – of a mixed community mutually learning about each other – really such a misconceived one? Michael Young is only a passing presence in this book; but the older I get, the more I admire The Rise of the Meritocracy, his 1958 dystopian satire about the dangers of a self-perpetuating elite – all head, no heart, and contemptuously remote from the journeymen toilers.

We all have bees in our bonnets. Eight years ago, after devoting my Orwell lecture to the private school problem, the first question from the floor came from Hitchens: it was about grammar schools. My own bee continues to buzz, and I struggle to understand why someone who, as Hitchens does here, describes private schools as ‘indefensible fortresses of money privilege’ remains so seemingly indifferent to doing something about them. Of course, it may well have been the case that the permanent growth of a grammar school elite would have done serious and lasting damage to the private schools; but, for good or ill, and as Hitchens reluctantly accepts, that ship has sailed. Whereas still in their heavily guarded harbour, and buoyant as ever, remain those unashamed vessels of privilege.