Toby Young
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What are my alternatives? I cannot afford to send my children to fee-paying schools and I don’t want to move, so my options are limited. I could home-school them, but unless I want to become a full-time teacher that would not work out much cheaper than educating them privately. The best solution, it seems to me, would be to band together with a group of like-minded parents and start a school. Not a fee-paying school — again, prohibitively expensive, even if it was no-frills — but a publicly funded school.
Is that possible? The short answer is yes — just not the sort of school I want to send my children to. For instance, a group of parents in Lambeth managed to set up a comprehensive that opened its doors in 2007, but I am not a big fan of comprehensives. From the age of 11 to 16 I went to two different comps and ended up with two GCSEs at grade C or above. It was only when I retook three of my O-levels and managed to get into a grammar school that I began to flourish. That’s the kind of school I’d like to set up in Acton — an old-fashioned grammar school.
Of the three main parties, the Tories have by far the most attractive education policy. They are proposing to make it possible for parents and other groups to set up ‘free schools’ — privately run, state-funded schools similar to the kind that have flourished in Sweden since the introduction of education vouchers in 1992. The problem is, the policy isn’t nearly radical enough. As things stand, home schools wouldn’t be eligible for ‘free school’ status — and, more importantly, neither could free schools select pupils according to ability. It seems very probable that the only selection criterion ‘free schools’ will be allowed to adopt will be proximity to the school — rendering them virtually indistinguishable from the academy schools that have been created under New Labour. According to a recent report by the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE, the exam results of academies are ‘statistically indistinguishable’ from those of comprehensives.
If I ran as an independent, it would be on this issue. My aim would be to apply pressure on the Tories to be more flexible when it comes to what privately run schools will be eligible for in state funding under their new policy. I wouldn’t be arguing for a return to a two-tier state education system, only that parents should be granted more autonomy when it comes to the sort of schools they’re able to start. At the moment, the Tory policy is, ‘You can start any school you like, provided it’s a comprehensive’ — and that is a recipe for failure. If I got elected on a platform of setting up a grammar school in the constituency, and did it, it would be politically difficult for a Conservative government (and the Conservative-run local council) to withhold funding.
A friend of Margaret Thatcher’s told me last week that she regards her failure to reverse the Labour party’s comprehensive education policy as her biggest mistake. Indeed, when he reminded her that more grammar schools had been closed under her tenure as education secretary than under her Labour predecessor, she began to cry. I believe David Cameron’s decision not to support grammar schools is also a grave mistake. He benefited from a selective education and no doubt his children will, too. Why shouldn’t children from less privileged backgrounds be given the same opportunity?
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