Be thankful for comprehensives

 

Donald Hirsch	Monday 10th December 2001

The latest school survey is a blow to advocates of selection: mixing up social classes reduces inequality without harming overall results. By Donald Hirsch

Over the past decade or so, British schools have been transformed. On the one hand, parents have greater choice, and local councils have lost many of their powers to direct children to particular schools through the use of catchment areas. On the other, central government and its agencies have taken greater control, imposing a national curriculum, tests and inspections. The aim has been to raise standards. Have the reforms worked?

At first sight, the results of the latest international survey, carried out last year and published on 4 December, suggest they have. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment puts UK 15-year-olds between third and tenth out of 28 industrialised countries on tests of reading, mathematics and science. We used only to dream of such placements in the international education league.

The improvement may be linked not just to higher standards, but to a new way of measuring performance. This latest survey looks at how well 15-year-olds are prepared for life and for future learning, not through curriculum-based tests, but through written tasks that invite them to apply knowledge and understanding in the real world. This gives us more helpful results than the rather crude surveys that were around in the 1980s, which showed mainly that Japanese students were better than everyone else at calculating simultaneous equations.

Might Brits be good appliers of knowledge, living up to their reputation, along with other "Anglo-Saxons", of being pragmatists rather than theorisers? Possibly. Five primarily English-speaking countries - Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK - have done particularly well in this survey, while Germany was below average. And UK students scored highly on reading tasks that asked them to evaluate and reflect on texts, rather than on more technical tasks that asked them, say, to retrieve information. Here, they scored second only to Canadian pupils, and that by a statistically insignificant amount.

Thus the survey suggests that the incessant drive for "standards" hasn't quashed all imaginative thought. Today's teachers are given targets in the same way that Soviet farmers had wheat quotas, and the new survey found UK pupils more likely than any others to report that teachers pressure them to do well academically. The pupils, however, are still able to step back and reflect.

Yet the old Achilles heel of British education - class difference - is still there. The difference that social background made to pupil performance in this survey was greater in the UK than in all but four other countries. Britain's least privileged students managed to do respectably by international standards - only 13 per cent of UK pupils had poor reading skills, for example, compared to 18 per cent overall. But it is the middle classes who have really been pulling our results up. The quarter of UK students whose parents have the best jobs score higher on reading than their equivalents in any other country.

Free-market enthusiasts imagined that school choice could change all that. Allow parents to choose schools, they argued, and standards will rise, particularly for the disadvantaged, who will no longer have to accept inferior services. It didn't work out like that. School choice, along with league tables of test and exam results, did put more pressure on schools to perform well, but the big winners have been the schools with the most advantaged pupil intakes, not those with the best teachers. Parental choices are often based less on a school's educational quality than on the social qualities of its pupils. This makes education different from most commodities: with a few exceptions, such as holidays at exclusive resorts, we do not mind much who else is purchasing what we buy.

Nor is it only in class-conscious Britain that parents are concerned about who else attends their children's school. In New Zealand, schools that have a surplus of applicants have been able to draw tortuously shaped admission zones to keep out children who live close by but in less desirable neighbourhoods. Research there suggests that the chances of being rejected by a popular school are closely related to your social class and ethnicity. In France, everything public is officially equal and school choice is not a policy goal. The reality is that many parents send their children to subsidised private Catholic schools, and savvy middle- class parents use all sorts of wheezes to get their children out of undesirable catchment areas. A recent study found that, among a wave of middle-class gentrifiers who moved into the not-so-posh Paris suburb of Nanterre, parents were willing to go public only if others like them did so, leading to complex "I will if you will" types of social bargaining.

Parents who care about the homes other children come from are often accused of snobbery. But this latest survey shows that choice of school by social intake may be more rational than some commentators (including this one) have argued. It shows that there is only one factor more powerful than a pupil's social background as a predictor of his or her reading performance at age 15. And that is the average social background of the other pupils in the school. In other words, parents can improve their children's academic prospects by choosing a middle-class school.

But this does not help the system as a whole to improve, because not everyone can go to a socially above-average school. If school choice allows the children of pushy middle-class parents to cluster even more than they would otherwise, educational outcomes will become more polarised. Researchers in the UK cannot agree on whether choice has indeed caused more social concentration.

Yet we tend in Britain to overstate the importance of which school you go to. The new survey shows that, on average, only 20 per cent of the variation in pupil performance is attributable to differences between schools, against 60 per cent in Germany, which has retained a grammar-school-type system.

So be thankful for comprehensives. The new survey shows conclusively that you can level up and not just down. The predominantly comprehensive schools in the UK produce better overall results than mainly segregated Germany, while Finland, which has almost no differences between schools and some of the lowest social inequalities, has easily the best reading results of any country. The quarter of Finnish 15-year-olds whose parents have the lowest-status jobs have literacy levels as high as the average UK pupil. Though our education ministers and teachers can pat themselves on the back, there is still room for improvement.

Donald Hirsch is an expert on international education trends who is currently reviewing school choice policies