Tory Education Policy is Entrenching Privilege says Jamie Shaw, Wyre Forest Labour

The Role of the Baccalaureate

The English Baccalaureate, (five academic subject qualifications at GCSE Grade C or above), has been introduced into the ranking of schools in order to re-enforce the existing trend in English schools towards the principle of Selection. Selection is favoured by Tories because it justifies and entrenches Privilege. Their project is being directed, successfully so far, by the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, a Tea Party Tory of extreme right-wing views.

Traditionally, the English education system over-valued academic achievement, important though it is. The schools most associated with this type of education, public schools, most other private schools, and grammar schools, benefited in terms of their reputation, being seen as “good schools”, because it was from them that the overwhelming majority of university students came. Socially, they were, and remain, elitist, the great majority of their intake being the children of the Rich, or the middle-classes.

However, as the “knowledge economy” of the last fifty years expanded, these elite schools could not cope with the demands for a greater supply of Higher Education students. So there developed comprehensive schools, in which academic education, still over-valued in comparison with other types of knowledge and capabilities, nevertheless was part of a wider curricular provision. One of the achievements of Labour’s later-20th-Century governments was in proving that academic success to university entrance standards was not confined to a social elite. One of its achievements in 1997-2010 was the broadening the recognition of different types educational attainment and allowing schools to publish them as part of their record of achievement.

Alas, the latter is now to be removed. Thus comprehensive schools will face a triple bind : less vocational options on offer to meet pupils’ needs; less subjects deemed valid in rating the school’s performance; and a discrimination in favour of academic subjects by making the baccalaureate the yardstick of a “good school”.

Of course, public schools will be unaffected and will remain “good”. Other non-comprehensive establishments, including the un-necessary Free Schools, will concentrate automatically on the baccalaureate. Which leaves the state comprehensives, soon all to be “independent academies” and to follow the moral imperative our extremist leaders believe to be the virtuous driver of Progress, blind self-interest.

Governors and headteachers will soon realise that a “good school” is a school which concentrates on high baccalaureate achievement, will also soon realise that, as their own admissions authority, they can market actively for academic pupils from other schools’ catchment areas, so creating the market-place free-for-all which creates winners and losers, concentrates academic achievement in “good schools” and creates contempt for “failing schools”.

So, in modern form, English schools will select on the basis of academic ability, entrench the hierarchical view of society on which Privilege depends, and so blight the moral and social values of our educational system and our national life.

Jamie Shaw Wyre Forest Labour