Clause36
Education and Inspections Bill
12:45 pm
David Chaytor (Bury North, Labour)
No, I am not saying that. I am saying that theorganisation of education can play an important role in the extensionof social mobility; it is not the only contributory factor. There arewider economic and social forces that are probably far more important.My key point, however, is that the hon. Gentleman was inaccurate aboutthe LSE report; it does not conclude that the slow-down in socialmobility is related to the changes in admission policies or thedeclining numbers of grammarschools.
The Oppositionwill also quote at length from the league tables, and they have manyopportunities to do so. I imagine that they have teams of researcherstrawling through them to examine the GCSE, A-level and value-addedscores in many of our selective schools. It does not come as a surpriseto me—I do not think that it will surprise many Committeemembers—that schools that admit children with the highest levelperformance at age 11 are likely to produce children with the highestlevel of performance at 16 or 18. Similarly, it is not a surprise thatthe value-added scores in some selective schools are particularly good.Clearly, if the intake is full of young people who have the greatconfidence boost from knowing that they successfully passed a test toget into their secondary school, that will obviously increase theirexisting high levels of motivation even further, making it easier toteach and stretch them. The league table results—even thevalue-added results of individual schools—are not directlyrelevant to the wider debate about the basic organising principles ofhow we allocate children to secondaryschool.
The otherclichÃ(c) to which the Tories always refer is the changing patternof entry to Oxford and Cambridge universities. Why we focus entirely onOxbridge is beyond me. The decline in the proportion of children fromstate schools over a generation was entirely the result of the direct-grant grammar schools opting out ofthe state system in the 1970s. It is utterly dishonest to draw anyother conclusion than that. They also refer to the work of Dr. JohnMarks, the leading intellectual advocate for their position. I shouldhave thought that John Marks is not entirely neutral in this debate,but I will return to other academic worklater.