Britain: Rich pull away from poor in the classroom

In characteristic form, the Labour Party has achieved the opposite of what it claimed to aim at



The colonisation by the middle classes of the best state schools has led to a dramatic widening of the gap in educational performance between rich and poor children in the past year, new figures indicate. An analysis of government data by the Conservative Party shows that the achievement divide between pupils in the 10 per cent richest and poorest areas of England has grown by more than ten percentage points, compared with fractional increases of less than one percentage point in previous years.

The figures also show that the attainment gap between rich and poor continues to widen as pupils progress through school. At age 7, the performance gap between pupils in the 10 per cent richest and poorest areas was 20 percentage points in 2007. At age 16, however, the gap had more than doubled to 43.1 per cent, suggesting that far from being a leveller, school was increasing the disparity.

The figures underscore the massive influence of parental background on school success. More than 65 per cent of children in the wealthiest group achieved at least five good GCSEs, including English and maths, this summer but the figure for children from the poorest backgrounds was less than 26 per cent.

Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that the system favoured those who were fortunate enough, or rich enough, to live in areas with good schools. "If you have nominal parental choice over school admissions, but an undersupply of good schools, you will find that the sharp-elbowed middle-class parents get access to excellent schools, but those trapped in deprived areas do not," he said.

Mr Gove said that the dramatic widening of the gap this year, after much smaller incremental increases in previous years, was the result of the cumulative effect of this phenomenon. He noted that pupil performance in the richest areas had improved at twice the rate that it had deteriorated in poor areas. An additional explanation of the sudden widening of the gap this year may be the influx of immigrants who do not have English as a first language, he suggested.

Conservative plans to allow good new schools to open in deprived areas, with extra cash for children from more deprived homes, would reverse a growing social class gap, he said.

Alan Smithers, Professor of Education at the University of Buckingham, said: "Even where you have good schools in poor areas, like some of the academies, they are progressively taken over by ambitious parents."

The figures come after recent concern by Christine Gilbert, the Chief Inspector of Schools, that the school system was dividing children along social and economic lines. They show that in 2005 28.2 per cent of pupils in the 10 per cent most deprived areas gained at least five GCSEs, including English and maths, at grades A* to C. In the richest 10 per cent of areas, 56.2 per cent of pupils reached this level, giving an attainment gap of 28 percentage points. In 2006 the figures were 29.2 and 57.6 per cent respectively, with a performance gap of 28.4 percentage points. In 2007 the figures were 25.3 and 68.4 per cent respectively, with a performance gap of 43.1 percentage points.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said that closing the attainment gap was a priority for the Government. The Government had invested more than 21 billion pounds in childcare and the early years since 1997, so that poor children could get better chances in early life, she said. It was now providing one-to-one tuition and personalised support to help every child to achieve at school, regardless of social background. She added: "We can only tackle deprivation and poverty by changing the aspirations of young people, their parents and the education system."

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Schools and class hatred in Britain

Let's make a 2008 resolution, politicians and polemicists together. Let us renounce certain chippy clich‚s when talking about schools and social mobility. Let it become a mockable offence to refer - as Michael Gove MP did yesterday - to "the sharp-elbowed middle classes" who "colonise" the best schools. Let professors of education like Alan Smithers feel a stab of shame when they take an easy pop at academies getting "taken over by ambitious parents". Let columnists beware of jeering at the "stupid spawn of the rich".

Fun though it may be, it is all a wicked distraction from the main task: the improvement of all British schools - yes, all - and an absolute intolerance of the shoddy, the dull, the undisciplined and the woolly. The new figures hauled out by the Conservatives only reinforce a swath of others, which make it clear that, after ten years of Labour government, the gap between rich and poor children's attainment is actually widening.

But jeering at "sharp-elbowed middle classes" is a pure distraction technique, blurring the inconvenient truth that many of our schools are (if not actually chaos) intellectually unambitious and overburdened with irrelevant duties. It leads to such class-war fatalism as the ridiculous theory that places should be allocated by lottery: which implies accepting that some schools will always be rubbish, so let's spread the misery around by ballot.

No: it won't do. How dare a professor of education sneer at "ambitious" parents? Would he prefer it if they didn't give a damn? How dare a Conservative MP criticise conscientious middle-income parents as "colonists", and suggest that their "sharp elbows" deliberately disable the poor?

Is it wicked for parents to want their children taught well in calm surroundings? Is it wrong to do your best? Most families are beset by worries about mortgages and redundancy and recession; they are not making war on the disadvantaged, but just doing what they can. They may kick off if rowdy children cause distraction and intimidation or sell drugs in the playground, but that is not class war. Any private school head will tell you that disruption and drug dealing occur in every echelon of society, and that parents protest just as fiercely when the Hon Freddie gives their child grief as when Charlie Chav does.

There are many roots of our school problem, and middle-class elbows are the least significant. One - fading now, thank God - is the legacy of the early comprehensive movement, which reacted against the cruel 11-plus by denigrating cleverness, precocity and academic passion in favour of mixed ability and rigid age groups. Then there has been a 25-year mania of central governments to interfere with every detail of the curriculum and keep moving the goalposts, thus de-professionalising and demoralising teachers.

Meanwhile a well-intentioned new sense of children's rights has led, through timidity and confusion, to an absurd erosion of teachers' authority - so now we need actual parliamentary edicts to enable staff to confiscate mobile phones in class. At the same time the mishandling of numerous cases of false sexual accusation, with adults guilty until proven innocent, scared many men out of the profession, creating a feminised, boy-hostile atmosphere. And now we have evidence that unpredicted, unmonitored and unresourced immigration leaves some schools unable even to teach the newcomers English.

On top of all that, there is a terrible fashion for loading on to schools the responsibility for inculcating things that are not facts or skills at all, but social desiderata - citizenship, sex education, diversity. This is largely a waste of time: note that while sex education has "improved", teenage motherhood and abortion have climbed. It is now causing another ruction because of the equally loopy obsession with faith schools. Barry Sheerman, chairman of the Education Select Committee, is at odds with the Bishop of Lancaster who has (surprise, surprise) decreed that Catholic schools must not teach "safe sex" and contraception in a morally neutral manner, nor support Red Nose Day.

Mr Sheerman and assorted secularists are up in arms, asking why the state should fund "indoctrination" (do they think Muslim schools teach free love, then?). But they miss the main point, which is that this is froth. A State that really cared about the core of education, and its ability to raise and inspire poor children, would not faff about making schools teach citizenship and condom technque. If sex education is so important, force every 12-year-old to do a holiday course run by nurses. If citizenship is important, then support local youth groups instead of closing them down because their kitchen isn't up to scratch or they can't afford enough slow-motion criminal records checks. Let schools just teach - properly, to an exam standard that cannot be fiddled, and with a focus on real subjects, whether that means astrophysics or practical woodwork.

I do not have the answer to every educational problem. Nobody does. I just know that one place where the answer certainly does not lie is in sniping at imaginary "middle-class" elbows. Stop doing it. Leave the poor sods alone. If all the schools were good, they'd soon stop manoeuvring, with a sigh of relief. Worried parental behaviour - if indeed there is anything wrong about it - is due to the deficit in the school system. It's a symptom, not a cause.

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