Grammar Schools

Baroness Humphreys Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Humphreys (LD)]

My Lords, I begin by also thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and congratulating her on securing this timely and important debate. As a former grammar school pupil, a former teacher in a comprehensive school and a parent of two sons who attended the comprehensive school in which I taught, I felt that I might have some practical experience to contribute to this debate. I certainly valued my years in the local grammar school and appreciated the advantages that my education there gave me. But I was also very aware of the disadvantages my education bestowed on the pupils in the local secondary modern school. Failure to pass the 11-plus left many of these pupils having to deal with feelings of rejection and of having let their parents down. Sometimes, even, feelings against the grammar school pupils boiled over into open hostility and did very little for social cohesion in our small community.

For the majority of us in the grammar school, social mobility beckoned. Very few of us remained in our locality. We followed out careers outside our community and became doctors, teachers, head teachers, mathematicians, scientists, anaesthetists and successful businesspeople. But I would argue that social mobility was probably easier in those days because of the economic situation. Work was fairly easy to obtain; all sectors of housing were available to those in work and seeking a home; and mortgages were affordable, even to those on a teacher’s starting salary.

A comprehensive system of education began for us in Wales when one of the earliest comprehensive schools in the UK was opened in Holyhead on Anglesey in 1949. Now, every single school in Wales is a comprehensive. We have no grammar schools or academies and the Assembly’s Education Minister, Kirsty Williams AM, has recently pledged that there will be no grammar schools in Wales on her watch.

We in Wales acknowledge that performance in PISA tests has left us lagging behind our counterparts in England, but GCSE results in 2016 were more promising. This year in England, 66.6% attained five A* to C grades, whereas in Wales the figure was 66%. In England, 6.4% of pupils gained A* grades, with 6.1% gaining the top grades in Wales.

In Wales, there is an acceptance that we have to do better, but there is also pride in what we do right. When the OECD came to Wales to report on our education system, it had many critical things to say about it—many things needed to change. But the number one thing it praised was the fact we have a comprehensive system in Wales and that we are dedicated to it. International evidence shows that the best and highest-performing education systems across the world do not select their children. The Welsh Education Minister insists on making her decisions based on evidence, not dogma.

As someone who has seen comprehensive school pupils become doctors, dentists, scientists, teachers, head teachers, businesspeople, builders, plumbers, electricians, accomplished actors, musicians and artists, and all take their place in the world, I believe the comprehensive system, in the Government’s own words, has allowed them to go as far as their talents would take them, without having to attend a grammar school. All the pupils whom I taught studied all their subjects, except English, through the medium of Welsh, but they still attained careers in the UK.

The Government believe that they are responding to the call from parents for new grammar schools, but I contend that most young parents today do not understand the reality of the grammar school system. They have not yet had to cope with the failure of a child to pass the 11-plus or 13-plus exam. As my noble friend Lady Pinnock has said elsewhere, the headline should read, “Government to create new grammar and secondary modern schools”—for, inevitably, once what was known as the “crème de la crème” is taken from a comprehensive school or academy to form a grammar school, one is left with a secondary modern school and a system with all the problems that we thought we had begun to overcome 50 years ago. It is self-evident that selective schools give a minority of pupils a first-class education and a majority of pupils a second-class education.