So Who’s Made a Grammatical Slip Now, Dave?

By ANDREW ALEXANDER

ANYONE who read this column in early March will have been unsurprised by the Tory U-turn on grammar schools. I recounted how Shadow Education Secretary David Willetts told me that grammar schools were no longer engines of social mobility.

But hadn’t the party hitherto proclaimed they were? He replied that the party had been ‘just saying that’, not meaning it!

We should be fair to Willetts. By instinct he is pro-grammar school.

But his ambition outruns his famous brains. Had David Cameron asked him to prove the need for more such schools, he would have performed the task with equal agility.

This is an interesting moment in Cameron’s campaign to demonstrate that he is a Conservative only in the sense that he wants to conserve Socialism, at any rate the Blair version.

Two aspects of the U-turn are intriguing, one ideological, the other tactical. The social mobility of grammar schools has always been demonstrable. If they provide less than they used to, it may well be because there are so few of them left in our inner cities.

There is also something repugnant in a Tory front bench so peppered with Old Etonians and public school products pulling up the ladder behind it. It smacks of a desire to keep the working classes in their proper place.

Or that would be so, were it not for the row breaking out in every part of the party. Two conclusions are possible.

Either Cameron was unaware of party feeling about grammar schools. He has never had much to do with them.

Or he knew exactly what he was doing and it was part of his campaign to drive out the traditional rank-and-file Tories from the party itself. I was told during the leadership contest that this was his covert plan, but I was very reluctant to believe that he could be such an ass.

you see, my informant said, Cameron calculates that these supporters, though they might abandon-their membership, will still vote Tory, having nowhere else to go.

Well, we shall see. The next election is a long way off. Other vehicles for dissatisfied Conservative voters may prove significant.

This apart, Cameron exhibits all the tact of a bull in a china shop in dealing with dissenters. He says they are deluded and selfindulgent, trying to make the party into a Rightwing debating club.

Such tact, such charm!

We of the great deluded are entitled to complain that we are also confused.

Having declared with one of his brains against grammar schools, Willetts announced with his other that the party was in favour of more streaming in comprehensives, i.e., selection by academic ability.

And specialist schools should go further in selecting pupils by ‘aptitude’.

He admits this is basically the same thing as ability.

How all this sits alongside the leader’s declaration against the grammar school principle of selection by academic ability would seem beyond explanation.

Unless his was just a tactical move, having learned by way of a mixture of opinion polls and focus groups that he was regarded as still leading the same old Tory Party, which he assumed to be a slur.

So he looked for a traditional policy to ditch. The grammar schools were conveniently to hand.

is something very odd about the current leadership’s enthusiasm for these small focus groups. Statistically, they are without significance. National opinion polls look at samples of well over 1,000 and still acknowledge a significant margin of error.

Another objection is that random selection can mean almost anything and these little groups’ views are always open to manipulation.

We can also take issue with the importance Willetts places on the significance of free lunches.

Grammar schools cater increasingly more for the middle classes, he says.

The declining take-up of free school meals shows this.

The issue is, in fact, complex, not least because parents try to avoid this ‘stigma’.

Research in Gloucester found that in the city’s four grammar schools, pupils from the most deprived areas took nearly 15 per cent of the places in one case, but the take-up of free school meals was only 1.6 per cent.

In another, those from deprived areas occupied 9 per cent of places, but the meal take-up was only 1 per cent.

We might note, purely in passing, that some comprehensives energetically encourage a take-up of free lunches so that they can claim that unimpressive exam results are explicable in terms of many children from poor homes.

JOE HAINES, once Harold Wilson’s Press secretary, said a shrewd thing to me recently, comparing Cameron with Geoffrey Rippon, one of the rising stars in the Tory Party under Ted Heath.

Rippon was suave, intelligent and authoritative, especially on the all-important medium of TV.

But close examination revealed little substance.

Had the opportunity and the task arisen, said Haines, a professional could have made Rippon Prime Minister in three months. But not in six.

The same, he said, applied to David Cameron, though with an adjusted and longer time scale.

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