Diane Reay
More than 50 years ago, Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden (1966) wrote in ‘Education and the Working Class’ that our educational system was one based on the principle of selecting and rejecting to rear an elite. It still is.
This hierarchical hyper-competitive ethos results in a damaging and dangerous neglect of the education of those the system rejects – it allows a focus on hothousing the privileged few rather than realising the educational potential of the many. This is why we have the largest social class gap in educational attainment in a recent international survey (OECD 2010) with less than 3 per cent of low-income English children achieving high levels educationally.
We have never had an educational system that attempts to educate all citizens. Instead we have not one, but three, educational systems. There is an elite, fast-track, lavishly funded private education system for the wealthy.
Meanwhile our class-segregated state educational system is not one but two systems. There is the better funded group of schools at or near the top of local authority league tables attended predominantly by white middle-class children. Processes of parental choice and residential segregation enable white middle-class parents to concentrate on realising the educational potential of their children by ensuring they are mostly educated in predominantly white middle-class schools, or else in largely middle-class top sets and tracks in more mixed schools.
And then there is under-funded, under-resourced education, often delivered by the most inexperienced teachers in predominantly working class, often ethnically diverse schools for the large numbers of working class children and young people who are failed by the system (Reay 2017). But this is not just about structures, it is about what those structures represent, and the values that underpin them.
This tripartite system is a consequence of our elite’s insistence on segregated privileged education to guarantee their social and economic reproduction. The top private schools enable the elite to be brought up in isolation from the rest of society, insulated from difference and diversity. They are bolstered by an ethos of effortless superiority which means many end up buying into the belief that they are cognitively and culturally superior to those with less privileged education.
But education should be a democratic right and an entitlement for all, not an advantage to be monopolised by the wealthy. Now, in the 21st century, the time has surely come for the country as a whole to make a decision about how we achieve an educational system that works for everybody, not just the privileged few.
This is a time when we desperately need an educational system that breaks down the barriers between social groups and is in all citizens’ interests. We have never had that! So this is not just about dismantling an elitist educational system, but centrally about replacing an outmoded divisive set of values that have pervaded our society for far too long.
The divisions our current educational system generate contribute to a destabilised fragmented society, and private schools are central to this divisiveness. They work against openness in society and sanction and reinforce hierarchy. By operating as a separate elite bubble, they have a powerful impact on the rest of our educational system and British society more widely. They reinforce a culture of ‘knowing your place’, of deference and intellectual inferiority among many of the 93 per cent who go to state schools.
The common sense in our society is that private schools provide a better education than the state sector, but OECD research shows that when children’s homes have equivalent levels of resources children in state schools outperform their private school counterparts by 20 score points on the Pisa reading test (2011a). The OECD also found that countries with sizeable private sectors do not do better in PISA tests (OECD 2011b) .
We must abolish private schools rather than just reform them because they perpetuate division, segregation and elitism in society. I suggest we follow Finland’s example and adopt the universal principle that all education should be free. As a consequence, our private schools would not be able to charge fees, most would be absorbed into a free state system, while others would wither on the vine.
But we also require radical reform of our state school system – which tries to model itself on the private sector with only a third of the private sector’s income (Verkaik 2018). Here it would help if we had comprehensive schools that were truly comprehensive. We need socially mixed schools in which different classes and races actually mix. Private schools epitomise individualism, competitiveness and self-interest in society. But in the 2020s we will need to work collectively to build shared goals, social cohesion, and a sense of trust and respect across social differences. Our educational system will never be one worthy of a civilised society until the children of all classes and ethnicities attend the same schools.
The abolition of private schools is an essential first step to achieving this.
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To watch Diane Reay debate reform of private schools at PEPF’s launch event in Manchester, follow this link [17:36]
Diane Reay is professor of education at Cambridge University. She has researched areas including school choice, boys’ underachievement, black supplementary schooling, higher education access, female management in schools, and pupil peer-group cultures. She is an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education.
References:
Jackson, B., and D. Marsden. (1966) Education and the Working Class. London:
Penguin Books.
OECD (2010) Pisa 2009 Results: Overcoming Social Background Paris: OECD.
OECD (2011a) Viewing the United Kingdom School System through the Prism of Pisa Paris: OECD.
OECD (2011b) Private Schools: Who benefits? Pisa in Focus Paris: OECD.
Reay, D (2017) Miseducation: Inequality, education and the working classes Bristol: Policy Press.
Verkaik, R (2018) Posh Boys: How English private schools ruin Britain London: Oneworld Publications
