Another Brick In The Wall

The stories in the news at the moment about selective education has made me ruminate on my Grammar school education.

I had the fortune to grow up in a town that had two secondary schools - a standard co-ed high school and a co-ed, no-fees grammar school. At the beginning of year 6 (I think) we all went and sat the 11+. I assume it was an optional exam, but it's not an option I can remember discussing. It was my first experience of a proper exam, all formally spaced tables in a large and alien hall on a Saturday morning. It terrified me. The stress of waiting to find out if I'd got in or not was ruinous to my mental health, as an already anxious 11 year old, but when I passed, I got one of the highest marks in the school. The following September, off I went in my expensive uniform clutching my expensive and heavy set textbooks that I never used.
Now, we didn't have a lot of money when I was little. We weren't on benefits because my dad earned a little too much, but that money was spread among a lot more people than is standard. We were very working class, and most of my friends' parents were horrified at this tall, sweary, untidy and hideous urchin befriending their special snowflake. Conversely, my mum absolutely HATED all the posh  friends I made. Until I was in year 9 or 10, I didn't have friends round very often, but neither did I make the friends that I kept for life until then, so no great loss.
School, for me, was something of a hideous nightmare. There was the bullying - daily do I give thanks that I never had to catch the bus to school. There was the bullying from staff, who occasionally joined in. There was the constant feeling of not being quite good enough. I have an old school report which says that I got 75% in a geography exam, and I was 22nd out of 25. This all got ramped up considerably running up to my GCSEs when all staff decided that the best way to get good results and finally beat Louth to the top of the county league tables was a campaign of demented terror. Every teacher became fucking Saruman, standing at the front of the hall, gravely intoning the awful fate that would befall those who could not be arsed. We might end up...poor.
I got 11 GCSEs. I went on to do five AS levels, but again was hobbled by a mixture of anxiety, discovering sex, and being taught in half my subjects by my nemesis. This teacher, in hindsight, was fairly innocuous and trying to get work out a woman who was far more interested in gigs and sexting and whose grandparents were dropping like flies. Alas that her main way of getting work out of me was to humiliate me in front of the class pretty much every week, in small ways like refusing to believe I had read a Nobel prize winning book in one evening, or just giving me the evil eye. I was never going to be a good student, but being taught by her meant I just didn't go to half my lessons all year. Then I got a B in her main subject, by essentially teaching it to myself.
But it was too late by then, I had given up, quit, and left after AS study leave. What I should have done was dropped a couple of subjects or switched to the other teaching group, but being teenage and grumpy and dramatic, I thought my only option was carrying on miserable or quitting. I had an idea I would go to college and become a nursery nurse, and even had a placement secured, but then my mum said I should stay at home and look after my sister instead. I agree, and also applied to do a nursing diploma at university, against some opposition from my boyfriend and family at the time. I was rejected, which fair broke my old heart. I ended up looking after my sister for over a year, and then moved away and got my first and only real job. The only reason they offered my shy, teenage self the job was because I'd been to Grammar school,

I'm still poor. I still ended up divorced. I still ended up on benefits. My kid's still disabled. I still live in a hovel. These are things that are supposed to be assuaged by a better class of education.

I mean, aside from getting a decent job by dint of being employed by a Grammar snob, I met my future husband at school. I learnt to write persuasively there, and I learnt to be intensely critical of everything, particularly myself. But my love of learning, of academia, of pushing myself did not come from school. That came later. I didn't go to university when my peers did, making me feel inferior, not to mention lonely. I remember going to a careers advice interview in year 12 and telling them I wanted to do a nursing diploma, and they stared at me aghast. Why not...go to med school? Why be a nurse when you can be a doctor? What sort of fucked up attitude is that? It is a blessed miracle I have a high-grade maths GCSE at all; there's no way in a thousand years I could get the grades for med school, even if I wanted to.

I now live in a city that doesn't have a Grammar, but does have a private school that takes a minimal amount of students on scholarships. It has twelve other mainstream secondary schools. There is fierce competition over which secondary school children go to, as there was in the area I previously lived in, where there were only three secondary schools and a private Grammar covering an enormous rural area. Our local secondary school is over the road, and I would no more willingly send my child to it than send him to a lion pit. That's my prejudice, my snobbery, but also based on its appalling GCSE grades. This is despite the fact that I KNOW that GCSEs grades do not necessarily equate to a good school experience. I was the most miserable girl on my throne of good grades.

The problem was succinctly put in a tweet I saw this morning from Professor David Andress of Portsmouth Uni: "What we see in the 'grammars' debate is an underlying certainty that it is impossible to educate everyone well, & a waste of time to try." It is so difficult to maintain any sort of standard in secondary education, whether because of appalling staff culture, the problems of academisation and having schools run as PR campaigns, or simply having too many students without motivation to try. Whichever area you live in, whether it be an area where having a two tier system is normal, or an area which is awash with average high schools, league tables are still used. Performance is still rated. Schools are compared by parents, who strive to get their children into the objectively best schools, hoping to give them a better start. Parents like the option of a Grammar school, not always because they are snobs or victims of class culture, but because they want to give their children a better education and they perceive that to be beyond the scope of standard high schools. Maybe instead of bollocking on about Grammar schools, the predominantly privately educated government needs to raise the profile and status of standard secondary education. Children do not deserve to be written off at the tender age of 11 because they went to the 'wrong' school, or failed to pass an entrance exam because they were stressed, or anxious, or upset about something else entirely.