But money is not everything. Many schools in disadvantaged areas do a good job on horribly limited resources and some do spectacularly. There are 50 state schools among England's top 200. The Robert Clack Comprehensive in Dagenham, Essex, is in the third most deprived borough in the UK, yet in 2007 more than 80 per cent of its pupils achieved five good GCSEs and one third went on to university. Only a few years ago it was deemed to be "failing", but now two thirds of applicants have to be turned away because 1,000 families apply for its 300 places each year. The headteacher Paul Grant certainly deserved his knighthood.
Yet there's no doubt that many state schools don't do well enough. Some blame the switch from selective grammar to comprehensive schools, seeing this change as motivated by class envy and ideological socialism. Interestingly, however, as Education Secretary in the early 1970s, Margaret Thatcher oversaw the greatest number of conversions of grammar schools into comprehensives. Like Labour voters, her Conservative supporters saw the unfairness of settling a child's whole future on the basis a single hour's IQ test at the age of 11. The basic aims of comprehensives were fairness and flexibility, to give every child an equal chance whatever their social background and whenever they matured. The current Conservative leadership has no intention of reversing it.
In general, however, comprehensives have not lived up to expectations. Unfortunately, early enthusiasts not only wanted to abolish the 11-plus exam, they also banned "streaming" for different abilities in subjects such as maths or French. Instead, mixed-ability classes were considered "best practice", the pious hope being that the more able youngsters would help their less able friends upwards. All too often, however, the two groups were not friends at all, with the less able disrupting the class so much that the talented were hardly taught anything. At the other end of the scale, not enough money was provided for more vocational training for the 50 per cent of children who were below average intelligence. These problems, coupled with poor salaries and poor resources in general, led to a haemorrhage of good teachers into the private system or other careers.
Nevertheless, improved teachers' pay and a new generation of heads, such as Sir Paul Grant, are gradually improving comprehensive education. In fact, working-class entry to university has doubled over the past 40 years. Unfortunately, however, this does not represent a doubling of their achievement, but simply the conversion of the old polytechnics into universities. In 1950, approximately 80,000 university undergraduates came from grammar or direct grant schools and 40,000 were defined as working class. By 2007, 250,000 of the tripled university intake came from state schools, and 80,000 of these are regarded as working class. But still only 40,000 got to the older Russell Group universities, which supply the majority of the professions, and only 10,000 (10 per cent of all working-class school leavers) came from comprehensives.
However, these low numbers are not the result of a deliberate middle-class conspiracy to deprive able working-class children of their rightful place in society. Nor is working-class "poverty of aspiration" the main cause. Most parents do try to find the best schools for their children. Unfortunately, a large proportion of families living in poor school areas can't get their children into the neighbouring better ones. Probably the introduction of educational vouchers, as recommended in the Milburn report, would improve parental choice and drive up standards. We will only increase the number of working-class entrants to the professions when all comprehensives are at least as good as the Robert Clack School.
