For several years I lived in Harrow-on-the-Hill, a charming "village" that sits perched above the dull wastes of northwest London. One sight to which I never became fully accustomed was that of tall, confident teenagers lounging around on Sundays in tail-coats and striped trousers. Along with straw boaters, the formal morning dress is part of the uniform of Harrow school, the public school which lends an air of distinction to "The Hill." I used to tell myself that dress is a matter of no consequence, that variety is to be welcomed. But, to be honest, I never succeeded in quelling my doubts: a uniform so out of step with contemporary fashion seemed to reek of privilege. What purpose could so preposterous a garb have if not to establish distance and superiority? We are boys of consequence, it seemed to broadcast, who have nothing in common with those louts "down below" in the drab comprehensives of Metroland. Every six weeks or so, the same message was rubbed home in a different way: having great difficulty in driving home, I would discover that it was the beginning or end of term, or Speech Day, or some other function. On such occasions parents arrived in their hundreds and the narrow streets would fill with Mercedes, BMWs and Rolls Royces.
Such a tale may appear to be of little relevance. There are large variations in income and wealth in every advanced nation, and the disastrous experiments with socialism suggest that aggressive efforts to eliminate inequalities have far worse consequences than the inequalities themselves. But the story does say something important about Britain, and it is something unflattering. In Britain, the quality of a child's education-and, hence, of his or her life chances as a whole-still depends on parental wealth to a far greater degree than in other western democracies. Throughout continental Europe, the best education is to be found in the state sector. A wealthy German or Swiss family might want to send their children to private schools for snobbish reasons, but they will probably not do so because the local Gymnasium (in the case of academically-oriented children) will provide the best preparation for university. In terms of educational opportunity, it does not matter whether your father is the chief executive of Credit Suisse or a garbage collector. Private schools play a more important role in the US: in the big cities parents with money see little option but to educate their children privately, and the children of poor parents get a raw educational deal. But even in the US the private sector has nothing like the cultural and social influence of Britain's leading public schools.
Educational inequality in Britain is widespread. In its 1998 schools survey, the Financial Times found that 49 of the top 50 schools by A-level results were private: the lone state school, ranked 45th, was one of the few remaining grammar schools. The FT trumpeted the fact that ten state schools had made the top 100, against only seven in the preceding year. This is an impressive improvement if it can be sustained, but it only underlines the degree of inequality. Since only about 7 per cent of pupils are educated privately, the proportions would be reversed if opportunities were equal in the two sectors: 90 of the top 100 schools would be in the state, not the private sector. Another measure of the degree of educational inequality is that of entry to Oxford and Cambridge. While private schools educate 7 per cent of the population, they account for about 50 per cent of Oxbridge entrants, a higher proportion than in the 1970s (the latest figures show a small shift towards state schools). Studies also confirm that this educational inequality results in lifelong inequality: the products of private schools continue to be hugely over-represented in the most desirable occupations, such as medicine, the law, the City and the higher reaches of the civil service.
The inequality, moreover, is measurable not just in terms of academic results. Because Britain has a two-tier educational system, it remains the most socially stratified nation among western democracies. This may not be evident to people who have lived only in Britain, because we tend to regard features of our own society as facts of nature. But having lived in both the US and continental Europe, I can attest that Britain is still uniquely divided by class. In Britain a person's social rank is instantly identifiable in his or her accent and bearing. The products of public schools sound and act differently from their counterparts in comprehensives: the discrepancy is illustrated in the difference in bearing between Tony Blair and John Prescott, his deputy. The privately educated have a social ease and confidence which is lacking in most products of the state sector. These differences in personal bearing are just as important for future success as differences in the quality of academic education. Indeed, there are two factors at work. In the first place, those already occupying high positions, who tend to be drawn from public schools, naturally wish to hire and work with people like themselves-those who went to the same kinds of schools. At the same time, greater social confidence makes those who are privately educated better suited to leadership positions. Demand and supply factors thus reinforce each other, and solidify a class dominance.
Much of the purpose of a private education is to create an artificial difference in personal qualities, and hence a differential advantage in life opportunities. Aristocratic values, by definition, are founded on artificially established differences. If everybody looked and sounded aristocratic, there would be no aristocrats. But differences can be established only through different forms of socialisation. Britain sustains its peculiar class structure only because the offspring of the elite are mostly educated together in exclusive environments. The children at public schools are disproportionately the offspring of parents who attended similar schools. They are taught by teachers who also attended the same schools. Such schools then interact mostly with each other. Harrow plays rugby against other leading public schools, and its headmaster attends conferences of heads from schools like his, rather than from local comprehensives. Thus public schools, acting on behalf of a narrow social elite, create a society within a society, and one that is largely hidden from those outside the charmed circle.
Why is it that even at the end of the 20th century Britain is showing few signs of wishing to confront the social and economic inequality associated with its two-tier educational system? To try to answer this question, let us review three kinds of reasons which might be presented for accepting the status quo: "Old Tory," "Thatcherite," and "New Labour." The Old Tories will say that Britain's private schools-especially the Etons, Harrows and Winchesters-are the product of a long tradition which has generally served the nation well. On balance they do an outstanding job in educating the young, producing a large proportion of leaders in all sectors of life. It is a shame that only a small proportion of parents can afford the very high fees, but this is not the fault of the public schools, which do not wish to exclude anybody. Any attempt to tamper with such institutions could be motivated only by such base emotions as envy and class hatred. Would-be reformers might succeed in destroying some of Britain's finest schools, but there would be no winners, because the quality of education for the majority would not thereby be noticeably improved. Indeed, in the long term, the consequences would probably be negative, as happened with the destruction of grammar schools. There would be fewer men and women with the sterling qualities bred in such schools, and the nation's relative decline would accelerate. The public schools embody the wisdom of generations and it would be a crass error to imagine that reformers can improve on it. The only sensible course is to leave well alone.
Thatcherites, or market liberals, would be equally opposed to change, but for different reasons. They might agree that the class distinctions in Britain are unhealthy; they might also regret the inequality of opportunity associated with the two-tier system. But they would be frozen into immobility by arguments about personal freedom. In a free society, individuals must be permitted to establish private schools and to charge whatever fees they see fit. By the same token, parents must be free to send their children to the schools of their choice. If those with financial means wish to buy a private education for their children, that is their prerogative. It would be totalitarian-a step on the road to serfdom-if the state were to insist on monopoly control of education. Education is one of those unfortunate instances in which two values-liberty and social justice-conflict. But in the final analysis liberty matters more than justice, and it must be upheld whatever the consequences.
The New Labour defence of the status quo combines elements of both these two arguments. Tony Blair is doubtless sympathetic to arguments based on both tradition and personal freedom. But New Labour's main emphasis is on what it calls "practical politics." It would be pointless for the government to get into a fight with private schools, which it would only lose. The only practical way to reduce educational inequality is to raise standards in the state sector. Some sixth form colleges and some of the remaining grammar schools are already nearly a match for many top private schools. There is no reason why standards in the rest of the state sector cannot be raised. It is simply a matter of changing the culture and teaching methods. Britain's state schools were doing fairly well until the 1960s, but then lost ground because of horrendous policy mistakes-the adoption of lax "child-centred" teaching techniques and the abolition of grammar schools. Middle-class parents have been shifting to private schools only because standards have slipped in the state sector. If the state gets its act together, the middle classes will flood back and the private schools will find themselves under renewed pressure. The great social divisions depicted above will then fade away of their own accord. In a decade or two, British secondary education will look much the same as that in Germany or France. The reformed comprehensive will be the natural choice of all but a tiny cohort of harmless snobs.
None of these three defences of the status quo strikes me as acceptable. Old Tories fail to address equity arguments. And they misunderstand the true nature of tradition when they argue that it precludes change. If institutions are allowed to ossify, they are not preserved; rather, they decay. The elitism of the great public schools may have been defensible in the past, but this does not make it so today; other aspects of social and economic life have changed. The fact that no other country has elite institutions with such a pervasive influence on its social structure is a prima facie reason for thinking that Britain has got it wrong, not that the rest of the world is out of step.
Market liberals, meanwhile, are equally rigid. The educational divide cannot be solved by the uncoordinated free choices of individuals. Those who can afford to send their children to private schools have every incentive to do so. Unless checked, the present inequality is likely to become more acute. Market liberals are right to emphasise the importance of personal freedoms, but wrong to imply that there can be no trade-off against considerations of justice. Contrary to liberal mythology, the individual does not and cannot have an absolute right to do anything; the notion of "natural rights"-rights, possessed by individuals, that exist before the formation of a community-is "nonsense on stilts" as Jeremy Bentham remarked long ago. Rights and freedoms always have to be negotiated between individuals, rather than unilaterally asserted. In practice there is no alternative but to weigh the costs and benefits of different institutional structures as rationally and impartially as possible, aiming, through the exercise of democratic processes, to reach a solution in the public interest. It is true that some people benefit from the right to buy a private education, but those without financial resources undoubtedly lose; their children are put at a clear disadvantage. The losers cannot be ignored.
New Labour's pragmatic grounds for inaction are perhaps the least principled. It is implausible to believe that the educational divide in Britain will be bridged simply by efforts to improve state schools. Every government in this century has pursued this policy. The Thatcher government tried very hard in the 1980s to raise standards. The Labour reformers of the 1960s and 1970s are the butt of criticism now, but they were at least as committed and well-intentioned as today's Blairites. Why should we believe that New Labour will do better today, given that private schools lavish far more resources on their pupils and can attract teachers of high quality by offering larger salaries and more attractive working conditions? It is difficult to see how leading figures in the present government can retain their self-respect if this "business as usual" approach is their only answer to gross educational inequality. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are justified in declaring their support for markets and their admiration for millionaires. They have logic on their side when they argue that many of the inequalities in income and wealth thrown up by market competition have to be accepted: it is absurd to try to eliminate the differences that flow from variations in personal ability, effort and luck. But it is another matter to stand idle in the face of an educational system whose direct consequence is to load the dice from birth. How can they defend a system which gives some individuals a huge advantage simply because their parents happened to be wealthy? This inequality is not the unfortunate byproduct of the market mechanism. It is not the result of enterprise or productivity. Rather, it is a structural inequality which does not exist on the same scale anywhere else in the developed world. By all means encourage individuals to compete, but surely an elementary conception of justice requires that gross inequalities in starting positions should be reduced, especially when this can be done without threatening, and very possibly enhancing, economic performance.
The argument that "political practicalities" rule out any action bar that of trying to raise standards in the state sector amounts to a cowardly evasion of responsibility on the part of politicians who claim to care about social justice. I would agree that outright abolition of private schools is neither desirable nor feasible. Although draconian, such an act might have been possible in 1945, when the sentiment of national unity was overwhelming. But the misguided Attlee government opted to attack private enterprise rather than social privilege, and so it nationalised chunks of private industry instead of the great public schools. Had Eton and the rest then been turned into grammar schools, the whole postwar history of Britain might have been different. We might now have a non-divisive system of the kind found in continental Europe: certainly permanent secretaries and cabinet ministers would have thought harder about school reform if they had known that their own children's future was at stake. Without an escape route, the elite would never have abolished grammar schools or embraced untried educational techniques such as absurd new ways of teaching reading. And the state system would have benefited from the expertise of those then teaching in elite private schools. By now we would be benefiting from a healthier and less-stratified society, and, very probably, enjoying greater economic prosperity.
What might have been achieved in 1945 is not feasible today. But what is possible is a policy of encouraging gradual moves towards "open access" in the private sector. In the US, leading private universities have long followed "needs-blind" admissions policies: candidates for admission are assessed on their potential given their backgrounds, and quotas are set aside for underprivileged groups. The question of how to finance their studies arises only after the admission decision is taken. There is no good reason why such a policy could not be followed by Britain's top private schools. Some philanthropists are making efforts to promote a more socially representative mix of pupils both at the leading private schools and at Oxford and Cambridge. In the January 1999 issue of Prospect, for example, Peter Lampl describes the efforts made by his Sutton Trust to raise the aspirations of pupils at comprehensives and to encourage more of them to apply to Oxford and Cambridge. But as he points out, there is a limit to what such consciousness-raising exercises can achieve. What is needed is an attack on the root of the problem, which is that entry to the best private schools is dependent on parental wealth. With fees running at up to ?15,000 a year, the top private schools are out of the reach of most ordinary families. Lampl has proposed that the government should underwrite a scheme allowing the top 100 private day schools to select on a needs-blind basis, as do colleges in the US. This would mean subsidising the fees of pupils accepted from poorer families.
I believe that a still more aggressive approach is required. The government should say that it wishes all private schools, but especially those at the top such as Eton and Winchester, to broaden the social pool from which they select. Over, say, a ten-year period, such schools could be set the target of achieving a pupil mix which broadly reflects that of society at large. They would be able to retain academic standards by setting entrance tests, but in assessing applications they would be asked to bear in mind the prior educational opportunities of pupils. Applicants from state schools could not be expected to have achieved the same standards as those from elite prep schools. The government, of course, would have to pledge to pay part (usually all) of the fees of such pupils, who would eventually form a majority of the student body. Because the cost of education at private schools is considerably higher than in state schools, this would mean an increase in spending on education. But this would be an investment well worth making, because educational spending is too low anyway. Such a scheme would bear little resemblance to the old Assisted Places Scheme which allowed a few underprivileged children to attend private schools on a grace-and-favour basis, without doing anything to change the elitist character of such institutions. My proposal is far more radical. It would mean that every school in Britain would eventually take pupils from all social classes and in substantial numbers. There would no longer be schools essentially reserved for the top few per cent of the population. The foundation stone of Britain's divided society would thereby have been shattered.
I do not accept that such a reform would be "politically impossible." If some kind of "open access" or "needs-blind" admissions policy is rejected, the Blair government would effectively be saying that nothing can be done about the most pernicious source of social and economic inequality in contemporary Britain. The prime minister may have one of the highest personal ratings in history. The Labour party may have a huge parliamentary majority. The media may be eating out of its hand. The Conservative opposition may be in utter disarray. Nevertheless, even in these most favourable circumstances, the Blair government would be saying that nothing significant can be done to lessen social and economic inequality in the educational system, and bring about the equality of opportunity long ago achieved in almost every other civilised country. Indeed, the cause is so hopeless, on this view, that even to suggest reform is to risk being branded na?ve, utopian or plain crazy.
The kind of change that I am suggesting would not necessarily require coercion. Public schools would not have to be legally required to adopt a less elitist admissions policy (legal changes might be fraught with difficulties). The goal should be to create a climate of opinion in which they would want to cooperate with a determined government. It is difficult to defend social injustice when it is brought into the open. It would be fascinating to hear the headmaster of Eton or of Winchester publicly defend the present inequalities to which they contribute. It would be pleasing to know why such humane and cultivated scholars believe that the quality of education should depend so heavily on parental income. What would Plato or Aristotle have made of such a crude emphasis on financial wherewithal? The teachers and facilities in such schools are of the finest quality. But why should such resources be reserved for a tiny slice of the nation's children, those whose parents happen to be in the top few per cent of the income distribution? Don't educationalists operating in such an environment feel even the slightest pang of guilt? The policy of taking only the children of the wealthy seems almost to deny the essence and purpose of education, which should be open and inclusive, rather than closed and exclusive. Opening up public schools to all able children, regardless of parental wealth, would not destroy such schools but render them more relevant: an Eton which sustained the highest standards while reflecting Britain as a whole, rather than an elite stratum, would surely be a finer Eton, one of which even traditionalists could be proud.
To see why such a change should not be feared, consider the example of Oxford and Cambridge. Such universities are technically private, but are ultimately supervised by the state. The cost of fees comes mainly out of taxation rather than parental income, which means that they go a long way towards needs-blind admissions. Yet Etonians and Wykehamists actually like Oxford and Cambridge. They don't regard them as dreary places just because the state subsidises fees and supervises them. They don't all rush to the University of Buckingham because it is fully private. Why can't Oxford and Cambridge be a model for the elite secondary private schools? If it works for pupils aged 18 to 21, why can it not work for those aged 13 to 18? It is true that a needs-blind admissions policy in the secondary sector would increase state control over private schools, although such institutions would technically remain private and have considerable autonomy. There might, eventually, even have to be some regulation of fees. But some oversight and financing by the state does not necessarily imply destruction of excellence or tradition, as the example of Oxford and Cambridge illustrates. All that is necessary today to make reform possible is for the Blair government to show a little political will. Is that really too much to ask for?
What is politically possible is what people accept as politically possible. The great merit of the Thatcher government was that it had the courage to redefine what was politically possible. In the late 1970s, dramatic reductions in personal tax rates, privatisation of nationalised industries and reform of the trades unions were all regarded as politically impossible. They were made possible by the courage of individual politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson and John Moore. They championed policies in the teeth of opposition from Labour, the media, intellectuals of all stripes, and the chattering classes generally. In the process they altered people's perspectives-so much so that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown now staunchly defend many of the policies they themselves vigorously opposed in the 1980s. Opening up elite schools is an easier policy to sell than many Thatcherite policies. If the resources now reserved for 7 per cent of the nation's pupils were opened up to all of them, the majority would gain. So the question for New Labour is whether it has the courage to expand the realm of the politically possible. Unless it does so in education, its hopes of creating a society at once less divided and more productive are likely to amount to very little.
