George Walden, Tory MP, and for a time minister for higher education in the Thatcher government, has written an exciting, analytic, truthful and overdue book. I would like to compel politicians, vice chancellors, teacher-trainers and heads of schools to read and understand it. It is far from being a party-political manifesto. Its message will be relevant, indeed imperative, to whoever wins the next election (and Walden himself has announced his intended resignation from parliament, being tired, he says, of party politics).

After 1977, and the "Great Debate", writers about education, (myself included) believed that the time had at last come to talk about what should be taught at school, rather than in what environment (comprehensive or selective) or to whom (mixed-ability or 'sets') it should be taught. This felt like a liberation. We thought, (rightly, as it turned out) that if there were an established national curriculum all schools, whether maintained or independent, would follow it, though independent schools might add a bit more to the minimum. If we got the curriculum right, we thought, improvement in standards would necessarily follow, for everyone. In the years since then the manifest failure to improve the outcome of school for most children has been increasingly blamed on teachers, whose Rousseauesque (or Dewey-eyed) training was held to be fundamentally inimical to the discipline of proper education. Walden agrees with this diagnosis up to a point, and he has some standard (and standardly hair-raising) examples of sloppy sentimentality in the classroom and in the school prospectus. But he seeks a more fundamental cause for the failure of our education system, compared with that of other European countries, especially Germany. He argues that by far the most important cause is the existence of the independent schools. I do not think that the force of his argument can be resisted.

For as long as I can remember, there have been arguments for suppressing independent schools. (As long ago as 1938, the winner of a prestigious essay prize at Winchester, who later became my husband, argued for abolition. The entries were marked by Eric James, who wrote to the author to say he agreed with every word.) Such arguments were often based on social rather than educational grounds. (Walden speaks of the over-developed British sense of social justice, which, along with typical British anti-intellectualism, has brought our education system to its present state.) It was held to be unjust that some children should be "privileged" over others. The same arguments were deployed, with little variation, against selective-entry grammar schools. For the left, "selection" was a wicked word.

Walden's arguments, in contrast, are educational. The worst schools in the country are agreed to be comprehensive schools and some of their feeder primary schools; the best are almost universally agreed to be selective independent schools. The best-educated people are therefore those who have been to independent schools and who seek to send their own children to such schools. Equally, there are many who went to maintained schools themselves, especially maintained grammar schools, who now seek to send their children to independent schools, where selection still prevails, and where education is seen to be best. The best-educated people thus have only a theoretical interest in the maintained sector. And, in theory, on grounds of social fairness, comprehensive schools may still seem to be the best, despite their dismal educational record. To condemn comprehensive schools on purely academic grounds seems "elitist"; and no accusation is more damning. Both left and right, for different reasons, are compelled to avoid such a charge, for the penalty of elitism is that all one's arguments are automatically disregarded. It was fear of the charge of elitism that led many members of the House of Lords, including myself, to sit by in cowardly silence when the title of university was bestowed on all the polytechnics, indiscriminately. It was the elitist charge, compounded by that of hypocrisy that was the undoing of Harriet Harman, whose case Walden calls "Labour's Dreyfus Case", transcending, as it did, the individual, and taking on a symbolic role within the party.

ÌÇÐÄVlog

The coexistence of the two systems, the one to which most educated people aspire and the other, is, in Walden's view, disastrous. For one thing, consciousness of belonging to the inferior part infects teachers in maintained schools, however much they prefer, on missionary or political grounds, to teach there. Hence they allow themselves to be represented, as many as 200,000 of them, by the National Union of Teachers, a union that is of the old-fashioned militant Left, deeply anti-academic, seen by the outside world, indeed, as deeply stupid. Public and parliamentary respect for teachers as a profession is therefore nonexistent. Walden quotes the often-made comment "many teachers are doing a very good job". Reading those words, one can hear the patronising tones in which they are invariably uttered. Given the lowly status of comprehensive, nonselective schools, it is hardly surprising that the national curriculum, testing and the other consequences of the Great Educational Reform Act of 1988 are having only a marginal effect on the outcomes of schools. The effects are certainly not enough to outweigh the drawbacks of a system within which only 7 per cent of the population gets an education generally believed to be good. The hope that market forces would serve to improve schools always seemed fantasy and has proved to be such.

It is true that at least some of those schools that have chosen to become grant maintained are also becoming selective (or partially so). But I believe Walden is right to argue that a random development of selectivity will not be enough. It will improve the education of some children, particularly those in prosperous parts of the country or city, but will do nothing for the rest. He therefore suggests a more radical change, to bridge the gap between the independent sector and the maintained.

ÌÇÐÄVlog

His solution is in effect to reinvent the direct-grant schools, offering to all independent schools the chance to become what he names "open" schools. All children could apply to one of these schools, and entry would be strictly by academic selection. There would be free places and fee-paying places, the fees set by a means test. (The graduated fee scheme was one of the best features of the old direct-grant system, though it was little publicised.) Thus there would be a number of schools to attend which would be the right of any child, provided he or she displayed potential academic aptitude. No independent school would be forced to join the scheme; but Walden believes (and I share his belief); that most of the independent day schools, forced in the 1970s to choose between losing their academic character and becoming independent, reluctantly chose the latter, and would willingly return to something like their old status. Most ex-direct grant schools, such as the 26 schools of the Girls' Public Day School Trust, have struggled to keep their fees modest and to accept as many assisted-place children as they could, as well as to award as many of their own bursaries or scholarships as they could afford. They never wanted to be socially smart schools for the rich alone. Their whole intention was to spread academic education as widely as possible. And it is important to recognise how wide this spread was. It is also important to remember that these schools were not, and still are not, "academic hothouses" forcing children into precociously scholarly paths. On the contrary; probably the best work they do is to enable children who are only moderately high-flyers to fly pretty high, and with confidence, instead of being dragged down by an environment that expects them barely to rise above the earth.

Walden's hope is that if such schools as these were truly open, then there might be no jealousy between them and the remaining schools. But, of course, as he realises, this could be brought about only if there were to be a radical improvement in the educational standards expected and achieved in other schools. And so, at the same time as some independent schools were being offered the chance to admit all comers according to open, not covert, selective criteria, the rest of the schools would have to change, to raise their expectations and to offer a really good and respected education to those who were not, or did not want to be, academic. The second part of the book is thus devoted to a description of the present state of education, primary, secondary and tertiary, with suggestions for improvement.

Walden points to the city technology colleges as a kind of model for a new sort of secondary school, selective or specialist, in the sense that they would provide technical and vocational education of a high order; but he is rightly sceptical of the whole financial concept of these colleges. It is mere fantasy to suppose that schools could be widely financed by the economy; a crucial part of the entire system of education could not be dependent on the goodwill or good fortune of some local sections of industry. I suppose this is now recognised: at least we have heard little about any new foundations in recent years.

The fact is, and Walden does not deny this, that both "open" schools and maintained schools that were specialist as well, but in technological subjects, would cost a lot of money. Any method of improving education, once one has passed beyond routine abuse of teachers or pious hope, will inevitably be expensive. Yet it has to be faced that unless this money is spent, Britain will fall further and further behind, until it reaches the lowly status of an underdeveloped country, ("developing" would then be too optimistic a term to use).

ÌÇÐÄVlog

The greatest hope for an improvement in standards of education, then, lies in selection. And this old-fashioned, once-obvious truth is beginning to be recognised by both political parties. Thus the time may well be right for the introduction of "open" schools, and the simultaneous development of selection for technological schools, educating children, in the old phrase "according to aptitude", but without the shame of rejection at 11-plus, once and for all. (It would be essential for the success of the scheme that movement between schools should be possible - at least this is my view.) If all this were to come about, Walden hopes that more and more independent schools would voluntarily join in the system; and probably the feebler of those who did not choose to do so would wither away, from shortage of pupils, leaving perhaps only the wealthy giants on the independent scene. These would be so few that the system could survive them. Meanwhile those middle-class pupils who did not get into the open schools would begin to populate the rest of the maintained schools, bringing with them parents devoted to the overall improvement of the system. Thus the class-based assumption that the poor and only they must put up with rotten schools would at last be eroded. Such is the hope.

Walden has a very depressing chapter about higher education and what is needed to preserve its standards. How long, he asks, can we hope to base good higher education on indifferent schools? The answer is no time at all. I am not depressed by the thought that fee-paying (and a graduate tax) is necessary if the universities are to survive. I am depressed by the thought that what Walden sees as a threat is in fact already with us. He speaks of the "nightmare of the right", that A-level standards become eroded and the floodgates give way, and degree courses are no better than extended sixth forms. I can assure him that, here and there, but increasingly, the nightmare is reality.

But, on the whole, Walden's well-argued and brilliantly written thesis displays both honesty and that true educational virtue, hope. Indeed my only doubt is whether it is not over-optimistic. As one is swept along by the argument, it is easy to forget, for the time, those children who are so deeply deprived at home, so totally neglected intellectually that they would need almost endless "remedial" teaching to enable them to benefit from one of the newly selective technological schools. It is not enough to suggest, as Walden does, that our primary schools have often betrayed such children by their low expectations and sloppy teaching. These children need more than an ordinarily good, well-disciplined properly teaching school, if they are ever to benefit from learning. Nursery school could help many of them, especially those who are linguistically deprived, who have, that is, hardly acquired the concept of conversation by the time they are three or four years old. Others may need help for many years. We must recognise that, for some children, education must be compensation, both academic and emotional. To lay proper foundations will be, again, expensive. But without them, the whole superstructure will turn out an even more expensive ruin.

Baroness Warnock was mistress, Girton College, Cambridge, from 1985-91, and headmistress, Oxford High School, 1966-72.

ÌÇÐÄVlog