Every year, at the beginning of July, hundreds of boys converge on Gary Hickey’s school to sit an exam that only about one in six will pass. And every year the headmaster gets a somewhat disturbing insight into the things some parents will do to ensure their child gets the golden ticket.
It’s not at all unusual, apparently, when the bigger cars roll up to the gate, to spot personal tutors in the back, pushing their 10-year-old charges through one last 11-plus test paper. Parents whose children fail to get into this popular state grammar despite such cramming will often ring Hickey in tears; once a mother demanded that he write a formal letter berating her child for having failed, and expressing his disappointment that the child had not worked harder. (Thankfully, she got short shrift).
Touring the undeniably lovely Adams’ Grammar School, in Newport, Shropshire – full of friendly, articulate children working with quiet purpose – it’s easy to see why competition is fierce. But if Hickey gets his way, there may soon be a slightly different crowd at the gates.
As a comprehensive schoolboy who has taught in comps for most of his career – and whose own son attends one – Hickey is convinced that bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds are slipping through his net. Since being promoted from deputy head last year, he’s gone out to local primaries, trying to reach parents who can’t afford big cars and tutors, and who might see Adams’ – with its swimming pool and oak-panelled library – as not for them.
But crucially he’s changed the selection criteria, creating a catchment favouring local boys (currently just over a quarter of the intake) over out-of-towners – typically the children of doctors and lawyers and other professionals willing to trek in from Wolverhampton, Telford and as far as the east Midlands. (Unusually for a state school, Adams’ accepts some boarders). If it works, the pass mark for these children will be pushed higher. But the interesting part is how parents have responded.
First came forceful complaints and, more understandably, objections from a well-regarded local comprehensive that risks having pupils creamed off. When these measures failed, some parents resorted to cheating, applying from false addresses in Newport or houses they didn’t actually own. When caught, they were apparently more annoyed then embarrassed. But perhaps they didn’t think that morally it was so different from buying into the expensive catchment area of an outstanding comprehensive, or suddenly finding religion before applying to a church school, or any of the classic middle-class dodges.
What Hickey has bumped up against is a phenomenon that Richard Reeves, a former adviser to Nick Clegg and now a researcher at the Brookings Institution in the US, calls the “glass floor”: the ferocious resistance of successful professional parents to their children falling below their own level of achievement – even if, whisper it, their kids aren’t very bright.
In one paper Reeves identified a group of Americans raised in higher earning families who went on to become higher earning adults. Yet judged on their teenage test scores, 43% had been distinctively average performers, the sort you’d naturally expect to fall back down the ladder. The main thing that seemed to have saved them was going to college – which sits interestingly alongside findings from the Sutton Trust in Britain that the children of professionals are three times as likely to attend an elite university as working class children are, and that 27% of the disparity couldn’t be explained by academic performance.
Every university admissions tutor or selective school head has tales of rich kids coached, crammed and otherwise artificially hoisted over the line – and who often fail to shine, miserably for all concerned, once they’re in. But even scraping in still gives them a foot in the door: the “right” name on the CV, the lifelong social network.
Just as “glass ceiling” describes the invisible ways a male elite once contrived to keep women out, the “glass floor” describes the practice of essentially raising your own kids higher than their talents deserve, and thus unwittingly keeping other people’s kids out. If the rich but dim aren’t allowed to find their own natural level, then the poor but bright will find it even harder to do so. Talent will not rise if mediocrity prospers unfairly, and we will all be poorer for it. That’s the elephant in the room of the “aspiration” debate: not raising the poor up, but what happens when the rich don’t want to come down.
My trip to Newport didn’t convince me that grammars are the answer. (As I’ve previously written in this paper, I don’t buy that building a new wave of grammars would unlock social mobility – which to his credit is why Hickey invited me.) But the political reality is that grammars are here to stay; the practical answer is to ensure they do what it says on the tin.
Most grammar heads would probably define their purpose as meeting a specific educational need for children with a highly accelerated learning style. Those who don’t try to identify those children, who regardless of economic circumstances can’t sort sheep from expensively hot-housed goats, are failing in that purpose and should be held accountable for it. The obvious worry is that the sort of changes Hickey is making might have only marginal effects, but he struck me as sincere; I wish him luck. He may not have all the answers – but, frankly, nobody does.
Brighton and Hove introduced a lottery-style admissions system in state schools that, it was hoped, would help combat the fact that poorer parents can’t afford to live in the “right” catchment areas; yet a review suggested lotteries alone did not seem to help in getting poorer children into popular schools. The alternative is easing competition by creating more excellent schools, but impressive results in a handful of flagship London academies have proved hard to replicate elsewhere.
The new focus on early years and parenting is sensible; learning starts long before school. But if that debate isn’t to descend into finger-wagging about poor parents failing their kids, we need to reflect on the ways that richer parents indirectly hold other people’s children back. Or to put it another way: people who build glass floors probably shouldn’t throw stones.