The first "free schools" will open later this year, part of the government's education reforms. Toby Young is setting one up, Melissa Benn is resisting at all costs
Toby Young is the founder of the West London Free School. Melissa Benn is founder of the Local Schools Network and a champion of comprehensives. So will Michael Gove's flagship policy boost standards, or lead to a two-tier system? Susanna Rustin hears the arguments.
Toby Young: In west London we want to start a school that is faithful to the original ideal of comprehensive schools, which Harold Wilson defined as grammar schools for all. At our school we want every child to study Latin up to age 14, and do at least six academic GCSEs. There's no reason in theory why this couldn't be done at a local authority-maintained comprehensive, but it hasn't been so far. I think the original idealism which informed the roll-out of comprehensives in the 1960s has, to a degree, curdled.
Melissa Benn: First, I think there is still a lot of idealism about the comprehensive system. Second, there are students all over the country who are getting a string of good GCSEs every year, including at my daughters' school, which is a local comprehensive of the kind Toby usually disparages. We hear an awful lot about Toby's school, which of course is a complete compliment to your leadership and self-publicising skills …
TY: That sounds like a backhanded compliment.
MB: … but I think there are bigger arguments to make. What I find really difficult about what I call the new right's take on education, is that you use, rather disingenuously, the idea of comprehensives to trash the actual comprehensive inheritance.
TY: There's a kind of hypersensitivity about any criticism of state education. Anyone who draws attention to some of the shortcomings of our state secondary schools is immediately accused of running down comprehensives. The useful thing about international comparisons is that we can see that, compared with the education systems of other countries, we are plummeting. The people who suffer most from this are children from low-income families. Last year Oxford and Cambridge accepted more students from one school – Westminster – than from the entire population of children eligible for free school meals. And the solution to that problem is not to abolish Westminster, it's to create more Westminsters that all children have access to.
MB: I don't want more Westminsters!
TY: Why not? It's an outstanding school.
MB: There are thousands and thousands of children who don't want to go to Oxbridge, and their education matters just as much. If you look back to the post-1944 settlement, you cannot say that state education has been anything but a success. In the 1950s, roughly 10% of children got a handful of O-levels, and now most get some kind of meaningful qualification.
TY: The problem with the current system is that, by and large, in order to secure access to an academically rigorous education, you need to either be of the right faith, you need to live within the catchment area of a high-performing comprehensive, or you need to be able to afford to go private, and that's why social mobility has ground to a halt.
MB: I don't think that's true. Children in so-called ordinary comprehensives can get a good academic education. A really good comprehensive offers access to academic subjects, but it also offers access to other subjects, so that children of all types can learn together.
TY: I don't understand why you're so set against trying something new when you acknowledge that the present system has its shortcomings.
MB: Because I would like to see reform in a different way. First of all, we don't actually have a comprehensive system, so to say the comprehensive system has failed or curdled is not fair. The effect of private schools, grammar schools and faith schools is that a lot of other schools are dealing with a high proportion of disadvantaged children. I'm not saying poverty is an excuse for failure, but it does have a connection with educational outcomes, and it would be foolish to say otherwise. I would like to see more money put into those schools, the best teachers in those schools – and I would like to see all selection phased out.
TY: I think we would both like to see fee-paying schools phased out. Wouldn't it be a fantastic result if enough parents and teachers set up outstanding secondary schools to which all children had access, so that fee-paying schools quietly went out of business?
MB: But there's another agenda creeping in. Look five years down the line and we might see a two-tier system within the state sector, where schools like yours become places the motivated middle classes flood to – in effect, grammar schools – and other schools, including some academies, will be de facto secondary moderns. But unlike the grammar/secondary modern divide, which at least had the virtue of being transparently unfair, this will be such a complex system that nobody will be able to make head or tail of it.
TY: As I understand it, you would like there to be very little diversity – ideally there would be no independent schools, no faith schools, no grammars, no academies, certainly no free schools. There would just be one-size-fits-all comprehensives to which all parents would send their children?
MB: No! I think there should be more choice within schools and less choice between schools. You say you want diversity and list independent schools and grammars as part of diverse provision, but that's not diversity! That's what leading educational administrator Tim Brighouse called a "dizzying hierarchy". What I am against is unfairness.
TY: I think we have a common aim, which is to reduce unfairness in the present system. Your solution is to reduce choice, mine is to increase it.
MB: It's not some kind of Stalinist nightmare to provide a good local school.
TY: And that's what I'm trying to do! Why should the state have a monopoly over the provision of taxpayer-funded education? Why can't there be a diversity of providers? What's curious about critics of free schools is just how conservative they are. What they are saying is that if you attempt this particular reform it will have a catastrophic, devastating impact on the existing system, and that's been a conservative reason for resisting change for time immemorial.
MB: There are lots of changes I'd like to see, I'm afraid your school isn't one of them. But your use of the word "conservative" is interesting. Toni Morrison said, "sometimes some things are worth conserving". Conservative isn't a word I would normally use, but I think the comprehensive principle as originally envisaged, but updated, obviously, is a principle worth conserving.
For more info, see localschoolsnetwork.org.uk and westlondonfreeschool.co.uk