For the past three decades, we have been told that British schools produce illiterates, that, after 11 years of education, something like 15 per cent of school-leavers are simply unable to read. I have never believed it.
It is one of those statistics (the proportion of people who have suffered child abuse and the proportion of males who have been convicted of crimes are others) that are bandied around. Too many people have an interest in such statistics being true: newspapers who want headlines, politicians who want to meddle, lobbyists who want money, or academics who want research grants.
I am not arguing that all (or even most) pupils emerge from school with adequate literacy for a world that is dependent on text. My point is that illiteracy as it is generally understood - the almost complete inability to read or write - is just about extinct in this country.
Now comes a survey of 15-year-olds in 28 industrialised countries, widely reported last week. The UK, far from being a country that produces inarticulate oafs, comes near the top in reading, maths and science.
Though Ireland just beats us on reading, we beat France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Austria and Denmark on everything. And only 4 per cent of our young people - against 10 per cent in, for example, Germany - fell below the most basic level in the reading test. “This does not mean,” the report emphasises, “that they have no literacy skills. In fact, most of these students can probably read in a technical sense.”
New Labour has greeted the results as a vindication of its school reforms. This must be piffle. The tests were carried out in 2000; Labour came to power in 1997. These 15-year-olds left primary school long before literacy and numeracy hours were revealed to our wondering eyes. The real point about this survey is that it tested children on the skills they will need in adult life, not (as previous international surveys did) on narrow aspects of the school curriculum.
So there never was a literacy crisis. Nor was there a crisis of comprehensive schools. Can it be a co-incidence that Germany, which has a selective system, does badly in this survey while Finland, Korea and Canada, which have fully comprehensive systems, are in the top few? Would the UK have actually done better if it did not still have pockets of selective education?
Politicians say that it is unacceptable for so many children from poor homes to fail at school. Well, the remedy, if you believe this survey, is in their hands. Canada, Korea and Finland have cracked it. The bottom quarter of their pupils, as measured by parents’ social status (their lower classes, if you like), actually have higher reading scores than the average for pupils across all 28 countries in the survey.
Moreover, the survey shows that the socio-economic composition of the school is an even stronger predictor of pupil performance than home background. Two children from the same family who go to different schools - one with posh children, the other with council-estate children - will end up further apart in their reading than two children from different backgrounds who go to the same school. In other words, genuinely comprehensive schools - that mix up social classes as the founders intended - are our best hope of ending the expectation that poor children will always fail.
Can anyone now explain to me why a Labour government wants to befriend grammar schools? Or why politicians have invented ever more ingenious ways to promote school “choice”, allowing the middle-classes to keep their children away from the hoi polloi?
Peter Wilby is editor of the New Statesman
