The parallels between the government’s approach to Brexit and to its promised grammar schools are more than obvious.
Just as Westminster hacks are still trying to work out what Brexit will actually mean, education reporters are similarly attempting to work out what the government hopes to get by its promised return of selection.
Ms Greening cannot have her cake and eat it (as Boris promised we could do with Brexit): this idea cannot be presented as part of a modern, fresh take on selection, when it is as old as time itself
Are we looking at a “hard” grammar model of selection for all at 11? Or a “soft” grammar model that might involve, for example, a high-performance unit within a family of schools that gifted pupils attend for indeterminate periods of time?
As with Brexit, there are nearly as many visions of what selection might look like as there are Conservative ministers.
There are some - Theresa May included, if her party conference speech is anything to go by - who seemingly want a return to the past with the opening of a hundreds of spotted-dickand-rugger grammar schools across the country.
But there are others, especially in the Department for Education (possibly right up to education secretary Justine Greening), who think this is misguided at best. That education ministers are uncomfortable with the idea helps explain why they often respond to the chorus of grammar school criticism by insisting that they do not want the old “binary system”, but a completely different model, with fluid movement between school types.
(At this point, it’s worth noting that pupil places tend to be a zero-sum game - and therefore for every child “promoted”, you would risk one being “relegated”, which strikes me as a really terrible idea.)
That idea sounds familiar…
And now we have another intervention, this time from Ms Greening herself in TES. In an apparent attempt to ameliorate the most brutal effects of selection, the education secretary has posited that university technical colleges (UTCs) could be an alternative to grammars for talented kids who aren’t academic.
Ms Greening cannot have her cake and eat it (as Boris promised we could do with Brexit): this idea cannot be presented as part of a modern, fresh take on selection, when it is as old as time itself.
Indeed, as Mary Bousted of the ATL teaching union points out in our story this week, there can be no getting away from the fact that Ms Greening’s idea sounds very much like the tripartite system - of grammars, secondary moderns and technical schools - proposed in the 1944 Butler Act that ushered in selective education in the first place.
New or not, is it really Ms Greening’s vision that for every new grammar there should also be a corresponding UTC? Because if that is the plan, then what was already looking like a huge, and very expensive, reform programme suddenly becomes leviathan.
It is worth remembering that Rab Butler’s post-war reorganisation soon came unstuck when most local authorities couldn’t afford to open technical schools. And, thus, tripartite became binary.
And even if the entire education system could be redesigned into three tiers, and Butler’s vision were to finally reach maturity 72 years after its inception, would anyone really want it?
Germany has had a similar model for most of the post-war years and is now attempting to disassemble it, worried over its effects on both students and the country’s productivity - not to mention international rankings.
Brexit might mean Brexit, but before we plough ahead with plans to cut ourselves adrift entirely, perhaps we ought to check out what’s happening in Europe’s education systems - because what you find is that selection means selection, however you dress it up.
@Ed_Dorrell
