Egalitarians and meritocrats in education

Iam sitting in the passenger seat next to my mother and, 10 years on, she's driving me to school. The zig-zag of BMX bikes and huddles of young girls standing in the middle of two lanes of traffic are immediately familiar. As the stark, geometric roof of the hall looms into view, I feel a tightening in my stomach like on the first day of school. A familiar sign welcomes me to John Cleveland College in Hinckley, Leicestershire. "This feels very strange," says my mother as we draw to a halt next to three black- clad Marilyn Manson lookalikes sharing an iPod. "I never thought I'd be driving you to school again."


And I never thought I'd go back either. Since graduation, I have lived in London, working in politics and journalism. I was one of the few among my peer group who'd been to a "bog-standard comprehensive". I'd recently bumped into a young, privately- educated Labour researcher who tried to persuade me that "the left's biggest mistake in the 20th century was to abolish the grammar schools" - repeating the line given by Lord Adonis, the former No 10 education adviser and now education minister, that has ruffled so many feathers on the Labour back-benches. I disagreed and made the age-old case for comprehensives - that they gave opportunities to late developers who would be written off if they failed their 11-plus, and that it is healthy for everyone to be educated in the same place...."


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The article lead to this letter:


Sir, Rob Blackhurst's conclusion in his article about comprehensive schools, "A comprehensive rethink" (FT Magazine, August 27-28), that education policymakers face a dilemma in balancing the needs of the brightest with those of the majority, is persuasive.


A closely related difficulty is found in our universities, as a result of the policy of "widening participation" to under-represented social groups. It is leading to the development of a highly stratified sector, where very able pupils with access to good private education or the better state schools gain places at our most prestigious universities, while "new universities" whose academic standards are the subject of some concern, take far more applicants from the "bog standard" comprehensives.
At the heart of both problems lies policy confusion which originates from a fundamental philosophical difference between those who hold a meritocratic view of education and those with an egalitarian approach.
Meritocrats see education as a sifting process that identifies and nurtures the most able, who will become our leaders. A classic example of a philanthropic meritocrat is Sir Peter Lampl, whose Sutton Trust supports talented working-class pupils.
Egalitarians, on the other hand, wish to minimise the differences generated by social inequality and argue that as many students as possible should have the benefit of university education. Hence the present government's target of 50 per cent participation in higher education.
All the time we see muddled thinking and contradictory policymaking as the government and opinion leaders oscillate between these two approaches. The Tory party is clearly meritocratic, with its policies of a return to grammar schools and generous financial support for able working-class students at university.
It has been argued by some that the Labour party also needs to return to its meritocratic roots. Certainly if, as the government hopes, education is to be the salvation of our economic problems, both they and the business leaders who support them will have to identify more clearly whether they want a meritocratic or an egalitarian system. They cannot have both.
Yanina Sheeran,


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