Ben Lowry: The Covid-19 restrictions will be used to undermine grammar schools in Northern Ireland

Luminaries who spoke up in favour of these outstanding educational institutions included Sir Ken Bloomfield, former head of the NI civil service, and Billy Young, former principal of Belfast Royal Academy (a fine co educational school, with a long reputation for an integrated pupil intake, and —like this newspaper — with a history that stretches back to the 1700s).

Latterly, almost no-one will speak in public for grammar schools. I know this because I have written about the threat to academic selection several times. I have phoned teachers or retired teachers from the best schools and had great difficulty getting them to defend the grammar system.

Partly this is because the threat to grammars was seen to have passed when Martin McGuinness ceased to be education minister.

But partly it is due to cowardice, in the face of the emotional arguments against grammar schools.

I have strongly supported the grammar system since my teens.

At age of 11 I went to a school where entry was decided on the 11+. Two years later I moved to a school based on a Great Britain boarding model (it did not start until age 13). I moved because a dozen of my older cousins had been to it.

I feel privileged to have been to both schools, excellent in their own ways. One was more focused on academic, one more of an all-ability school, which did what such schools should do: have a range of sport and activities, making it more likely everyone finds their niche.

But it is a big leap of logic to go from the notion that all-ability schools can be first rate environments for pupils to the notion that all schools should be all-ability.

Yet almost no-one challenges that notion, because they do not want to be seen to endorse selection. There is much talk about the child who loses out, which is a real problem, but little about the suffering of a bright child trapped for their whole schooling in a setting far below their ability.

Grammar school supporters also don’t want to be seen to be defending ‘bastions of privilege’.

It is true that the middle classes are more likely to get into grammar school, but the reasons for that are complex and include factors such as a family’s attitude to education. But background is only one factor. Many affluent pupils do not pass academic selection.

While grammar schools are an imperfect system, they have powered social mobility — above all schools such as Grosvenor and St Mary’s, once near each other in west Belfast, where generations of working class kids were put on a path to university and profession.

The brilliant Seamus Heaney, one of the great poets of the 20th century (in the news over the NI centenary), went to St Columb’s, Londonderry, which epitomised the success of grammars: its alumni includes John Hume, Eamonn McCann, Phil Coulter, Martin O’Neill, Sir Declan Morgan and the world renowned physicist Ray Flannery.

Grammars shook up the school system after World War Two in stunning ways, but sentimentality about academic selection led to them being scrapped in England, with disastrous consequences.

As became clear to me in my teens, if you don’t have selection on ability you have it based on wealth.

The present risk is twofold.

Covid is being used to undermine the whole system of exams, which are being depicted as themselves inherently unfair. If this succeeds everything from grammar schools to elite universities will be damaged, perhaps destroyed.

It will start with a deferral of one year’s exams or selection tests, and then move on to the notion that ‘teacher assessment’ is better.

I know of an above average pupil who attended one of NI’s best schools, whose grades were made mediocre by the huge grade inflation, when the government lost its nerve in downgrading. The school says it played straight while less rigorous schools over marked, yet no top school would dare say so in public. The family of this pupil feel that 14 years of hard work was betrayed.

It is only one illustration of a major scandal, yet everyone assumed that the only story last summer was one of poor children being at a disadvantage from grade assessment.

Peter Weir is doing good work to resist sentimentality in Northern Ireland, but he only has cover insofar as England pushes ahead with exams — which it might not.

The UK has 1% of the world’s population, but 17 or 18 (depending on list) of the top 100 universities —better pro rata even than America.

Yet such institutions are accused of being based on privilege, not merit, and are too scared to deny it.

We do not accept for five seconds the notion that sport, for example, should be all ability — and fans never will. Yet the range in academic ability is as vast as it is in sporting.

The idea that pupils with most potential should be taught together is in grave peril, and if it goes then all of society will suffer.

Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

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