Like a lot of people wobbling around the centre ground of British politics, I viewed the elevation of Theresa May with a certain amount of relief. She was bright, thorough, hard-working and capable. And she was not either Andrea Leadsom or Jeremy Corbyn.
But oh Theresa, what's this stuff about education?
Two quick points. Grammar schools suck in the brightest and best. Bully for them; but where does that leave everyone else? One of the biggest problems besetting working class children is that they are more likely to be brought up by parents who never got anything out of education themselves, and are less likely to be committed to its benefits. I know from my own kids' experiences that there is a strong anti-education ethos among some denizens of comprehensive schools. Bright, well-supported middle class kids are a modest corrective in such places. Diminishing their numbers would be a disaster.
And letting faith schools select more children by religious practice runs the return of grammars close for stupidity. Leaving aside the injustice (it's unfair to tell people that their children can't go to the local school their taxes have helped pay for, just because they practice the wrong - or no - religion), what does such division do for integration? It prevents it. Labour MP Angela Rayner stood up in the Commons and accused May of "Segregation, segregation, segregation". Given Labour's dismal record of encouraging multiculturalism that's galling to hear. But Ms Rayner is right. What Britain urgently needs is 20 years or so of kids of all faiths going to school together, falling in love, doing sport, going out clubbing, drinking cider in bus stops and all the rest.
Personally I would do away with state-funded faith schools altogether. When I put this to a Christian friend he said, "Yes, but you're forgetting that C of E schools are the last repository in society for teaching Christian values". Whether you think this is a good thing depends on your point of view; as a non-Christian I can value the immense contribution of Christianity to the Enlightenment whilst thinking that perhaps Christian values should sink or swim on their own. Certainly I think (and the Birmingham Trojan Horse experience bears this out) that Islamic schools are a catastrophe in the making (a family friend who works with the Government's Prevent scheme tells me he is very worried about radicalisation, which he says is breeding a society within a society; and this guy is staunch Old Labour with a lifetime's experience in social work).
I went to a private school (which, God knows, was like the Wild West in some ways), but I am not an enthusiast. Not even a Corbyn government would ban them (and I wouldn't want to live in a society so authoritarian), but their tax privileges are hard to justify. Private schools are not charities; not in a society where state education is freely available. They exist to provide safe haven and advantage for the children of the monied. Removing their charitable status would force many more bright, well-supported children into the state system. Those kids would cope, and their presence help the less fortunate.
Centre ground? Perhaps I've got so right-wing that I'm coming round the other way again. May out! Corbyn in!
