Diane Abbott, Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, has defended her decision to send her son to the £10,000-a-year City of London School in a variety of ways: that it was her son’s own choice; that other black parents would do the same and many now choose to send their children to be educated in Jamaica. She says that the state system lets down middle-class black boys just as much as it fails black working-class boys and that she has done right by her son.
As the London MP who publicly criticised both the Prime Minister for choosing the selective London Oratory School for his son, and MP Harriet Harman for choosing a grammar school, Abbott claims that while they seek middle-class advantage, she is motivated by the need to remove her son from a racist environment. Other black Labour politicians, including Paul Boateng, have sent their children to private schools, and former Tottenham MP Bernie Grant said, shortly before his death, that he regretted not doing so. But they did not publicly attack those who did. In fact it has been a long-established practice for Labour MPs to buy privileged education. One of the most expensive fee-paying schools in the country, North London Collegiate School, had the daughters of Hugh Gaitskell, Labour Party leader 1955; Douglas Jay, Home Office minister and Anthony Greenwood, Minister for Housing, all at the same time in the late 1950s. So much for Old Labour!
Oh, Ms Abbott!
Bourgeois criticisms of Abbott have mostly come from two points of view. One is that there are many good local secondary schools in the Hackney area which can show improving exam results with dedicated teachers and supportive parents. Brian Sedgemore, MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, said that by avoiding a state school, Abbott is denying these improvements and ‘was effectively telling parents that they had no hope of getting a good state education for their children anywhere in London’.
Other protests have come from those who see the creation of ‘sink’ schools being accelerated by a boycott by middle-class parents, so that the proportion of children living in poverty (on the free meals list), and with special needs, rises. Since school funding now depends largely on success in the league tables, funding is cut for schools with children in most need. Critics say that when parents of children who often happily attend local, mixed, comprehensive primary schools reject local secondary schools and choose fee-paying or selective education, their choice has a direct impact on others. Working-class children are stigmatised as ‘not nice to go to school with’ in the words of Ted Wragg professor of education who rages against the snobbery and prejudices directed against the children of the poor. Added to the disadvantages of poor housing and low pay, he says ‘we might as well stamp “leper”on their foreheads’.
Other educationalists say that the deciding factor in the educational segregation of the poor and the middle class is housing, not the middle class opting out of the state system. After all, less than 10% of education in Britain is private, although this is concentrated in some areas. Twenty years ago nine out of ten families moving to social housing were headed by someone in full-time work. Today the figure is just one in four. State housing, in which ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented, is now the last resort of very poor families with children.
The increasing polarisation of schools into ‘successful’ and ‘failing’ schools has been accelerated by recruitment from areas of concentrated social deprivation which are largely poor housing estates. By this housing criteria, areas like Hackney which have some of London’s most impoverished council estates alongside streets of the most expensive homes in the city, should have a socially mixed intake in local schools. Some do and reach national average exam results. Diane Abbott and her son could easily have chosen one of them. But she claims that white teachers in state schools are racist and we must deduce from this that she thinks white teachers in the private sector are not.
Racism
Diane Abbott who is a leading figure in the Socialist Campaign Group within the Labour Party and chair of the London Schools and the Black Child Annual Conference says she will continue to campaign to improve the school system for black children. She is absolutely correct to say that African-Caribbean children continue to be failed by the state education system. This year Birmingham City Council published figures showing that black boys are excluded from secondary schools more than twice as often as their white counterparts and mixed race children four times more often. This in a city where 43% of the school population comes from minority ethnic groups and where in the next 10 years there will be a non-white majority in schools. In 2001 Birmingham GCSE exam results of five or more A-C grades were as follows for boys: African-Caribbean 17%, Indian 49%, white 39%, Pakistani 31%, Bangladeshi, 27%. For girls: African-Caribbean 34%, Indian 65%, white and Bangladeshi 50% and Pakistani 42%.
Exam results in the top 10% of schools have been improving at nearly three times the rate of the bottom 10%. This is the context in which the authors of a detailed study ‘Educational Inequality – Mapping Race, Class and Gender’ 2001 concluded that ‘African-Caribbean and Pakistani pupils have drawn least benefit from the rising levels of attainment and the gap between them and their white peers is now bigger than a decade ago’. These same pupils were at an equal level to, or in advance of, their white peers at primary age.
Living on the frontline of poverty in a racist society takes an annual toll on the health, hopes and happiness of black children and their parents. Inequalities of income are compounded by inequalities of schooling, holidays, peace of mind and all the other advantages that contribute to the increased ‘achievement’ that the better-off section of the working class and the middle class regularly buys for its children.
Cash crisis
Education Secretary Charles Clarke (Highgate School – fees £9,000 a year), who was in charge when the funding crisis hit schools in the 2003 summer holidays, has a good idea. He is bringing in management consultants KPMG to train school heads to ‘manage their resources effectively’. This from the man who ‘forgot’ that schools would have to pay for merit-rise increases from their budgets! The cash crisis cost more than 20,000 job losses and the £120 million of transitional funding for the hardest hit councils will wipe out the next round of merit-rise performance pay for tens of thousands of teachers.
The main attraction of fee-paying schools is the small class size which Charles Clarke experienced in his own school days. When asked what they want from schools, working class parents put a high teacher-pupil ratio at the top of the list. With this government managing schools we can only expect class sizes to rise and teachers to leave the state sector in droves.
Abbott represents all that is rotten in the British Labour Left. Traditionally MPs and their hangers-on arbitrarily pick up good causes at home and abroad, network with elites in business, the arts and the universities, appear on platforms, speak with authority on behalf of minorities, and rummage around between the state and the private sector for the best bargains in services and other provisions for themselves. They use extra-parliamentary campaigns and organisations for their own electoral purposes but are tolerated by the ruling class because their main function is to block and divert the righteous anger of the poor. They seek power but when in power say they are powerless to make a difference because of international business or institutional racism. Anything and everything is shamelessly used as an excuse for doing nothing except having a well-paid career. Diane Abbott should be sent packing even though she has just been reselected. The political results of her hypocrisy will be to further lower the poll turnout in South Hackney.
Susan Davidson
FRFI 176 December 2003 / January 2004
