Today’s Guardian (14 August p 32) has a stack of letters about the under-funded sixth-form colleges, including this from Rev Dr Patrick Miller, former principal, Esher College (1980-98):
Owen Jones is quite right (In Britain, young people are having their future stolen, 12 August), sixth-form colleges have been a threat to selective education from the outset. Hugely popular, evidence that the comprehensive ideal could succeed brilliantly, they offered a much wider curriculum than schools; students could be “academic” or given a second chance (the pass rate for “retakes” was almost double); all could escape the constraining regime of schools and be treated as young adults.
This could never be allowed, of course. Colleges should be kept in their place by various tactics: middle-class dinner parties were frequently salted with patronage (“One hears you are amazingly successful with the less able”); they were squeezed between selective schools and fully “open access” FE colleges. In most authorities they were held back from investing in the infrastructure needed for a proper vocational curriculum; little funding tricks were used, just as they clearly are today, in order to protect the establishment fondness for secondary moderns, fee-paying and grammar schools; funding, we were told, should be per student, but schools could cross-subsidise from other years.
Sixth-form colleges have been a notable success story for the past 50 years. Clearly, that can’t be allowed to stand unopposed. People might think they were evidence that a fair, non-selective education can be a great benefit to the country, as well as an enjoyable experience for young people.