A paper published last week in an academic journal called npj Science of Learning attracted an unusual amount of press attention. It looked at the GCSE results of 4,814 students at three different types of school — comprehensives, private schools and grammars — and found that once you factor in IQ, prior attainment, parental socio-economic status and a range of genetic markers, the type of school has virtually no effect on academic attainment. Less than 1 per cent of the variance in these children’s GCSE results was due to school type.
I should declare an interest, since I was one of several co-authors, along with the distinguished behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin — who first announced his findings about the heritability of GCSE results in The Spectator in 2013 — although I had a very minor role. The researcher who deserves the lion’s share of the credit is Emily Smith-Woolley.
I was surprised by just how tiny the effect of attending a grammar or a private school turned out to be. Last November I wrote a blog post for the education charity Teach First in which I pointed out that general cognitive ability is the best predictor of how well children do in their GCSEs, with differences in IQ accounting for more than half the variance and differences between schools — the money they receive per pupil, average class sizes, quality of the teaching staff — accounting for 10 per cent or less. That claim, which has been substantiated many times by education researchers, was considered so shocking by Teach First that it removed my post and apologised for having published it. Yet this latest research suggests the effect of attending one type of school instead of another is even more negligible than that.
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