Bringing up girls: An interview with Melissa Benn
Melissa Benn. Photograph: Benjamin Mortimer
On the day Michael Gove ceased to be Secretary of State for Education, people filled the crypt at St Peter de Beauvoir to hear writer and education campaigner Melissa Benn speak about her new book on bringing up girls, What shall we tell our daughters?
The only daughter of Anthony Wedgewood Benn – the original ‘call me Tony’ Labour politician – Melissa Benn was outspoken as a girl, challenging her father on “division of labour within the household” and putting up signs in their kitchen asking: “Is there sexism in the Benn family?”
“It’s mothers and fathers who pose the greatest danger to their daughters,” she says. “When I started writing the book I wondered what the difference was between the girl who reads a glossy magazine and feels intimidated and unhappy about her body because of it, and the girl who can shrug it off and say ‘that’s just advertising’.”
The cover of her own book might prove as much of a litmus test as the glossies, featuring as it does a backlit black-and-white photo of a slim, semi-naked, implicitly teenage girl. How that happened is a question for John Murray, the publishers.
Taking risks
But as well as not to judge a book by its cover, what does Benn think we should tell our daughters? “To trust what they feel, to speak their mind, and accept that failure is a part of a successful life,” is her précis.
The act of telling is a joint effort between families and schools. Benn is full of praise for ‘failure week’ run by the Girls’ Day School Trust – during which pupils attend assemblies and workshops on the value of having a go and taking risks – and for the ‘oracy’ curriculum at School 21 in Newham, which has its own slots in the timetable to teach pupils how to use spoken language as a medium for argument and self-expression.
“Even a string of A-stars doesn’t make you someone who can stand up and argue, who can say what you think,” is her line on how girls’ ‘obedience’ – their greater desire to follow the rules and produce what is expected of them – accounts for better exam performance but lower pay.
“Men are much better at ‘leaning in’, sticking their head round the door and asking for a promotion.”
Traditionalism
The kind of education that inculcates confidence, creativity and emotional security in both girls and boys is, Benn says, under threat from a resurgent traditionalism in state schools, which emphasises the wrong kind of discipline. “If you want a progressive education these days, you’re more likely to find it in the private sector!
“Wealthy children are told, yeah, you can sit there and spend days thinking about building a kite when you’re thirteen, but that poor child in central Manchester or Liverpool, they’ve got to sit there just copying out their lines because they’ve turned up with their tie off-kilter: I don’t like that.”
It’s to Benn’s credit that she doesn’t park this criticism solely at the door of the man who had, that day, lost his job.
“Gove was one of the most erudite and excitable exponents of a particular view of what should happen in education. He may go, but the reform movement he represented and headed up – that’s still there.”
The amusingly pejorative name for this movement is GERM: the Global Education Reform Movement. “GERM is concerned with parental choice, with competition, with privatisation,” says Benn. “It starts from a position of denigrating state schools and saying they’re all wrong, and saying it knows how to fix it.”
And the former Secretary of State doesn’t get off the hook. “Gove was absolutely in that model. And although there was something positive about a right-wing Tory saying state education matters, and the education of poor pupils matters, the rest of it was pretty destructive.”
Benn contends that academies and free schools are “a con”.
Free Schools
“Free schools were sold to us pre-2010 as a way for parents to open up their own schools, but not many parent-groups have set them up apart from very influential parents like Toby Young. On the whole, it’s educational chains and companies or religious organisations, which has created its own problems.”
On academies, she cites research done by her colleague Henry Stewart at the Local Schools Network, the organisation she jointly founded in 2011. After Gove announced that qualifications previously deemed ‘equivalent’ to GCSEs – a GNVQ, for instance, used to count as four GCSEs – would no longer be included in school performance rankings, Stewart re-examined academy attainment over the last four years, removing such equivalents from the figures. He found that without the equivalents, conventional state schools had done marginally better than academies.
And in her opinion, the Gove curriculum, with its emphasis on teaching factual knowledge, will “leave a third of our children behind”.
“I think you have to be realistic about the fact that some children start with so much more cultural and social capital than other children. When my daughter started at primary school, some children knew who Mark Rothko was; some couldn’t write their name or go to the toilet by themselves.”
The GERM view is that suppositions about what underprivileged children can or will learn – along with socio-economic indicators – have been used as excuses for underachievement. Benn, on the other hand, ascribes poor results among poor children to socio-economic factors.
“As long as you have a system that is as hierarchical as ours is, where the richest children – 7 per cent – get the most privileged education, and where you have selective grammar schooling: where you have a divided system, you increase the gap between poor and rich children.”
Benn advocates a properly comprehensive system, saying: “Where you educate everyone together, as they do in Finland or Canada, everybody does better.”
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says the same thing, but it’s difficult how these divisions can be broken down, short of banning private education. “I would admit that I am a pragmatic idealist,” says Benn, “in that I’m interested in everyone having the kind of education that I wanted my children to have, and I think that’s a fair enough position.”