‘State education has never commanded the same loyalty or sense of affection from the British public as the NHS…High-quality comprehensive education was never presented to the people as a democratic ideal; indeed, it was never presented in any coherent form at all.’ Melissa Benn, School Wars

‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’ Albert Einstein

The NHS endures its fair share of slings and arrows but I think it’s right to say that lots of us have an affection for it, what it stands for and the myriad times it has helped us or our family. We get upset if we think it’s being messed with. Look on Twitter. Some people, even those who don’t work there, have ‘Save the NHS’ avatars. The first quote, from Melissa Benn’s School Wars, is right though. The same doesn’t seem to apply to our state education system. I don’t see variants of ‘Save our NES’ nearly so much.

My contribution to the education debate is to ask whether we, collectively, have possibly got just a little bit too carried away with the things that can be counted, principally academic performance, at the expense of that which is more difficult to quantify. And is our obsession with academic performance a barrier to us embracing state education in the way that we do our health service.

Something strange seems to happen to us, especially as parents, when we consider education. In a mass participation event such as a marathon, few of us expect to be troubling Mo or Paula at the finish line. Despite prolonged, gruelling training we almost universally accept that we are simply there to complete the course and to match or exceed a particular time that we have in mind, sometimes a former personal best. I’ve never run a marathon but I think that’s right. Those who do take marathons on – lots of people – don’t seem to need to expect to win to feel motivated to undertake a huge challenge and do it to the best of their ability. With education we seem to expect, living vicariously through our children perhaps, to win.

If we are to move away from an obsession with academic performance, however, I think we need to do more than appeal to our collective conscience. I think the media does quite a good job of getting across the idea that society benefits from a more egalitarian approach to education. Many of the pushiest parents will probably agree with this concept. But it’s usually a different matter when it comes to OUR children.

Shortly after our first child was born – 10 years ago – I started thinking about his education. I considered ways to evaluate whether pushing for a private or selective school was wise. One idea was to compare the life outcomes, using Friends Reunited, for my year at the local comprehensive with the nearest high-performing (top 100) private school. No great surprise, a noticeable difference in the sort of occupations of the two groups. With my own school I had the advantage of remembering most of the people. My overall impression was of a happy bunch, good jobs and families. The same was true for the private school, but I would struggle to say that either group was happier than the other. Also, it wasn’t clear that the private school group were more useful members of society. Higher status careers for sure but does a City trader trump a nurse?

And when it comes to getting a ‘good job’ there is another side to the argument that everything hinges on exam results. Business, I’ve heard said, is all about relationships. And one of the (few) oft-cited arguments for non-selective state education is that it helps you mix with people from all walks of life. If we consider arguably the most famous businessperson in the UK at the moment, Lord Sugar, I don’t think I do him a disservice by saying that, at 16, he wasn’t faced with an agonising choice. Do I continue my studies and become a modern-day Edward Gibbon, chronicler of key periods of world history, or do I give it all up and knock out aerials from the back of a Transit on my way to a billion? Not everyone can be Lord Sugar, but we need people to be self-employed and to start small and medium businesses that generate employment. My point is that it’s not true to say that peak academic performance is a prerequisite for all ‘good jobs’ and that something that’s difficult to measure – the social effect of attending a non-selective school – may actually be beneficial for certain types of rewarding and enjoyable work.

With this in mind, there is a suspicion that successive politicians, from both sides of the political divide, have assumed that what’s best for all of us is a bit of what worked for (most of) them: a highly pressured academic environment. There’s no doubt that we still need people to fulfil roles requiring a high degree of academic training and discipline but I think we should question whether so many of us should be so desperate for our children to aspire to these roles. I’m not sure we can prove they make you happier.

I’m asking this not because I think academic performance doesn’t matter. It does, it matters a lot. But the insane pressure to raise academic standards at the expense of everything else seems to have created an education system where teachers aren’t trusted or respected to the degree they should be and where the school system has fragmented, endangering our ability to raise collective standards of attainment. As Peter Mortimore, author of Education Under Siege and someone with 50 years’ experience in education, points out:

‘In my view many of the problems [in education] have been predominantly caused by the direct actions of politicians across the political spectrum. They have fragmented – almost to destruction – what was once a national system.’

If we are to hope to create an education system that enjoys the status of the NHS, with the consequent increased respect for teachers and the likely broad-based educational benefits that go with that, we need, I think, to question whether we haven’t developed a distorted view of what’s best for our own children.