Grammar schools: are they the answer?

“O frabjous day!” said Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph. For four “shameful decades” – ever since Anthony Crosland vowed to “destroy every f***ing grammar school in England” – the political establishment has turned its back on “the greatest single engine of social mobility this country has ever known”. During their too-brief heyday, grammar schools helped transform the prospects of bright working-class children. In the mid-1960s, when there were 1,300 grammars in Britain, their pupils won half of all Oxbridge places. But the Left decided that selecting pupils on the basis of ability was “unfair”, and so the “all-must-haveprizes” comprehensive system was born. Since then, Britain has “sunk down the international education league tables, social mobility has stalled, and hundreds of thousands of our brightest children have been betrayed”. But at last we have a prime minister – grammar school-educated herself – who is prepared to reverse this terrible mistake. Last week, Theresa May let it be known that she plans to overturn Tony Blair’s ban on new selective schools, paving the way for a “new generation of grammars”.

There’s no denying that grammar schools provide a good education, said The Times. The question is: for whom? The idea that they are a lifeline for poor children is plain nonsense. As Ofsted’s chief inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, has observed, grammars are “stuffed full of middle-class kids”. Fewer than 3% of their pupils are currently entitled to free school meals – a key indicator of poverty – compared with 18% across England overall. Even in the 1960s, grammar schools only educated a quarter of state school pupils, leaving the rest to languish in secondary moderns.

This debate should have been long-settled, said Stephen Bush in the i newspaper. Numerous studies have shown that grammar schools do nothing to improve the overall prospects of the poor. They weren’t even responsible for the postwar surge in social mobility. That was caused by a one-off shift in the British economy from blue-collar to white-collar jobs, which meant there was simply more room at the top. The trouble with facts, said Duncan Exley on opendemocracy, is they can’t compete with a good story. The grammar school debate is a case in point: fans of selection simply brush aside the dry statistics and offer up heart-warming family anecdotes about working-class kids made good. If progressives are ever to win this argument, we need to start telling our own story – about the growing number of non-selective schools that provide a brilliant education for everyone, and “not just for a lucky few”.