Bring back grammar schools?
To The Daily Telegraph
Opponents of academic selection turn a blind eye to selection by chequebook and the postcode lottery, which is the shameful reality of current state education. The logical position of the educational establishment (militant teaching unions, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and a handful of out-of-touch Tories) should be to abolish fee-paying schools, to force parents to send their children to local comprehensives. Why are such people opposed to a meritocratic education system when thousands of middle-class parents can afford to avoid sending their children to failing schools either by moving house or funding school fees, an option unavailable to the poor?
The logical extension of the Cameron government’s immensely successful free schools programme is to widen parental choice further and increase social mobility by creating new selective schools across the land. The Conservatives should tackle this anomaly now and force the parliamentary opposition to defend the failing status quo that millions of their voters no longer support. Philip Duly, Haslemere, Surrey
To The Guardian
In the run-up to the 1993 local elections, the ruling Conservative group in “selective” Lincolnshire hoped to curry favour in what was then the all “comprehensive” Lincoln by turning the one secondary school it controlled into a grammar. The reaction from the remaining grant-maintained schools was to enter candidates in all Lincoln county division elections, under the slogan “Say NO to secondary moderns”. The result was that most seats in Greater Lincoln turned Labour or Lib Dem and, for the first and only time since the council was formed in 1974, the Tories were consigned to the opposition benches. If you introduce grammar schools, you convert all the rest into secondary moderns, which is, in effect, what you have today in the rest of the county, where selection at 11-plus still occurs.
The last thing that secondary education in England needs, imperfect as it undoubtedly is, is a return to a system that was manifestly wrong 60 years ago and is equally wrong today. John Marriott, Lincoln