Exposed: The great grammar school lie

ENEMIES of good schools never cease to go on about the alleged cruelty of academic selection. Why aren’t they just as annoyed about all the other forms of school selection which have replaced it?

Above all there is the icy, utterly unfair finality of selection by wealth. If your parents cannot afford to live in the right area, then you are excluded from almost all the better state schools from the start. But there are plenty of other

things going on. Last week, hardly noticed, it was revealed that state schools are now ‘excluding’ thousands of pupils, often by backdoor methods which do not show up on the books, as well as pushing them off the rolls to boost their exam results.

Selection can happen after the age of 11, as well as before it.

And what do you think all those well-publicised rows about hairstyles and uniforms are really about? They

are schools signalling to their areas that they don’t really want pupils from certain sorts of homes.

Well, can anyone tell me how this is fairer, more open, or better for Britain than selection by ability that still happens in successful, well-educated countries such as Germany and Switzerland? Any form of selection will hurt somebody. But selection will always happen in some form, so why don’t we choose the fairest and most rational sort?