The Great School Scam is laid bare

NOTE how the mainstream media have almost entirely ignored a new and devastating report about our few remaining grammar schools.

The survey of evidence, by the Higher Education Policy Institute, destroys a number of favourite claims by the comprehensive lobby.

Here is what it says. Areas which have academically selective schools are far better than comprehensive areas at getting state school pupils into Oxbridge and top universities.

For example, England’s tiny few 163 surviving grammars send more black and minority ethnic pupils to Cambridge University than all England’s 1,849 comprehensive schools combined.

By using a more realistic definition of low-income than the ‘free school meals’ test usually applied, the report also shows that any pupil from a less well-off home is far more likely to get into a good university from a grammar school than from a comprehensive.

The huge ‘attainment gap’ between pupils from poorer and better-off homes, a real problem in this country’s schools, is almost eliminated in grammar schools.

And, by the way, even despite the siege of grammar schools by middle-class parents trying to get their children into good schools without paying fees, 45 per cent of grammar school pupils come from households below the median income level.

At every turn, this document makes nonsense of the education industry’s continued dogged defence of the failed comprehensive experiment.

I have to keep asking why our Establishment is so blind to the blazingly obvious, and why this terrible mistake, which hurt the country as well as destroying the hopes of millions, is not put right.