Why Charles passed the grammar school test – and Blunkett flunked it

WHAT a pity that Prince Charles did not try to send his sons to state grammar schools instead of to Eton, a school everyone associates with money and privilege. Yes, I can see the difficulties, but it would have been a beautiful way of skewering the socialist hypocrites who claim to be the friends of the poor.

In one action, he could have put the Crown clearly on the side of the people against a bone-headed and unfeeling government – which is where the Monarchy should always be.

And he could have given enormous help to a cause that will, in my view, one day triumph – the noble battle (now raging for almost 50 years) to make good education available once again to the sons and daughters of the poor.

In the meantime, the disclosure that the Prince tried to lobby the Labour Education Secretary, David Blunkett, on this issue is very heartening.

What is not heartening is Mr Blunkett’s smug, superior reply, confident that the Westminster spin machine’s power over public opinion makes him (actually a militant Leftist) hugely more influential than the Prince, even when he is wrong and the Prince is right.

David Blunkett is an attractive person, with a history of personal courage and resilience. What a pity it is that he is so utterly mistaken on most major issues.

AFTER Charles tried to interest him in rebuilding grammar schools, the then Education Secretary responded: ‘Our policy was not to expand grammar schools.’ He said that the Prince ‘didn’t like’ his reply. But why should he have liked it? It’s a stupid policy. Actually, New Labour’s policy was even worse than that. Their ‘School Standards’ Act of 1998 actually banned – by law – the opening of any new grammar schools. This Stalinist clause still stands, four years after New Labour fell from office.

Mr Blunkett added that Charles ‘was very keen that we should go back to a different era where youngsters had what he would have seen as the opportunity to escape from their background, whereas I wanted to change their background’.

Challenged to explain this alleged change, Mr Blunkett referred to ‘a transformation over the past 20 years both in attainment levels and opportunity, affording youngsters higher education, apprenticeships and the life chances that many of us take for granted’.

Modern politics is great at producing such statistics. But no figures show how many girls and boys, talented and hardworking, turn away sadly from school and learning every year.

They do so because the only schools they can get into are chaotic, ill-disciplined places where it is dangerous to be seen as academically bright, and where hope and encouragement are absent.

There are other schools. But they are for the children of the well-off, the privileged and the sharp-elbowed (like the cunning Labour and Tory frontbenchers, so skilled in working the system to their advantage). Talent counts for little or nothing in their secret, winding selection process.

It makes me furious to think about it. Yet I think the mood is shifting. When I first started campaigning on this, I was told it was futile and finished. Now I think we may be on the verge of a rethink, once the latest gimmicks of ‘academies’ and ‘free schools’ have failed, as they will.