Former Ofsted chief examiner Sir Michael Wilshaw insisted recently that our few remaining grammar schools must be eradicated because they ‘are stuffed full of middle-class kids’.
Blogger: funny how comprehensives have singularly failed to raise all that many working class children from the depths but that is precisely what grammar schools across the nation did for me and so many working class kids of my generation.
They've been trying for five decades and so many of the working class children have had the door of opportunity slammed into their faces.
It is not the existence of a handful of grammar schools which is the issue but the horrific abolition of so many tremendous schools which were grammars that is our problem today.
The one genuine issue with grammar schooling was the fact that the secondary moderns and technical schools were not given fair financial treatment in comparison.
Abolition was a disaster - why were these other schools not granted support to become terrific schools but doing a different job?
The system in Germany today shows how a system with proper development for the academic can work extremely successfully alongside vocational and other schools.
I did my second spell of teaching practice in a state comprehensive school in Maltby. Confusingly, it was still called Maltby Grammar at the time.
I remember this small group of trainee teachers being addressed by the head. He told us that he was 100% behind comprehensives because the old system 'had so much wastage'.
My experiences were that the comps were where the most waste was found!
For their entire existence they have mimicked grammar schooling and have caused misery for all of those many pupils who do not have an academic bone in their bodies. Setting only scratched the surface of the problem and mixed ability is a political concept which has caused plummeting standards in all schools committed to its implementation.
I have worked with mixed ability classes in independent education and it can be made to work therein because the class sizes are a third the size.
This catastrophe in state education was exacerbated by ROSLA for 15 year olds in the early 70s and made even worse when so many pupils were forced to remain in education until 18 in order to hide rampant unemployment figures.
The system has had other unanticipated pitfalls. So very many young people were channelled into remaining in groups of similar age to themselves.
In bygone days, they would have gone into a workplace alongside the middle aged and older people.
I am convinced that the loss of such environments has had a huge deleterious effect on our ever burgeoning crime figures.
