I went to local grammar school, where pupils were streamed on basis of 11+ scores (age adjusted). The A stream had high concentration of children from single child families. For the catchment area, an extremely high proportion of children had parents with middle class, professional backgrounds. The B to E classes were still more middle class than the children who had failed. The school budget per child was higher and there were parental contributions to school fund which improved resources.

This was in the 70s and exam results were good at the grammar - but 60 out of 70 of council estate primary classmate failed and the secondary modern had very poor results (low grade CSEs and not many of those per pupil) as expectation was that they would find work in shipyard, tobacco factories and textile mills and so it wasn’t necessary to spend much money on their education.

A generation later, my sons went to the local primary that went into special measure shortly after they left, then onto inner city comprehensive with remit of taking across ability range (number of high academic students balanced by same number of low with most being in middle). The school was judged outstanding while they were there and had higher than city average EAL and FSM and they had a wider, better education than I had.

