by Kevin Meagher

The debate about grammar schools should have been over and done with a generation ago.

After all, it was a system that locked-in the most appalling social inequality.

If you passed your 11-Plus exam, you went to grammar school, with an effective guarantee of a professional career and life membership of the middle class.

If you failed it – because you were poorly on the day of your exam, or dyslexic, or for any other reason – you went to Secondary Modern school, where you would learn to ‘do something with your hands.’

A broadly-based education was not for the likes of you. Like the Epsilons in Huxley’s Brave New World, you were bred for drudgery.

It was a wicked system that divided families and communities, perpetuating ridiculous assumptions about intelligence and by extension, the worth, of tens of millions of people over decades.

By disregarding the talents of so many, so early and so utterly, it fuelled strife in industrial relations that bedevilled post-war Britain.

The former Conservative trade and industry secretary, Peter Walker, remarked in his autobiography that Britain’s post-war economic history might have been better had the wily, aggressive, intelligent but untutored trade unionists he dealt with led British industry, while passive, uninspiring business executives had instead become servile trade union leaders.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the effective abolition of grammars, led in no small part led by middle class parents who found their own children failing to get into them, was a seminal moment in making Britain a fairer and better country.

And, by delicious irony, it was Margaret Thatcher as education secretary under Ted Heath who got rid of many of them.

But the left has always been complacent about what came next. It was never enough to simply create comprehensive schools; they needed to be as good as the grammars they replaced.

They needed to show that the two-thirds of kids written-off at age eleven, were indeed smart enough to warrant receiving a rounded education. All they needed was a fair chance.

And this was indeed the promise back in the 1960s – that comprehensives would be as good as grammars – but it was an idle boast.

Instead, a different pattern emerged. The middle classes go private if they can afford to, or strain to fit into the right catchment for high-performing comprehensives, often affecting a miraculous Christian faith to blag their way into an Anglican or Catholic school.

Demotivated teachers left in ‘bog standard’ comprehensives serving sink estates continue to try and make water flow uphill, dealing with kids who can’t speak English or arrive at school half-fed.

To this day we pretend the system is equal, but it isn’t. Schools that struggle to live up to the virtuous comprehensive ideal are left to atrophy.

But allowing them to fail, to go unchallenged, is a betrayal of the children who attend them and who simply drop-off the educational conveyor belt at sixteen, straight into the rubbish bin.

The left, traditionally more bothered about liberal teaching and sating the demands of the lunatic teaching unions, excuses educational failure and poor teaching in a mistaken belief that equality of opportunity – all must have the chance of a comprehensive education – is the same as equality of outcome – that every child should leave school having been intellectually stretched to maximise their potential.

Even Tony Blair was wary of a full-frontal assault on this complacency, showering the schools system with funding but not setting the clear, unambiguous goal that every child should be expected to succeed and receive a clear pathway in life, with tough penalties for those parts of the system that are not delivering it.

His ad hoc creation of academies was a means to provide better local leadership, thus allowing improvements to bubble to the surface. What was needed, however, was a strong top-down approach making clear that every child must be valued and nurtured, no matter what the obstacle.

As a result, the tyranny of low expectations still holds sway over too many children’s lives.

The failure to grasp the issue of educational standards and social mobility head-on and win it for the left has now created space for a Conservative Prime Minister to begin rolling us backwards to those dark days when a third of kids were valued and two-thirds were not.

It must have escaped Theresa May, but there is nothing to ‘make with your hands’ these days. In any event, a country is not a marketplace. It is madness to welcome-in immigrant labour to fill skilled jobs because we have failed to sufficiently educate our own people to perform them.

The moral mission of state schooling should be to ensure that every child finds their talents and meets their potential. Children don’t fail, the system does. No leaky classroom, flaky teacher, coasting head or idle governing body should deny them their chance in life.

The bright vision of comprehensive education promised so much but we have let its potential slip through our fingers by not ensuring high quality schooling for all.

The inexorable result is Theresa May’s retrograde and pessimistic plan for grammar schools.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Uncut

Tags: academies, education, grammar schools, Kevin Meagher, standards, Theresa May