The government is going to sanction the opening of a new generation of grammar schools – a depressing move. It is nothing less than the back-to-1952 concomitant of the Brexit vote, the UK seeking to turn back the clock to the Enid Blyton era of deference and social hierarchy, an era that Theresa May evidently craves. You can take the girl out of Eastbourne, etc.

Bringing back grammar schools – like getting out of Europe – is a Ukip policy co-opted by the post-Cameron Conservatives so we can see the right perfectly ideologically united. How can liberals such as Ken Clarke and George Osborne bear to remain in such a obscurantist, reactionary grouping?

I was a working-class grammar school pupil – our success is built off those left behind | Frances Ryan Read more

The unspoken truth about headlines announcing the end of the ban on grammar schools is that it also means, through the process of sortation that occurs courtesy of the 11-plus, the return of secondary moderns. Though I don’t suppose we will see a “May pledges to bring back secondary moderns” headline in the Telegraph, or hear it shouted from the podium at the Tory party conference.

I admit I have a personal issue with grammar schools and the 11-plus, because had it existed in fully comprehensive Newport, South Wales in 1968, when I went to secondary school, I would most likely have failed it. I was a very slow developer. The product of a non-bookish working-class household, I couldn’t read until age seven, wasn’t remotely academic and, when they did some quasi-formal selection for my new comprehensive-with-added-banding school, was placed outside what was known as the “grammar stream”.

Only by the age of 13 was I making progress and starting to meet the grammar streamers on their own terms. Indeed, it was a competitive urge to match some of them that drove me on – eventually to good A levels and Oxford. Had I been put into a school for failures at 11, I have no doubt that I would have met those expectations handsomely.

I have bored on about my comprehensive before, but looking back it really was rather remarkable. A school of 2,000 pupils, one of the largest in the country, it was set on three sites divided by age group spread across 44 acres. The head had been in the Sudanese civil service and ran the school on similar lines; he was a friend of Roy Jenkins, who used to dish out the prizes on speech day; half the Welsh first XV taught there (these were the days when rugby union was amateur and many rugby players were teachers – the England prop Colin Smart taught religious instruction!); and the under-13 football team, drilled with relentless passion by an ex-Newport County player, routinely won matches 22-0. Success was expected, failure frowned upon.

The school took pupils of all abilities and tried to make something of them. It taught everything from Oxbridge entrance to remedial forestry without batting an eyelid. I had one-to-one teaching with the head of history because I was the sole pupil doing S-level history – a pupil-teacher ratio that even Eton would have struggled to match. The key thing was that the school was properly funded. The fact we had one of the town’s few swimming pools was a source of pride.

Comprehensives were a good idea done down by politicians and the right-wing media, who ensured their failure

The ethos of success and achievement made us feel that anything was possible. Yet this was a large comprehensive catering primarily for the vast Ringland council estate that, once the 1960s boom had run its course and Llanwern steelworks started to run down in the Thatcher era, became a byword for social deprivation and worklessness, crime and drugs. The social problems on the estate had a knock-on effect on the school, and, when I revisited it in 2006, it was about to change its name, so negative had the associations of the old name become. Comprehensives, like council housing, were a good idea done down by politicians and the right-wing media, who disliked them in principle and ensured their failure by a mixture of underfunding and relentless criticism.

The political right see grammar schools as a panacea, but they aren’t. They are socially divisive and educationally corrupt. For every hot-housed success, there will be a forgotten failure. Comprehensives can work if they are boundlessly confident and well funded. In a good comprehensive, you can aim high in subjects at which you are good, go more slowly at those in which you were bad. I never did get the hang of physics or chemistry, and was hopeless at languages, but at history for some reason I was a world beater. A comp is a blank canvas in which you can be whatever you want to be. Judging children at 11 is disgraceful, but then, we live in disgraceful political times.