Local Schools For Local People

Councils have not run schools in 30 years, since as long ago as the days when councils were run by Councillors rather than by Officers. And without very strong Local Education Authorities, there cannot be a bipartite or tripartite system of secondary schools. With them, though, such a system would be, as it used to be, perfectly simple.

That, even over and above central government's visceral hatred of local government since the former stopped being staffed by the products of the latter, is why Local Education Authorities have been actively persecuted by every Government since, under Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher was butchering the grammar schools.

In the teeth of the strong opposition from the entirely Labour LEA in Durham for example. Labour Councillors were grammar school themselves. Or else they knew from experience how good Secondary Moderns could be, and they were therefore able to predict accurately that what was proposed in their place would be horrifically worse.

Whereas Thatcher was commercially educated. She sometimes pretended not to be, although without ever lying directly. But she was. And that made all the difference.