Bad Grammar, Good Grammar

On one level, it hardly matters what either side of the grammar schools debate says. The question reappears, it used to be around once every five years, it is now around once every seven or eight years, and it will soon be around once every 10 years, if that.

It is discussed for one day, although never by anyone in a position to do anything about it. Then, it goes away again. This has now been happening for many decades. It might end when, quite soon, there is no one left in public life who remembers grammar schools. Or it might not. Only time will tell.

But in anticipation of the next outing, the proponents do need to find some way of addressing the fact that 13 per cent, more than one in eight, of those currently attending the state grammar schools still in existence got into them from private prep schools, while a huge proportion of the rest was privately tutored at a weekly rate many multiples of the total income of anything like an average family with two working parents.

This is not because they are all in posh areas. They are not. There are decidedly less salubrious parts of any local authority area. Just as there are rich people in all of them, who would do this kind of thing throughout the entire country. They used to do exactly that.

Bandying about figures about how many people from state schools used to enter Oxford and Cambridge in the grammar school era, quite apart from the fact that those figures were not much higher than they are now, bizarrely assumes that everyone included in those figures was "working-class". They were not. Most of them were middle-class, and a high proportion was upper-middle-class.

Oh, well, the partisans of grammar schools probably have 10 years to think about this. Possibly, they now have longer than that. Conceivably, they now have forever. I am not saying that that is a good thing, or that it is a bad thing. It is just the way that things are.

By then, of course, we shall have had at least one of the comprehensively schooled Prime Ministers whose nonexistence is held up as proof of the failure of the comprehensive system. Although we shall have been treated to the circular argument that any school which could produce a Prime Minister was obviously not a "typical" or a "real" comprehensive.

Astonishingly, that claim is even made of any that sends people to university, or at any rate to university that was already in existence in 1990. In reality, when it comes to schools with Sixth Forms (a great loss in many places), institutions which do not do that simply do not exist. I should not be at all surprised if Sixth Form Colleges which did not send people to those universities every year did not exist, either.

In the meantime, since the abolition of the existing grammar schools is no more likely than their restoration everywhere else, a new educational charity should elect to Associateship those pupils in all schools who, on leaving the Sixth Form at 18, had attained since beginning Year 10 examination results at or above the average in the remaining state grammar schools, both in terms of the marks themselves, and in terms of the range of subjects studied. It should also elect to Fellowship those teachers whose pupils attained such results over 10 consecutive years.

Associateship would be automatic, so that hostile schools or whoever else would not be able to deny it to anyone. The most prestigious universities would be contacted in order to make the Associateship an admission requirement. And this charity would be called after a Labour politician who fought to defend the grammar schools.

There are plenty from whom to choose: Ellen Wilkinson, George Tomlinson, Sidney Webb, R H Tawney, Eric Hammond, to name but a few. Durham County Council's Education Committee, an entirely Labour body, fiercely resisted comprehensivisation. But, alas, Margaret Thatcher was too much for that Committee.

Speaking of Hammond, some years ago I posted something on this subject and it referred to him. He was described as "obscure" by an interlocutor, who has since bought the Chairmanship of the Governing Body of one of Michael Gove's already-failing "free" schools. Such is the breadth and depth of the knowledge of those who have been put in charge of those institutions, which are absolutely forbidden to select academically, as is just as well if they are being run by persons as ignorant as that.

But of course they are. Remember that all-Labour Education Committee of Durham County Council. A bipartite or tripartite system is only possible with very powerful Local Education Authorities. Successive Governments have dismantled LEAs in order to make grammar schools impossible. But no Secretary of State has ever gone further down that road that Michael Gove.

Nor have Gove and his supporters the slightest interest in restoring the full employment, the workers' rights, the strong trade unions, the co-operatives, the council housing and other municipal services, the public ownership and the Welfare State that made possible the civilised and civilising world of the Workers' Educational Association and the Miners' Lodge Libraries, of the pitmen poets and the pitmen painters, of the brass and silver bands, of the male voice choirs, of the people's papers rather than the redtop rags, of the grammar schools, and of the Secondary Moderns that were so much better than what has replaced them.

All of those things were of a piece. Anyone who will not support all of those on the first list, does not and cannot support anything like any of those on the second list.