Mock
John Major all you like. Doing so has been a national hobby for 20 years, and
the nation wishes him 20 more.
But when it is all added up, his seven years as
Prime Minister will be 40 per cent longer than David Cameron will have managed.
And Major will still be the last person ever to have led the Conservative Party
to a General Election victory.
John Harris has it right:
ReplyDeleteJust listen to the former Independent columnist Mary Ann Sieghart, writing last year: "If you are bright but poor and you live in Kent, Essex, Buckinghamshire or Northern Ireland, your parentage doesn't have to dictate your progress. You have nearly the same chance of becoming a cabinet minister, a judge, a newspaper editor or a top rower as your privately educated neighbour. Why is that? Because these areas still have grammar schools, those turbo-chargers of social mobility."
Unfortunately, this is rot. Last week the Sutton Trust educational charity released a report about who exactly goes to England's 164 remaining grammar schools. Though the news was not exactly revelatory, the figures were still striking: 2.7% of their pupils are entitled to free school meals (FSMs) as against 17.5% in other state schools; 13% of entrants to English state–funded grammars come from fee-paying schools, more than double the proportion of 10-year-olds in private education; in areas that have stuck with selection, 66% of high-achievers at 11 who are not on FSMs get places at grammars; among those who are entitled to them, the figure is 40%.
It's clear what is going on. Affluent parents pay for coaching; many go as far as putting their kids in prep schools, in the expectation they will fly through entrance exams for state grammars, and the money will have been well spent. The Sieghart utopia is a fantasy: in Kent, Buckinghamshire, Trafford, Lincolnshire and the rest, a bright child on FSMs is much less likely to make it to a grammar school (and, if the theory holds true, from there to the cabinet room, the inns of court or the Oxford University Boat Club) than more affluent classmates with the same levels of ability. Even in Northern Ireland, where a superficially creditable 7.4% of grammar school kids are on FSMs, that is still far lower than the 19% of all post-primary children entitled to them, and the 28% who take them in non-grammar schools.
None of this, of course, will change the minds of the stubborn hardcore who claim that the return of the 11-plus would solve many of Britain's problems at a stroke. Such great minds as Michael Portillo, the irksome Conservative MP Graham Brady and even some voices on the left bang on about grammar schools holding the key to some great revival of social mobility – but they're guilty of a misreading of history that would be found out in any undergraduate sociology tutorial.
Post-1944, we are told, the grammar schools churned out thousands of elevated proletarians, and the economy just happened to have salaried jobs for them. In fact, that great spurt of embourgeoisement happened because of the expansion of white-collar employment and the public sector: the fact that some of the new middle class had waved goodbye to most of their classmates at 11 and gone to get O-level Latin was beside the point.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/11/grammar-schools-social-mobility-deluded-thinking