Mobile No More

The British economy changed shape after the War. There were simply far more white collar jobs to fill, and anyone in the right place at the right time was given one. Since it is almost unheard of for people born into the middle class ever to leave it, those people's descendants were therefore set up forever.

Probably a lot of those bourgeois dynastic founders had been to grammar schools. But many had not. And few, if any, had gone on to university. Likewise, the end of the grammar schools, whatever else might be said of it, did not end that process. It merely coincided with that end.

Purely educationally, which is what this debate ought to be about, if there ever was a Golden Age, then it was between comprehensivisation and the 1988 Education Act.

Teachers at secondary level were not merely confronted with the people whose primary schools had entered them for the 11-plus, as, even with the best of intentions, the most working-class children routinely were not, and probably still are not where the grammar schools continue to exist; certainly, the pronounced absence of the poor from those schools more than suggests that such is the case.

Nor were those teachers merely confronted with the beneficiaries of expensive prep schools and private tuition, which have always been endemic in such systems and always will be. That situation is now localised, because the grammar schools are now localised. If the grammar schools existed nationally, then so would it, just as it always did.

But during that one generation, secondary teachers were presented with an entire cohort, and were able to identify those to whom the most academic education was appropriate, an education they were then both equipped and permitted to deliver.

Margaret Thatcher and Kenneth Baker finished that off. But, again, those teachers reached retirement age and duly retired. Those in non-National Curriculum subjects were not replaced, and it is worth pointing out that the grammar schools are as bound by the National Curriculum as any other state school is. But those individual teachers would have retired, anyway. So, again, this was all at least as much a matter of coincidence as of anything else.

Also important to remember is that a bipartite or tripartite secondary system can only be made to work, or even to exist, by very powerful Local Education Authorities. The nationalisation of schools since 1988, although under no one more aggressively than under Michael Gove, makes such a thing absolutely impossible. Blame him.