No, if you were academically inclined and middle-class (which are two very different things), then you did not necessarily hate your comprehensive school in a largely working-class area.
Nor did it necessarily hate you.
Nor did it necessarily hate you.
I didn't, and it didn't.
The school that sent Theresa May to Oxford was a mixed comp, not the girls' grammar that she seems to be pretending.
40 or so years later, she is now the Prime Minister.
She ought to be a bit more grateful.
We finally get a PM who went to a comprehensive school, 15 years after we first could have had one, but she pretends she didn't and she tries to close them all down.
ReplyDeleteMargaret Thatcher used to do it in the other direction. Pretending, without quite saying it, that she had attended a state grammar school. Rather than, as in fact, a private school with the word "Grammar" in its name.
DeleteI work in Kent. My school is not a grammar. Therefore my school looses between 20-30% of our brightest children every year. And so not only do we have a lack of bright children, we also have a corresponding lack of middle class children, pushy parents, children who arrive playing musical instruments, children who arrive already in arts groups etc. Taking all that out of a school makes our job harder.
ReplyDeleteAnd if that was not bad enough, the media and government then expect us to somehow compete in league tables with the grammar schools, and call us failing if we get lower than average results. Even though we have a lower than average intake. Then they wonder why we struggle to hire good teachers. It feels like we are being set up to fail.
You are.
DeleteThe stupid Tory Right, played like a fiddle. Nobody is talking about Brexit now, it's all about grammar schools that won't happen. But then neither will Brexit.
ReplyDeleteOne of the Three Brexiteers cannot last long after today. One way or another, all three will be gone before very long at all.
Delete