‘Only nostalgic vandals would bring back grammar schools’.

A woman called Jemima Lewis wrote  a piece for the Telegraph with this heading.

 

I didn’t read it for two reasons.

 

The first is that the title says it all; it would be exactly what you would expect from the left-wing chattering classes who actually know little of what they pontificate.

 

The second is that nothing about her is in the public domain. Her biographic details are zero. But there is one certainty; she was not even born when grammar schools were abolished 50 years ago at the behest of a public school educated toff, Anthony Crosland, and it is possible that even her mother was just a tiny tot.

 

There was no educational case. It was simply a piece of  social engineering by the left to keep the lower orders in their place. After all, where would the future Labour voters come from if those clever kids from the council estates morphed into middle class?

 

So it must be a fair observation that this lady does not know what she is talking about.

 

I was a grammar school oik, as we were probably called by the public schools in the county, Stowe and Eton.(The Stowe boys’ uniform was an obligatory trilby hat and hacking jacket; one of its most famous pupils was David Niven – and more recently Richard Branson and Harry’s ex, Chelsy. Ours was  black and red blazer and cap, very non-U).

 

It was an ancient foundation dating back to 1423. The original building, small and in Norman architectural style, is still extant, in Buckingham town centre.  At least we had more pedigree than Stowe (founded in the 1920s).

 

Apart from tradition, was the school as good as today’s polemicists about grammars crack them up to be?

 

The school was very small by today’s standards; about 180 pupils over six forms, roughly equal numbers of boys and girls. Therefore the small staff had to teach at every level from first form to University entrance. But comparisons of performance are scarcely possible because there were no grades in the GCE; you either passed or failed, and failures were pretty rare.

 

The basic qualification for entering a profession was usually 5 O levels and 3 A levels, presumably as benchmarks that you were sufficiently intelligent and educated to pass the professional exams. University entrance was mostly by competitive examination.

 

So how did we get on?

 

My recollection is that just about everyone in the 6th Form went to university, to one of the military academies, or into one of the learned professions via articles.

 

People like Ms Lewis make the quite extraordinary claim that the 11-plus exam favoured middleclass kids because their parents could afford extra tuition and so grammar schools favoured the bourgeoisie  and so are mostly middleclass institutions, leaving the less privileged to be kept in their place at the local ‘bog-standard’ comprehensive . This does not seem to fit with the claim that they turn working class kids into toffs. And the 11-plus was a test of intelligence, not of educational standard.

 

There may have been middleclass parents of my generation of pupils, but none to my knowledge. My classmate Tom, who went up to Oxford, was the son of the manager of the local Boots the Chemist and played golf, so perhaps he qualified. Waggers, who went to Cranwell, was the son of a small entrepreneur with a workshop that turned our bits and pieces for Electrolux, and there was a sprinkling of tenant farmers’ offspring.

 

The remainder came from working class backgrounds - farm labourers, navvies, bricklayers, the squire’s gamekeeper. Their homes were generally council houses or tied cottages.

 

Grammar schools could not guarantee success. But they did provide a certain equality of opportunity.