The equality-obsessed left will never understand grammar schools like poor, bright pupils do

As a Sevenoaks resident, I am simply relieved that the grammar school campaigning has now been put to bed after considerable dithering and delaying on the part of Nicky Morgan, Education Secretary. Today’s announcement might be headline news for most, but for us locals this row has dragged on for years. Notwithstanding the obvious political difficulties of sanctioning the creation of some 450 extra grammar school places, irrespective of whether the school calls itself an ‘annexe’ or not, Morgan dragged this on long enough before doing the right thing.

Opponents of the expansion of Weald of Kent (sorry, the building of a new school, ahem) are saying predictable things. Labour politicians closed most grammar schools down in the 1970s or turned them in to comprehensives, with Anthony Crosland having famously proclaimed, according to his wife, that he’d “destroy every last fucking grammar school.” Together with Shirley Williams, he nearly succeeded but for a few areas, like Kent, that resisted. It’s interesting to note, of course, that Crosland enjoyed a public school education, whilst those awful grammar schools were good enough for William’s daughter – just a couple of manifestations of the glaring hypocrisy of the left. Comprehensive Future’s spokesperson is Melissa Benn, can you guess whose daughter she is? Luckily for her, her socialist family’s distinguished name opens doors that mean she has the luxury of saying that selective education is “unfair, unnecessary and divisive.” Then we have Labour politicians such as Lucy Powell, bleating on about “equality of opportunity” *yawn*. She said: "They (grammar schools) do not increase equality of opportunity, they make it worse. Tiny numbers of children from disadvantaged backgrounds pass their tests because they are the preserve of the privately tutored.”
Nonsense! The rich have always had private schools anyway, so things have never been equal, but abolishing grammar schools made them even less so. Is it mere coincidence that politics has once again become dominated by the wealthy, privately-educated in the years since New Labour’s ban on building new grammar schools and abolition of assisted places? The fact is, it isn’t good enough to dismiss tiny numbers. Those tiny numbers were ordinary people from ordinary backgrounds, like a distant second cousin of mine that I met for the first time this week, now in his 60s, who told me how his Irish parents were bursting with pride and delight when he passed and gained a place at grammar school, and how, when he acquired his extensive book list (as a librarian, his life was books ever since), they literally spent their last penny to buy the book he needed. Powell, Benn and their left-leaning ilk would rather deny those few the chance to achieve their potential, so long as they can comfort themselves that everyone from a humbler background is roughly the same. And yet, whilst they attack what were once key institutions of a meritocratic society that rewarded ability and rewarded excellence, they say nothing of the real scandal about this grammar school: it’s only for girls. Perhaps girls are part of a deserving minority for them who should be given an extra helping hand, whilst working-class boys are better off staying that way, lest they end up voting for the sexist, classist Tory party.

Education, let’s be honest, ought to mirror life. True, I write as one who received the very best from a comprehensive school and who is therefore passionate that all comprehensives can offer pupils the opportunity that mine did. But grammar schools, particularly where there is another shot at going there offered to you at 14, pose no threat whatsoever to comprehensives. I came very close to acquiring a scholarship to private school, and if I’d got it, I’d have lost years of Saturdays to school and the only advantage, as it turned out, would have been that I’d probably now find my Latin Mass a bit easier to understand. But even when I failed to earn that opportunity, the next best thing turned out to be the making of me socially, intellectually and in any other way you might imagine. I’m extremely grateful I ended up at the comprehensive where I met people rich and poor, of all walks of life. So failure in selective processes isn’t the end of the world. I think it was once said of John Lennon when at school that he’d never amount to much musically. Yet there is no purpose in attacking selection on that basis, because it does work and it does offer the very best of educational opportunities. The real difference between those of us who support grammar schools (even if we weren’t beneficiaries of them) and those who don’t, is that the opponents seem determined to give everyone the same, on the basis of apparently hard and fast rules of the game, that exclude the possibility of there being intellectual excellence worth nurturing, in any community or section of society that lacks the social capital of wealth, well-educated and/or well-connected parents. Those clever people like my second cousin are, I’m afraid, an annoying little exception: an elephant in the egalitarian room about which Powell and her like have nothing to say. Come to think of it, they can hardly countenance the existence of working-class, state-educated Tories like me, so God knows how hard grammar school success stories must be for them.
The erosion of selection, even within the comprehensives, has done no-one any favours. Too many schools are “coasting.” Too many of our overly-large graduate population aren’t employable, because their formative experiences of education have been so unselective that they learn the reality of selection in every other sphere of life in a hard, bruising way when, to their chagrin, they still have to start out making the tea with a first-class degree. As for the privately-educated, they are now scapegoated as themselves the protectors of their own privilege, when in actual fact they simply have a superior learning experience that better prepares them to take advantage of subsequent opportunities. I actually felt that, when I was a student at Cambridge, there was a kind of quiet but definite reverse snobbery against those who had a fee-paying education, in spite of the fact that we were all there simply because we’d achieved very well academically, and had the good fortune to be liked on the day by a few interviewers at the point of application. These students were almost apologetic about their apparent good fortune, and I always wonder if compensating for it sits at the heart of a quandary I’ve long puzzled over: why so many on the left have lived lives far removed from the poorest they claim to support, and why they so angrily rail against the opportunities they themselves benefited from. When they are made to feel inadequate for having been lucky at the start (isn’t all success part luck?) and when, should they find themselves in public service, their background makes them the butt of cheap jokes, they are as much the victims of the left’s progressivist mantra as the kids from the nearby comp.

But whatever the strange motives of many a critic, the fact remains that academic selection is no inhibitor of social mobility, but it is precisely the opposite. Rather than criticise the absurd nonsense of sex discrimination still characterising our education system, the class war warriors choose instead to say nothing of the boys who are the losers in this particular instance just for being boys, and they continue to perpetuate discrimination against the brightest children of whatever sex and background, sacrificing them on the altar of equality. When will these equality-obsessed folks learn not to put their politics above the good of the very best pupils who deserve the chance? Dianne Abbott didn’t do that, when to her credit she faced down a barrage of criticism to honour her son’s wish to go to private school. Shirley Williams, who I’ve always admired, didn’t do that when it came to her own daughter, presumably accepting the charge of double-standards to do what was right for her own. I just wonder what will persuade them to be similarly concerned about the interests and future of other people’s children, because what’s certain is that the poor students who thrived and made a good life for themselves thanks to grammar schools have not been able to persuade them.