Grammar School

The rise and the death, and now the rise once again of the Grammar School has refuelled the debate on our failure to educate our children properly.

The players in this long running play, should I say tragedy, are successive governments, the teachers and their idealistic training academies, parents and of course the children.
'Education' has been displaced by the political mantra of 'social displacement' in society and the need to address the 'mobility' of the poor to "make something of themselves".
Education has become a tool. A yardstick by which government can say it is doing something. Education can be measured, it has targets, it's supposed objective is to give us all a mythical level playing field from where we can live our live and prosper.
The social imperative is replaced by cant and dogmatism, ideological surety and an undying obsession not to listen to any others reasoned proposition.
When I was growing up the educational world was divided into three spheres.
Private education which in those days belong to a different universe. Grammar Schools and Secondary Modern Schools. At 11 years you were given an opportunity to either progress or stay as you were, it was as simple as that. The 11 Plus exam was a turning point in so far as if you were successful the education system did what it was supposed to do - "educate", otherwise it became a sort of holding pen until you went into manual or skilled manual work.
Luckily this was not the end of the world since there was plenty of work for the kids who were the outcome and although it limited the aspiration it never the less had its own strata and many a successful outcome was born of living and working in a community of like minded people.
The Comprehensive School was a grand idea. It merged children who would normally have gone to the Grammar School with the Secondary Modern child in the well meant assumption that the "good" would rub off on the "bad", that aspiration would by osmosis permeate into the texture of the failing child (for what ever reason), they would grasp the importance of education and seek it out like a horse a lump of sugar.
Of course we in this country wish an outcome but are hesitant to provide the funds to follow through. Class sizes ballooned and the quality of teaching didn't keep step with demand
Standards rose marginally for the less able child and whilst the very able (the geek) were able to isolate themselves, the bulk of children, losing the stimulus of achievement which the Grammar School inculcated, drifted and under-performed. Decades of 'ideological well wishing' has seen us fall in the world educational rankings to those of an impoverished nation and its a scandal which successive governments have been party to.
Of course members of government do not normally come from the ranks of the Comprehensive since in this country we have always "bought" our way out of poverty. Private education has been the guarantee of success.
For those clever enough, or with parents who could afford to tutor their child to take and pass the 11 Plus exam, the Gammer School was the only other avenue to a University Education.
Comprehensives now-days supply a fair proportion of the "Uni" intake but the university authorities have long complained about the poor standard of the pupils coming to them from the comprehensives to the extent that the first year in university is used to bring the Comprehensive entrants up to a standard where 'university education' can begin.
Manipulation of school examination standards, the use of multiple choice in answering exam questions and the plethora of grades brought out each year to disguise the lowering of the overall standard has put the educational fraternity into a spin of denial refusing to admit they were misguided when they misguidedly substituted education for a social mobility exercise and, at any cost, the inequity of our social/class system could be remedied.
Mrs Mays review and suggestion that Grammar Schools should be re-establish in the poorer pupil catchment areas has merit. Caution should the byword since the middle class, desperate to find a better outcome than the Comprehensive will buy property in a poor area just to gain preferential residential entrance, on top of being able to afford tutoring.

Perhaps greater emphasise should be given in Primary School to presenting all the children with a curricular and "in school" tutoring, aimed at passing the 11 Plus test and then at least all the children will have had a fair opportunity to pass.

We have to address this poor educational attainment.
We are in competition in a world where 'technical specialisation' is our only answer to the mass exploitation seen in the manufacturing centres in Asia.
Unless of course we have had our honeymoon period of social up liftment and are now once again considering the prewar job uncertainty of queuing for work at the factory gate, which is not far removed from the "zero hours" contract, much touted by our business leaders as being the choice of many.