Hope, fights and grammar schools

A typical Kentish town, with its grammar school at one end and its secondary school at the other, is a throwback to the Bad Old Days, or the Good Old Days, depending on what your views are on academically selective state education. If Theresa May’s plans go ahead, the whole country might look something like this.

In my childhood home town of Sandwich, Kent, the two schools, Sir Roger Manwood’s grammar school and the Sandwich Technology School, have staggered going-home times to avoid the fights on the station platform that used to happen every afternoon. Their uniforms are tellingly different: the Manwood’s students wear smart blazers and ties, the Tech ones wear casual black polo shirts and black jerseys. There’s a slight shiftiness in the afternoon atmosphere. Self-conscious Manwood’s girls change out of their uniform as soon as they get home from school in order to avoid being mocked by ‘Techies’ in the Co-op. Tech children sit on the green after school and leave all their litter behind, because there’s a caretaker at their school whose job it is to pick up all the rubbish. Manwood’s students go home with about three times as much homework as Tech students.

From the outside, a prospective parent would be forgiven for mistaking which school is which. The Technology School is the shiny, swanky one, with cinema, sports hall, AstroTurf, its own football academy and its own windmill providing electricity. The grammar school is more shabby-looking, after progressive anti-grammar Labour councils were mean with funding. Lots of parents, looking round the two schools, actually prefer the Tech, which is both dazzling to look at and known to be a kind establishment that aims to look after the needs of every child.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham discusses grammars with Toby Young on the podcast