Civitas has just published an interesting book called The Ins and Outs of Selective Secondary Schools. Edited by Anastasia de Waal, it’s a collection of essays by the usual suspects in the never-ending argument about grammar schools.
De Waal points out that the two sides have more in common than you’d think. In particular, they share a common goal, which is to sever the link between a child’s socio-economic status and attainment. In 2009, according to the OECD, the variance in the scores of British children in the Pisa international tests in maths, reading and science that could be explained by their backgrounds was 13.8 per cent. By this measure, the best-performing region in the world is Macau (2 per cent) and the worst is Peru (27.5 per cent). Britain is close to the OECD average of 14 per cent.
As you’d expect, those who believe in school selection, such as the Conservative MP Graham Brady, argue that clever children from poor families are likely to do better at grammars than comprehensives. Exhibit A in the case for the defence is the dominance of the professions by the products of independent schools, something that wasn’t true before Tony Crosland set out ‘to destroy every fucking grammar school in England’. In response, Fiona Millar and others point out that the number of working-class children at grammars rarely climbed above the 15 per cent mark, even in their heyday, and that the proportion of children on free school meals in the 164 that remain is just 2 per cent. Today, the main beneficiaries of selective education are still the middle classes.
It’s easy to rebut this argument. A majority Conservative government could make it a condition of allowing an existing grammar to expand — or a new one to be set up — that it set aside some places for children on free school meals.
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