These days I find myself so drifting away from the bounds of acceptable opinion that I don’t even shout at Radio 4 for being biased, because I don’t even understand the basis of what the arguments are about.
Take this morning’s schools feature (occasioned by Sir John Major’s comments about the ‘truly shocking’ dominance of a privately educated elite in public life), in which Harry Mount argued in favour and Owen Jones against the motion that grammar schools lead to more social mobility than comprehensives.
It was a good debate, but then you might also ask, who cares if they do? Do grammar schools provide affordable, high quality education – that’s the question? If they do, then it shouldn’t matter whether social mobility is increased or decreased, because all sorts of factors outside the realm of education affect mobility.
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