So what if grammars don’t help social mobility?

Is the purpose of education to educate or socially engineer? It was announced yesterday that England is to have its first new grammar school in decades, and the strange thing is that not a single person in the media (that I could see) asked whether this would improve education standards. Instead the entire debate was about whether it improved social mobility.

On the Today programme and the New Statesman website, a statistic was quoted showing that grammar schools have a smaller percentage of pupils on free school meals than comprehensives.

There are probably many reasons for this, but most likely the largest factor involved is that intelligence is hereditary and social class correlates with IQ; in other words, middle-class kids tend on average to be more intelligent than working-class ones. You could make the system fairer by replacing grammar entrance exams (for which richer parents hire tutors to help their children pass) with straight-up IQ tests, but the number of poorer children would still be disproportionately low.

In fact the more social mobility we have over the generations, as everyone seems to want, the more that social class will correlate with intelligence.