The social mobility case against grammar schools

Plenty of Conservative party members won’t like this article. I apologise in advance for that: I know grammar schools are popular with the membership and my view won’t be. But bringing them back would be a serious misstep for education policy. They are a distraction from what we should be doing, they serve the wealthy not the poor – and they don’t work.

Throughout my near two decades working on social mobility I would periodically hear the call for grammar schools to return. In evidence, I’d be told about the boys who went to one and went on to university while their classmates who didn’t went down the pit, into a manual job or similar.

This view is sincerely held. It may well be that grammar schools did indeed provide such a boost decades ago, although at their peak in 1964 only 5 per cent of pupils went to university, where around 44 per cent now do.