In 1960, my father failed the eleven-plus. He was lucky: his parents could afford to send him to a private school. In 1968 he went up to Cambridge, in 2000 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and last year he retired as head of Theoretical Physics at Oxford.
Although it was seldom recognised as a condition in the 1960s, my father’s late academic development and early difficulties with basic literacy skills are characteristic of dyslexia. Dyslexia runs in families, and I very much doubt that I, a card-carrying dyslexic, would have passed the eleven-plus either. While I may never reach my father’s academic heights, after an inauspicious start to my school career I did well in my GCSEs and A-Levels and graduated from Oxford this summer.
Learning difficulties are not uncommon – dyslexia alone is thought to affect one in ten children in the UK – and nor are they the only reason why a child with great academic potential might fail to shine in a set of exams taken when they are only eleven: poor primary school teaching, having a summer birthday and simple chance must all have consigned many a bright child to a Secondary Modern.
Theresa May is a grammar school girl herself, and understandably supports the expansion of a system within which she thrived: it was reported on Friday that she plans to lift the ban on new grammar schools imposed almost two decades ago.
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