When Gordon Brown entered Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister he talked about the excellence of the education he received at Kirkcaldy High School in Fife. He even invoked the school motto – “I will try my utmost” – and claimed: “I wouldn’t be standing here without the opportunities I got there.”
Some in Scotland detected a massive hypocrisy in these words. His grammar school might have given him – and many like him – the opportunity to get on in life but that had not stopped Brown being in the vanguard of Scottish socialists who wanted to abolish every grammar school in the country. They succeeded: state education today in Scotland is a comprehensive monopoly.
That would seem to have taken its toll on educational excellence, say critics, even in Brown’s old elite grammar. According to today’s Scotland on Sunday, Brown’s alma mater (now a comprehensive) is no longer giving its pupils the sort of opportunities he enjoyed.
“Earlier this month,” reports the paper “the school, which was previously regarded as a beacon of academic excellence, was branded one of the most underachieving in Scotland, prompting education officials to draft in a troubleshooter.
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