It only makes sense for a country, never mind it's individual citizens, to provide resources for its "brightest and best" to succeed and excel. While some old duffers are obsessed about the "good old days" of socialist thinking in the 60's and 70's, the countries that we are losing out to economically are pushing their school children and students to excel. Though ironically some of those countries have a history of socialism and communism, but still see the nonsense of "one size fits all" education.

What we need is equality of opportunity, not equality of delivery. Everyone should have access to education which will most benefit them. For some that will be pure academic, for some academic-clerical, for some skilled manual, and for some it will be a triumph if they leave school with basic reading and arithmetic skills. Only a fool would suggest that the optimal delivery mechanism of education for all abilities is a single "one size fits all" school.

There's just no point in them. They were part of the tripartite system that came into being in 1944. Free secondary education was established and HE of course couldn't accommodate a mass of new attendees (a situation that was made worse by 1000s of demobilized servicemen in 1945-46) when just before 1944 only .09% of 18+ year-olds attended university. They had to devise a system that rationed places until more institutions were built and reconstruction had been accomplished. By the time you hit the 1960s more universities were being built and need for grammar schools was effectively over. But change is difficult in education because it is such emotional issue for people so it wasn’t until the early 1990s that things really started to move rapidly. Now we have the beginning of mass HE so the need to ration is no more. When they allow truly differentiated tuition fees, the transformation of the system will be complete. It seems to be a rather silly political ploy, probably aimed to appeal to the prejudices of their base support when in reality there is no practical reason for them anymore.

But we've had stratified and streamed ability groups in the same school for decades. Why the need for a separate building?

i agree there. I would have been far better off had schools taught me useful skill of some sort that could help get a job, instead they fixated on trying to force you to learn foreign language and algebra and other pure academics some of us just did not master and never have, and never will.

Academics is fine and dandy, but its not something everyone has the ability to excel at.

For high school, I cannot honestly say I learned much of anything, it was just a 4 year struggle to get out and not fail.

I went to a secondary modern, and there were the div groups and the clever groups with a few in between. They weren't taught in the same classes or anything so I don't really understand the need to separate them geographically either.

I passed and went to a direct grant school. My brother didn't pass but all his friends did. They are no brighter than he is, nor am I. This difference in whether or not you passed was in the answerS your parents gave on the application for,. School preference if you try child passes, father's occupation. First time round my mother put "joiner", when I sat it she put "government employee"

Our grammar school was miles away - you needed to take the bus to get there. I'm glad I didn't have to do that and could just walk 15 minutes. Also a bunch of ex-grammar kids turned up at my school every year until it became a comprehensive - I don't recall any of them ever being put in the top groups for anything.

If your goal is to increase the standard of academic achievement then I'd suggest the best way to do this would be to invest and thus improve teacher education.

That's what we had at my comprehensive school.

I hadn't realised that they were introduced as some sort of systemic rationing, but in any case, they have evolved into something else, namely schools with a heavy academic focus. Surely there is a place for such institutions in society, as Pulsaki says, for the brightest and the best. It does seem a shame to dismantle a highly performing educational tier.

The problem seems to be they way grammar schools broadly entrench class division, and perhaps way forward is to reduce the number further, spread them around the country, and make them accessible to the truly gifted. Like some of the performing arts schools. That way there would not be widespread grief and stress about the 11+ as most would choose to remain in the comprehensive system.

The nature and structure of the economy in the UK is fundamentally different than it was in the post-war period. A curriculum based on the broad idea of a traditional and classical education is of little utility these days. I certainly agree with you that public education should always strive to offer the best educational experience it can but that will always be dependent on resources. All things being equal, there is a direct causation between money invested and results.

Secondly, I’ll restate, that the way social class manifests itself around the idea of selective grammar schools has lost much its potency with the formation of mass higher education.

And lastly, I think the best way to deal with this issue would be just to rename most of the secondary schools as grammar schools. This would either put the concept to bed or expose narrow class prejudice as the grammar school proponents scramble to create a new version of selective public education. Or they could stop moaning and put their children in private secondary education.

I completely agree with this. Looking back, teachers in the post war era tended to be much more rounded and experienced, many having served overseas in the forces.

I remember one primary school teacher, who had probably been some kind of communications bod in the war, having us primary school kids make microphones, morse transmission devices and electro magnets from bits and pieces even then easily available, and they worked. I wonder how many primary school teachers would understand the principles today.

Even in the grammar school I went to, there was a degree of engineering training. I remember the metalwork room had an austin seven hanging from the ceiling that sixth formers were working on and it was useful to be able to use the lathe to machine motor cycle cylinder heads. No health and safety in those days, just enterprising fun. I do remember one geography master who was a returned civil servant from the empire who was a complete pratt.

But without selection based on something like the 11+, how do you identify the "truly gifted" and why would you bother? The "truly gifted" will emerge from a proper common education system without being selected at age 11.

You mostly need to re-professionalise teachers in an attempt to get a few of the truly gifted to think that being a teacher is a privilege,

I like the Conservative notion of a meritocracy in education when it'll most likely cost 30k+ pounds a year to attend a top 10% UK HE institution in the not too distant future.

A few years ago I worked for a company in the Tata Group. Its founder, Jamsetji Tata, had a typically Parsee (Zoroastrian) approach to charity, which though it was stated in relation to the poor of India, applies equally to the provision of education in the UK:

Exchange "charity" for "government funding" and there's an argument for academically selective education, as relevant today as it was 150 years or so ago.

Whether that education should be delivered in specialist Grammar Schools, or whether through academic streaming within a comprehensive education system, is not really the point. What makes the biggest difference is in encouraging academically able children to perform to their potential, to provide a learning environment where that is the expectation and where there is support for bright kids to push themselves. I can't help feeling that, too often, the teaching and administrative staff at public-sector schools have lost that aim in the political shenanigans and shifting fashions of education policy. However hard people like Oink work to point out the obvious (and not-so-obvious: I'd never considered that grammar schools were put in place to effectively ration HE places...) and demonstrate how the system ought to work, that work is too often undone by the lack of enthusiastic support from within the teaching profession.

The pre-Comprehensive system of grammar vs secondary-modern evidently needed changing in the 1960s. The disparity of funding, of teaching, of opportunity, was patently unfair to those who, for all sorts of reasons, had not been able to perform adequately on the 11+ exam.

I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with reintroducing selective schools today, so long as funding and support for the non-selective (the modern take on secondary-moderns) is guaranteed and properly managed. I've always been under the impression that it was the failure of secondary moderns, rather than anything the matter with grammar schools, that was the driving force behind the introduction of comprehensive education.

Of course, some areas never really lost grammar schools. A nephew of mine attends what is now officially a "direct grant maintained" school in Wiltshire that was a CofE-funded Grammar school for most of its first century of existence, until some time in the 1990s. It is still, fundamentally, a grammar school. It's always been academically selective, always free to attend, and has by all accounts a good relationship with surrounding comprehensive schools.