Ditto. I moved from an old grammar into a brand new comprehensive school. We were in the top two classes...taught by the same grammar school teaches as we had before. The children from the secondary schools went into the other classes...taught by their old teachers.

Most of the grammar school children went into 6th form...most of the others left school at 16.

Did you take up the offer?

Bull. Her major contribution as Minister of Education was removing the free milk.

Life is strange: those who achieved the best A level results in my lot were rejected by Oxford/Cambridge .

As a minister maybe but as PM it was a different matter. The milk is a red herring, there are far better ways to get good nutrition into a child's diet. Plus the classrooms had all kinds harmful bacteria on the desks, floors and big stinking cloths because of spillage. Thatcher brought transparency, accountability and increased the level of service and professionalism to state education. Schools before were often demeaning and harmful places, no more than educational dustbins for working class children. State schools often failed these children, children who entered adulthood branded as failures, state institutions that were set up to produce a tiny elite while undermining the potential of large swathes of the population. If it wasn’t for the reforms in the 1980s and 1990s that would still be largely the case. I'm not suggesting Thatcher was a champion of the working class, in fact I find many of her policies despicable and unnecessarily harsh but imo many of the changes in public education produced profound advancements and benefits.

Sounds very familiar.

I went to school in Brighton, on a campus that (then) comprised an infant/primary school (a distinct infant school was built a bit later), a secondary modern and two grammar schools (one per gender).

The change saw the SM become a comprehensive, the girly grammar a girly comprehensive and the male one a sixth form.

Quite a few of my teachers at my comprehensive were straight out of the grammar schools. They did not teach the B-stream!

The schools still exist. I think they have over 6,000 pupils between them. The campus should be a bit crowded but it isn't. It covers 70 acres in a nice part of town and the schools are dotted around the edges. There is an awful lot of green between them. Looking back, I was quite lucky to spend 13 years there.

Sounds nice...my school was surrounded by council estates.

One thing that has struck me, on reflection, was that there was an almost total absence of non-white, non-Christian people in the three schools I went to.

If memory serves, there was one teacher from India, two Hindus, a Sikh, an Asian-Ugandan refugee, an African and a kid from Antigua. And one Jew.

That's spread over 13 years.

I wonder if things are different now?

Oink for Thatcher. Yay.

I grew up in Sheffield...which at the time was predominantly white Protestant. I can't remember anyone at the schools I went to being other than that. There were very few Catholics in the area I lived...just as well as we weren't allowed to mix with them. My mum was appalled when I met my husband (his surname gave him away)...please don't tell me he's a Catholic and an Irish Catholic. 30 years later when she was close to death...she finally admitted I had married a good man.

Very different times

Do tell.....

We had a Greek Cypriot temporarily (1960s) and one black kid who I was good friends with. Except for the part where, in my innocence, I'd call him blackman to get him to chase me in the playground.

I cringe when I think about it now. Sorry Douglas.

Different times. I don't think we saw anything nasty about it in those days. It was just a difference in colour. Even the school thugs didn't pick on the non-white kids. It probably didn't occur to them that they were meant to.

My. That's another world. We had the children of wave after wave of failed immigrants; the successful immigrants having moved on. I recall there being West Indians by the busload, one called Everard, Greeks, Turks, Indians, Pakistanis, Spaniards, Portuguese, Poles, binnies of multiple flavours, even a Canadian. Now I understand there to be a wave of Chinese immigrants. When I arrived I thought Toronto a bit monocultural.

It is still largely the case though isn't it?

My Direct Grant school had about 50% of the pupils from 11 plus passes the rest were fee payers. It had very good results apart from me and many girls went to university which was not so common then. After the reforms it opted to become fully independent removing opportunities for working class kids.

I didn't think much if the 11plus as a selection method though, it failed boys miserably plus at the age of 11 you became an obvious part of the them and us world.