Andrew Adonis considers abolition of grammar schools damaged social mobility
This article, from Workers Liberty is interesting. It is about this article, from the Spectator. The Spectator article has provoked a remarkable number of rebuttal articles, such as this, from the Guardian, and another from the Guardian, as well as vaguely supportive ones such as this, from the Evening Standard.
It shows that nearly thirty years on selective state education is still a live issue in British politics. Polls suggest that the majority of the population would send their kids to private schools if they could afford to. Given that all private schools are selective one could argue that this implies that the majority of the population approve of selection. The bizarre thing is that the one thing that the major parties agree on is that there must never be a return to grammar schools, which I take to mean that they are all against selection.
Sometimes it seems that the only parents who could afford to educate their kids privately but choose not to do so are a small minority of elected Labour politicians. Certainly Lord Adonis himself, together with his arch-enemy Ruth Kelly and Lord Falconer all chose to send their kids to private schools. It is widely predicted that Tony will send Leo to a private school.
As usual with political arguments, when you look carefully at what the two sides are saying, they do not actually refute the other side's assertions. The pro-selection camp says that, basically, comprehensives fail to prepare kids to get to the top of the tree. They point out that for the first time ever the leaders of both the major parties are privately, and expensively educated. They point out that comprehensives send a negligible proportion of their output to Oxford or Cambridge. The opponents state that if Secondary Modern schools had not been abolished the pass rate at GCSE would never have come close to its current levels and we would never have a hope of achieving the 50% target of young people going to university.
I suppose it boils down to what you think is the more important goal, which depends a lot on how what value you put on an Oxbridge or an Imperial College degree compared to a Luton degree. Richard Sykes implied that the former was a great deal more valuable than the latter, for which, of course, he was crucified in the press (see here). This is a similar argument to the comparative value of a GCSE in Physical Education compared to one in Latin. I wonder if we can ever be truly objective about such contentious issues.