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Re-introducing grammar schools

ARGUMENTS FOR:

Grammar schools offer the best academic education the state system can provide, as the 146 that survive prove every year.

Education is by its nature selective and elitist. Not every child can master advanced mathematics or a foreign language. A good educational system respects such realities.

Grammar schools used to be the greatest instrument for social mobility this country has seen. Since most were closed, the proportion of state-school educated undergraduates at Oxford has fallen by 7 per cent to 55 per cent.

Selection doesn't mean that children are irrevocably divided into academic sheep and non-academic goats at the age of eleven. Provision can be made for late developers to transfer to grammar schools. Independent schools accept new pupils at all ages.

Comprehensives replaced selective schools because the secondary moderns, not the grammar schools, had failed. The answer is to provide better schools for the less academic.
The First Post guide to the issue of the day

ARGUMENTS AGAINST:

Grammar schools represent a 1950s solution to a 21st century problem. Society has changed. The middle-class is much larger. Grammar schools would no longer lead to social mobility because they would be almost entirely filled by middle-class children.

There are successful comprehensives all over the country. It is nonsense to pretend that comprehensives can't be as successful as grammar schools in teaching the academically able while also catering for the less academic.

The real problem lies in primary, not secondary, education: the fact that 44 per cent of children leave primary school either illiterate or innumerate.

The campaign to restore grammar schools is a distraction from the need to provide better education for the majority of children.

It is better to increase the number of self-governing City Academies than to hark back to the elitism of the post-war years.

FIRST POSTED MAY 21, 2007

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