Sunday 18th October

I went to Grammar School.  I was lucky.  I used to love ‘Pit Your Wits’ on TV and  had even been bought a couple of books full of these sorts of puzzles and so I passed my 11 plus, as did 5 others out of about 80 kids in that year of Junior School.  We had no preparation at all, we had no idea why we were asked to return to the Assembly Hall and sit at a desk.  We were told to turn the paper over and fill it in and answer as many questions as we could.  There was a blackboard at the front and the Headmaster pointed out Name – Joe Bloggs.  Address – 6 Brick Lane.  At least two boys filled their exam paper in with those details.

When I eventually got to Grammar School after my parents had bought the ridiculously expensive Uniform and Sports Gear from the sole retailer in town allowed to sell them, who happened to be one of the School Governors, I discovered an interesting fact.  All the other kids in our year came from Private Prep Schools.  I hadn’t even realized there were such schools.  I simply thought everyone went to a State School, as I had.  And these kids had been drilled in the very same sort of exam papers for months before-hand, and almost all of them passed and went to Grammar School.

I was lucky.  But my old friends weren’t.  They went to the Secondary Modern School and got a much less academic education.  There was no chance of any sort of re-evaluation at a later stage for slow developers.  The 11-plus was a one-off chance which we didn’t even realise we were being given.

And now the Tories are allowing the re-introduction of Grammar Schools by the backdoor; as so-called Satellites of existing Grammar Schools.  Which may well be great for those lucky or with wealthy enough parents to ensure they get there, but not for those left behind.

Who know how I would have fared if I were born a few years later and had attended a Comprehensive.  I didn’t actually do that well at all at the Grammar School.  6 O-levels and I ran away from home and school a few weeks before my A-levels.  But the Grammar School did open me up to new ideas, and to the concept that education and enlightenment were good things in their own right, that Art was important, that there was a whole world of opportunity out there.  Maybe that was more to do with the Post-War expansion of ideas anyway, who knows?  So I don’t regret my Grammar School education, but I am glad that Comprehensives eventually gave that same sense of opportunity to everyone.  As so often in the Modern World, what is good for a few individuals is not that good for the rest of us.