As the Chief Inspector of Schools has rightly said, the Government's plans to extend grammar schools with a passing nod to increasing access for a few bright but poor pupils is simply likely to make those schools who lose them worse: social mobility for a few bought at the cost of even greater immobility for the many. It will increase not reduce the divisions which are holding this country back and which were so clearly shown on 23rd June.
Two points I'd like to make:
1. I don't have a problem with a school system that separates those better suited to stretching academic work and those with better practical skills, so long as the value of each is appreciated and the type of education each offers is good. Both should be excellent in their own way (not one being a shadow of the other in a demoralising, pigeon-holed hierarchy). They have something rather like this in The Netherlands and Germany which doesn't seem to require those taking the more practical route to be seen as less worthy. Although those countries still make things, of course ...
2) The Government's plans are a perfect example of one reason I believe we should stay in the EU (and why I said so well before the referendum): many of Britain's deepest problems, not least the educational, social and cultural gulf between those who did well and badly out of their education, are of our own making and result from our own bad governance. They were done on our watch, not the EU's. Nigel Lawson's recent plea to complete the unfinished Thatcher revolution tells me that the people who brought us to this are of late full of a passionate intensity. The last thing we need is to let these people out again at a time when we are once again looking inward. They have pissed in our pool for long enough.
If only as an example, we need Europe more than ever.
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