When I realised I lived in an area with grammar schools, I moved house for the good of my kids

I was blissfully unaware that I was living in grammar school HQ until I took my child to the playground. Nodding in his direction a complete stranger approached, looking as though she’d eaten something sour: “Have you registered him with a tutor yet?" He was 10 months old.

Apparently, in Buckinghamshire, if you want your child to pass the 11+ you have to register them with a tutor before they’re born. “It was the first phone call I made when I found out I was pregnant," boasted the woman, who resembled a cross between Kirstie Allsopp and Bree van de Kamp from Desperate Housewives. “It might be too late,” she continued.

“I’ll take my chances," I said, as I scooped up my child and navigated an escape route through a minefield of baby Einstein products and organic raisins.

Before my son started school, we moved to a grammar-free zone, where children get to play in the summer, while children in Bucks get hot-housed in constant preparation for the dreaded 11+.

In the Commons debate today, where the lift on the grammar school ban was announced Labour MP Kate Hoey evangelically supported the move. She held Northern Ireland up as a success story. But in a global study in 2014, Northern Ireland came even lower than England in the international table.

In 2014, the head of Ofsted, Michael Wilshaw, said: "Grammar schools are stuffed full of middle-class kids, only 3 per cent of whom qualify for free school meals. That is nonsense." Grammar schools might do well with 10 per cent of the school population, but everyone else does really badly.

In August the Sutton Trust warned that 13 per cent of grammar school entrants come from outside the state sector, largely prep schools, which does nothing to improve social mobility. It warned that there was effectively “a correlation between how rich you are and the likelihood of going to these schools”. Surely every child deserves equal access to opportunity, whatever their academic ability, not just the few whose parents can afford to pay for tutors. If that’s the case, there’s only one fair policy option and that’s to invest in all schools, raising standards across the board.

Inherent in the grammar school ideology is the notion that education is fundamentally an academic exercise, where children are to be programmed, like machines, to churn out facts. Charles Dickens’ Hard Times documents what happens to children who are forcefed facts by headteacher, Mr Gradgrind, and deprived of “fancy”.

Michael Gove, Nicky Morgan and now, Justine Greening are the Gradgrinds of the day, grinding the children and teachers down so that there’s nothing but facts left in the system. Cissy exposed the system’s failing. That fact alone doth not maketh the person. Alive to joy and alert to the pain around her, she possessed the emotional intelligence that enabled her to recognise and challenge the flaws in the system.

Gradgrind’s system could only thrive in isolation. His children must not be contaminated with “notions” of fancy which they might catch, like a rash, from free-spirited children. That’s the purpose that the selective education system serves. The elite order affords certain privileges to the rich and imposes sanctions on the poor, as though poverty is a life choice.

Having benefited from selective education, recipients invariably go on to work in professions that reinforce this world order of entitlement, such as politics. Nothing along this career trajectory will challenge these deeply held prejudices.

Selective education is a form of social engineering and acts as a kind of inoculation against empathy, which has no place in fact factories and league tables. Yet, without it, we can’t access compassion and a sense of fairness and justice. Maybe that’s the point. If the Tories were forced to mingle with the masses at school they would know that homelessness, hunger and poverty are not life choices and that all children, irrespective of social class, deserve the very best education.