Theresa May is right, we need more selective schooling – the brightest have suffered for long enough

Even if her government is not actually about to restore grammar schools, Theresa May has reopened one of the most painful subjects in education in England and Wales and taken a huge risk by reviving the subject. It may be a bigger risk than she realised. It is not a change that featured anywhere in the Conservatives’ last election manifesto, and May does not have her own electoral mandate as Prime Minister.

She is playing with fire.

For all that, I think she is right – right, at least, to broach the hypersensitive question of selection. It is perverse in the extreme to encourage school diversity and choice to the point of allowing pretty much anyone to set up a new “free” school, then to allow selection on all sorts of criteria – sports, music, etc – but to ban absolutely the most basic selection of all: by academic ability.

May is also right to highlight, as she did when she met MPs on Wednesday, how the present system selects – ruthlessly – by income. If you have the money, you can buy your way into the catchment area of the best local school. Those parents who want to know, know exactly which these schools are, and divergence in local house prices is the proof. Being in the “right” catchment area is a big selling point for a house: you have only to scan estate agents’ adverts to realise this.

And if demanding parents still feel that the school is not up to scratch, they can pay tutors. It is doubtless coincidence that the Sutton Trust report, showing the sharp growth of private tuition over the past decade, appeared just as grammar schools hove again into view. But this is yet more evidence of the injustices spawned by the present arrangements. State schools should provide an education that does not need to be “topped up” by paid-for tutoring – whether for those at the top or the bottom of the scale. The money paid over – to moonlighting junior teachers among others – is staggering, and it is wrong.

These are all contradictions – pernicious contradictions – produced by the present system. Supporters of comprehensive schools, from the time they became the norm in the 1970s until now, insist that the system as a whole is an improvement on what went before. Their arguments are familiar: such definitive selection at 11 was cruel, depended on performance at one or two tests, and could ruin a child’s future. It perpetuated class and wealth divides, and it had the effect of squandering abilities.

Those same supporters – who include most of the current state schools establishment – now cite studies that show the majority of pupils do better in comprehensives. The only pupils who may do less well are those at the very top. Comprehensive advocates tend to skirt around this, insisting that the most able children will end up doing well anyway, and that the benefits for the majority outweigh the interests of the very brightest.

I’m sorry, but I do not think these arguments are good enough. In these competitive times anything that holds back the brightest is an indictment in itself. What England and Wales did was to abolish, by Government fiat, a system that was internationally respected and enabled the most able to flourish, and replace it with one that reduced social mobility and actually penalised the very best.

Why, instead of imposing comprehensives, was the decision not taken to keep selection, while modernising and improving the education provided by the secondary moderns? Answer: because it stemmed from misguided egalitarianism: from politics and ideology, not from how the interests of the country’s future might best be served.

Only now, 50 years on, is academic excellence starting to reassert itself as something desirable, but over all those years some of the “brightest and best” have been lost. Is it chance that the previous Conservative front bench was so heavily weighted towards public schools? Or that the professions are still so skewed in the same way? When Oxford and Cambridge are criticised for the preponderance of private school pupils they admit, it is rarely stated that this is actually a step back. They were far less socially exclusive when grammar schools – and the selective direct-grant schools of old – competed for places.

Here you deserve to know where, as they say, I am coming from. Here are a few – perhaps random – personal disclosures. My sister and I both went to (selective) direct grant schools on scholarships and we both went on to Oxbridge at a time when there were relatively few places there for women, but far less dominance by the private schools. My two brothers went to a grammar school as it went comprehensive. Standards slipped dramatically. Their lives and their careers have turned out fine. But school was not a great success. One now lives in a county with grammar schools; the other moved house for the sake of the schools.

Direct grants schools, such as the one I went to, had to choose between going private or joining the state system. Most went private and slashed the proportion of free places (from as many as half at the school I went to), thus striking another blow against social mobility. Perhaps some of today’s academies and free schools, whose financial model is more like that of the direct grant schools, could become selective, while avoiding the stigma (as it will be seen in some quarters) of being designated grammars. Could this be where Theresa May is aiming?

There need to be caveats, of course. If academic selection is to be reintroduced, there must be more opportunities to transfer between types of school; 11 is too young for a life-choice. An option rejected in the 1970s – the complete revamp of secondary moderns – should also be embraced, because technical education is poor, if not poorer, than it was.

And a footnote. I was in France last week, during the annual ritual of the rentrée – when work resumes, politics is re-joined and the new school year begins. The airwaves were full of the organisation and curriculum changes introduced – without any of the political warfare that characterises education discussions in Britain. The focus was on improving the education of French children.

Alas, education in general, and schools in particular, are unlikely to escape the grip of politics here, and the greatest risk in raising the prospect of new grammar schools now is that it will reopen this barely healed wound. Perhaps, however, as with the European Union, it is something that has festered for so long and to such destructive effect that we should embark on a proper discussion, in the knowledge that we are 50 years on, and try to settle the question once and for all.