grammar schools

1348 days ago

The Orwellian vision for Universities of the Guardian's Sonia Sodha

The peak years for state school entrance to my old University, Oxford, were in the 1960s. Then, successive Governments and Education ministers including, in a rare error of judgement, the blessed Lady Thatcher, started to scrap grammar schools. That ladder which gave bright working-class kids educational and social mobility was whipped away as they went along to comprehensives. Comprehensive schooling has, almost entirely, failed both the bright poor and the not so bright poor who, on most measures, fail in later life as badly as they did in the “bad old days”. But one institution has a solution… an establishment where most of the senior staff went to public schools and Oxbridge. Yes, you have guessed it…

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