However, Hitchens argues that the existing state school system is also riddled with inequalities. He cites a Sutton Trust report which found that “more than 85 per cent of the highest-performing state schools take in fewer disadvantaged pupils than they should for their catchment area”. Some successful comprehensive schools are located in areas with high house prices, so they tend to recruit more children from affluent families. He also mentions a study from Teach First, which found that 43 per cent of students at England’s outstanding state secondary schools come from the wealthiest 20 per cent of families. Poorer pupils, Hitchens notes, “are half as likely as the richest to be heading into an outstanding secondary school”. Many affluent families who send their children to comprehensive schools try to give them an advantage in other ways, for example, by paying for clubs and extracurricular activities. Nonetheless, I would, without doubt, support any return to selection by ability, rather than income, at the drop of a hat, in the unlikely event the electorate were to be given the chance to choose, by the current crop of political elites, who, ostensibly, stand on either side of the imaginary divide between the two main parties. In presentational terms, the most noticeable effect of not reporting unregulated international GCSEs in the measures of attainment is seen in DfE’s headline performance measure of the percentage of eligible pupils achieving five or more A* to C GCSE or equivalent qualifications including English and maths; the reported performance of affected schools is 0% on this headline measure. The absence of unregulated international GCSEs from the headline measure almost exclusively affects the published results of independent schools. We estimate that this issue might have affected the reported performance of up to around one-third of independent schools and the reported performance of up to around two-thirds of pupils in independent schools . Our seriousness only persists to the extent that it permits hypocrisy, given that almost no one scolds VI Forms and universities for continuing to employ academic-based selection.

Hitchens doesn’t appear to recognise that most private schools are also academically selective and parental income is just an additional selection factor, nor that these figures undermine the idea that private schools provide an unfair advantage to the children of the wealthy. They are also prima facie implausible. The citation directs the reader to the Department for Education report Revised GCSE and Equivalent Results in England: 2014 to 2015 . The summary document cites slightly different figures to Hitchens, so we’re left to search through the nine Excel files for the statistics he’s referencing. In Main National Tables, Table 3b, we find the relevant figures for grammar, comprehensive, and all mainstream state schools. The figure for independent schools does not appear anywhere here, but it does appear in a HoC briefing paper which quotes the same source, so I will grant Hitchens the benefit of the doubt. I went on to to teach in Comprehensives, for seven years, in East London, leaving to become a Chartered Certified Accountant in the Oil & Gas industry, and, owing to the paucity of education I encountered as a schoolteacher, I selected, by income, to put my own children through private schools, namely, Dulwich College and Alleyn's, (as I was not prepared to entrust their education to the state, for which my children remain ungrateful, indifferent to, and oblivious of what they avoided) where they both succeeded, academically, as far as the watered down syllabi allowed, with one of them graduating from a Russell Group University (Leeds), and the other eschewing university (which I think is a very good decision for most young adults today, particularly if it's not a Russell Group one), and relies on his well rounded social skills to make his way, along with a raft of mainly A and A* Grade GCSE O' and A' Levels. Reading the first two chapters one gets a sense of the depth of knowledge or research Hitchens can draw on. Any Zoomer or Millennial reading this is likely to learn a great deal about the history of the British left and the debate on academic selection which took place long before we were born. The arguments made by this book, and by others in the right-wing press, serve as an alibi for cash-strapped middle-class parents who want a better education for their children. I argue they should wear their prejudices openly, and demand the reintroduction of grammar schools for their own self-interest.

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Introducing grammar schools reduced the percentage of pupils attending private schools to 5.3% in 1960. The reintroduction of grammar schools today would likely have an even larger effect given the dramatic unaffordability of school fees. Simultaneously applying VAT to school fees would be the final nail in the coffin for the private school business model, and most would apply to become state grammar schools. Public debate usually frames education as an investment, and questions how to improve the quality of schooling so that today’s children earn more as tomorrow’s adults, or how best spread the investment between social classes so that everyone has the same shot in life. Hitchens’ book continues in that tradition, but I have presented enough information to show that education likely has little effect on earnings and that reorganising secondary education into grammar schools will likely not spread opportunity or boost the earnings of pupils who attend.

in independent schools, pupils have continued to be entered for unregulated iGCSEs that do not count in performance measures and they have not been moved across to the regulated certificate versions. The Impact of Selective Secondary Education on Progression to Higher Education (HEPI Occasional Paper 19)

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There are few subjects these days that cause parents more stress than the education of their children. Hitchens argues that as well as condemning numberless gifted young people from poor families to languish in mediocrity in sink schools, the project hasn’t even achieved its aim of a fairer society. Quite the reverse: selection by ability has been replaced by selection by wealth, the better comprehensives being able to draw from the most expensive catchment areas. Moreover, in the desperate attempt to shore up belief in the comprehensive project, the process of making exams easier was initiated, a process which continues to this day to the point where large numbers of university entrants need remedial classes in basic literacy and numeracy. Hitchens even showcases the many stories of students who transferred to a grammar school after showing academic potential after age eleven. Of course, some bright children did not or could not transfer and were left disappointed by their failure to gain a grammar school place, but surely this is an argument that they should have been better expanded rather than scrapped? But Hitchens also hints at the greater purposes of education - cultural transmission and the pursuit of academic excellence - as ends in themselves. He is on stronger footing when arguing these goals can be better achieved by segregating kids by ability. How can one be taught the English canon when slower children take weeks to grapple with Shakespearean English, or be trained to compare theories of history when ignorant pupils need to be taught the basic facts of the Tudor Dynasty and the Second World War over and over again?

Grammar schools decrease the salience of the home environment and provide a level playing field between the haves and have-nots. The examination grades of different social classes converge, and working-class hostility to education is eradicated through the leadership of enthusiastic teachers and cultural spillover from middle-class schoolmates. This creates a more meritocratic society where professional, educational and economic success more closely correlate with real ability, rather than inherited privilege. This is not just more fair, but also benefits society as a whole, as the economic potential of the country is maximised. Hitchens points to the declining share of Oxbridge entrants from independent schools after the introduction of the tripartite system: 62% percent before the Education Act 1944, falling to 45% on the eve of comprehensivisation in the mid-1960s. The representation of state (nearly entirely grammar) schools more than doubled in this period, from 19% to 34% (pp. 89-91), with the remaining places were filled by overseas students and students from direct grant schools. ACCORDING to his widow, Anthony Crosland, the Labour education secretary from 1965 to 1967, once told friends: ‘If it’s the last thing I do, l’m going to destroy every last f***ing grammar school in England and Wales and Northern Ireland’.If true, he pretty much succeeded. Of the 1,298 grammars that existed at the time of that profanity, just a few hundred pale simulacra of these once formidable institutions now remain. This was, argues Peter Hitchens in A Revolution Betrayed, a grievous self-inflicted wound whose pain is still keenly felt. He also references the 1983 Standards in English Schools report by Caroline Cox and John Marks which, according to Hitchens, ‘shows pupils at secondary modern and grammar schools obtained more GCE O-level results than pupils at comprehensive schools – both nationally and in the same social group’ (p. 86). It compares achievement between comprehensives and a weighted average of grammar schools and secondary moderns, and finds that this reconstructed sample outperforms comprehensive by roughly 15% of the gap between grammar schools and secondary moderns. 1There are too many examples to list, but his finest instance of misuse of statistics is when Hitchens argues ‘grammar schools greatly outdistance both comprehensive and private secondary schools’ and ‘the difference between comprehensives as a whole and private schools as a whole’ is ‘slight’ and cites figures that the percentage of students achieving 5 A*-C grades including English and Maths at GCSE are 96.7%, 56.7% and 58.1% for grammar, comprehensive and private schools respectively. Hitchens’ conclusion is that ‘selection by ability produces results far better than covert selection by parental wealth or religion’ (p. 95). But grammar schools (and by extension secondary moderns) were (and are) more numerous in wealthier areas of England , and the 25% weighting placed on grammar schools is an overweighting, as grammar schools outside of LEAs retaining the tripartite system draw from a much smaller percentage of the population. A key factor in the bipartisan betrayal of the grammars was the Conservative s’ failure to expand them in advance of the wholly predictable strain they would come under as the “Baby bulge” reached schooling age in the 1950s. It is astounding how this fact is almost universally omitted from increasingly irregular rows over the issue in mainstream media.

Of course, selection across all age groups never ended at all. It has simply evolved into a more sinister species. Wealth is the “serpent” that corrupts the educational Eden , and the rich will always find a way to educate their own.Some of the flaws in the comprehensive model were understood at the time, and glossed over in the sunlit uplands promotion, but the extent of the potential damage seems not to have been realised, or if it was, it wasn’t considered a priority. Graham Savage, the civil servant who coined the term ‘comprehensive’, was inspired by American high schools whose aim was to produce good citizens rather than an educated elite. He admitted that academic standards would likely fall, but commented near the end of his life that they had fallen rather more than he had anticipated. Increasing the number of grammar schools, Hitchens implies, would give poorer children a greater chance of getting into them. But what if it didn’t? The gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children widens in those areas where selective schooling is present. Hitchens claims in his book that, “Support for academic selection does not mean support for the exact system of selection which was abolished after 1965.” But selection is still selection. Grammar schools tend to reinforce, rather than dismantle, social and economic inequalities. Despite many of the poor arguments in the book, I actually support the reintroduction of the eleven-plus and grammar schools, albeit for different reasons.