Damien Hinds has been Education secretary only since January 2018. Before being elected to Parliament his career was in the hospitality industry, including pubs.  This inexperienced minister, rather than first mastering his brief, after a short spell in the job, pronounces in favour of a doctrinaire policy which was discredited decades ago.

The Tory Government of which he is a member was elected in 2017, pledging to expand grammar school provision, but the Tories are not united on this matter; several of their MPs have voiced their misgivings. Most of the comprehensive schools throughout the  country were established by Tory local authorities.  These councils remain aware that many parents support the idea of grammar schools until their own children fail the eleven-plus and get shunted off to secondary modern schools. Lots of these secondary moderns are called comprehensive schools, although that is a nonsense.

Comprehensive means what it says: encompassing all; in other words, taking all the children in a given area, regardless of ability.  The 11-plus exam enables grammar schools to take only the children they fancy, which means the most able, those who are thought easiest to teach.  When a system creams off the ablest in this way, the schools receiving the remaining children cannot, by definition, be comprehensive.

Kent Education Authority’s overall GCSE results are among the worst in the country.  It also has the biggest concentration of grammar school in the country. Its grammar schools do well ─ although not as well as some comprehensive schools in other counties ─ but the modest results of its secondary modern schools drag down the overall performance.

Some parents are beguiled by better buildings, a fancy uniform and the thought that their children need to mix only with other “nice” children.  When they look beyond the superficial things, they see the risk of 11-plus failure and the prospect of their children being sent to a school which receives less funding despite having the challenge of educating more children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Creating more grammar places means creating more social divisiveness, more children with a sense of failure.

Britain’s future needs more people with good educational qualifications and good job prospects. The last thing it needs is a population deeply divided by social inequality, being already one of the most unequal societies in the developed world.