More on Grammar skool anexations....

Charles Moore of the Telegraph has been listening in on the conversation of Tonbridge school children. Maybe I should explain that comment before his lawyers contact me! He says as much in his most recent comment piece in the paper. Actually he was extremely positive about the level of discussion coming out of the (often loud) mouths of the school children of our town. Charles lives in East Sussex and, so he says, is a regular commuter through Tonbridge but he's actually using the daily scene of the mele of school boys and girls as a lead in to the real point he makes which is that he thinks that the growth of grammar schools should be encouraged. He goes on to say in his column that we should be celebrating inequalities rather than trying to equalize everything in our society and particularly in education. Some may not be at all that surprised by Mr. Moore's point of view given that he is Margaret Thatcher's official biographer, chosen by the lady herself no less, but I happen to think that he maybe has a point. At least grammar schools give less well off children a good fighting chance of becoming upwardly mobile. Unless all grammars and all private schools countrywide were to be abolished, which is highly unlikely in the next hundred years, we will go on having unequal opportunity; so why fight that fact by trying to impose idealistic principles in education policy? Which just makes all this business with Weald of Kent School having to call the recently approved new Sevenoaks grammar school an "annexe" rather absurd. Let there be more grammars in all counties and not just in Kent and a few others. So long as comprehensives maintain their own standards where the harm in it?...