Grammar schools like the one I went to are good for social mobility – the public schools most politicians attend are not

I get angry sometimes because I know there were children born after me whose life chances were blighted, irretrievably, by being deprived of the chances I had through the grammar school. That is just too sad to bear

Labour passed laws in 1998 banning the creation of new grammar schools (PA)

Like hanging and steam engines, the whole idea of state-funded grammar schools is a distinctly atavistic cause, the enthusiasts for it usually on the right of politics, and old enough to be able, from personal experience, to want to return to a better yesterday. Like me. Leaving old trains and capital punishment to one side (I am sentimental about neither of those), I do wonder if the time might not have come for a sensible, rational discussion about secondary education for the academically gifted. Theresa May (ex-Holton Park Girls' Grammar School) and Education Secretary Justine Greening (ex-Oakwood Comprehensive School) certainly think so, if the reports are to be believed.

OK, calm argument is asking a bit much, given the passions on all sides, and the dogma that usually attaches to the debate. After all, everyone’s been to school, haven’t they, so everyone has got an “informed opinion”. But I may as well have a go at making the case for what I would like to call Modern Grammar Schools.

First off, were grammar schools the ladder of opportunity for poorer children they were made out to be? Yes and no. I went to a good grammar school, the Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester, to give it its full title, in the 1970s. Founded in about 1536, and re-founded in 1877, it was built first on the money made by William Wyggeston as a wool merchant, and later by the prosperity the city enjoyed as a centre for hosiery manufacture (by the way, the grammar schools were thus more of a Midlands and northern thing than a southern one, founded in the long era when the North was actually richer than the South – there were comparatively few in the Home Counties. Thus when they were abolished, that act accidentally added to the North-South divide).

My masters – and they were almost exclusively male – had dedicated virtually their entire working lives to the place, Mr Chips style. In 1973, when I turned up, there were even a couple (the Head of Art and the Lower School Master), who had started their careers at Wyggeston just before the Second World War, their time interrupted in one case by service in the Durham Light Infantry. They wore gowns, they exercised an easy discipline, they got the very best out of their charges, and they sent lots to Oxbridge, me included.

They were go-ahead too, and experimental. Occupying a whole classroom, we had the first computer in the whole county, and it was used by the university next door. The nerdier kids were learning programming by the late 1970s. The headmaster took a small class in Russian. Unbelievably, Ancient Greek was firmly on the syllabus (though not for me – I excelled at Geography, you know). Rugger and cricket were the school sports; football was for the playground during breaks, hockey an exotic import for the sixth formers. Some of us were useless at all of them.

Had it not been for the school, I’m not sure what I’d be doing now. Do I feel that my good fortune was built on depriving some other child of a decent education? Not really, I have to say. I don’t think it is zero-sum in that way. If you scrap the grammar school you do not, as we discovered in the decades since, level up educational standards and achievements. You simply make the system of state education overall much less attractive, and people are free to opt out if they can afford to. And opt out many have, making often painful sacrifices, despite the escalating fees and competition for places.

If the egalitarians of the Labour Party – the Dick Crossmans, the Tony Benns, the Tony Croslands, the Shirley Williamses – had really wanted to revolutionise educational opportunity, they would have scrapped the public schools which so many of them attended. Instead they demolished – literally in some cases – free places of learning founded as far back as medieval times with traditions and excellence built into their very fabric. I wonder how their spiritual successors in the Corbyn-led Labour Party, now as then products of fine public schools, feel about all that.

But who got most out of the grammars? When I think about my classmates I see a couple of things. Yes, there were some working class kids around. There really were sons of miners and publicans learning Latin, and there was no great social embarrassment about their status. You occasionally got embarrassed when it was plain that your home was much poorer than some around you, but it didn’t intrude much. Most of the actively encouraged competition between the kids at the school was based on their prowess at sport, at their studies or bullying their weaker peers. It cut across class.

On the other hand, it also became increasingly apparent, to me at any rate, that some of the lads’ mums and dads were spectacularly rich, again at least by my standards. Obviously I’d gone past big houses in the posher suburbs before, but it was only when we got old enough to visit each other’s homes that I discovered quite how large a living room and a garden could be. Some of them had two cars! For my more fortunate friends, I got the sense that they may not have encountered how small a living room could be, nor what a tin bath was for.

The point here is that the sons of consultant surgeons, university lecturers, chief architects and chartered accountants could, in many cases, have easily paid for their offspring to attend at least a minor public school, if not the famous ones. For them, the grammar school did represent a bit of a scam, basically getting a public school education on the rates, so saving them the school fees. But that was the alternative; there was no way their kid was going to a comp. And when the state grammar school was gradually wound up after re-organisation in 1976, they did send the younger siblings to such establishments. Indeed a new, fee-charging private grammar school for Leicester was set up only a few years later, ironically occupying some of the handsome late Victorian buildings my old school had long since abandoned.

What was the upshot of all this? Well, a few working class and middle class kids did exceptionally well, with transformational effects on their lives and to the great benefit of the wider community as they made their contributions in callings nobler and more socially useful than journalism (thought I’d get that in before one of the trolls).

The others did well too, usually getting enough ‘O’ levels to get an apprenticeship or a job at a bank at 16. The failure, if such it was, wasn’t the grammar school in itself but the rigidity of selection at 11. We all knew by the time we were 15 it had been of a lottery. There were kids who must have been bright enough to pass the language and maths tests at 11, but who didn’t go on to New College Oxford (it was the nearest Borstal where they finished off their educations). Conversely, there were kids, such as me as it happens, who weren’t that much cop when they were 11 or 12, but got better as time went on.

We didn’t have much transfer in from the comps, and the dimmer boys were simply kept down a year rather than being sent off somewhere else. That was a fault, and the obvious answer is to have a re-test at, say, 14, and a movement of children at that point, in their own interests as intellectual development can change radically in a few short years. Puberty can do unpredictable things. At 16 you could have another reshuffle for 'A' levels.

Of course, the best comprehensives can replicate that through effective setting or streaming arrangements, and moving away from so-called mixed ability teaching. They can also have – do have – superb and talented teachers making great sacrifices for their students. What they lack, though, is an institutional focus on academic excellence above all.

A modern grammar school system would add another element to the educational eco-system. These schools would suit some pupils more than others, but I cannot see why running them and funding them necessarily deprives other schools of resources. Some graduates might be attracted to the teaching profession because of the modern grammar schools’ public school-style ethos but openness to all regardless of means, in a way they are not attracted to working in the comprehensive system. There is a certain strength in allowing new, or renewed, systems to prove their usefulness, as we found with academies and free schools.

The truth is that every system of education has its drawbacks as well as its advantages and no one system – including the comprehensive system – can hope to suit all children or be able to evolve without a competitive spur. Harold Wilson, like Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath a high-profile product of a grammar school education (before we went back to get our prime ministers from the ancient public schools), once famously remarked that he would like to see every child get a grammar school education. That was well meant, but wrong, as it simply wouldn’t suit every child, just as life in a comp doesn’t suit some, nor life in a “top” single-sex private boarding school would suit everyone.

I get angry sometimes because I know there were children born after me whose life chances were blighted, irretrievably, by being deprived of the chances I had through the grammar school. That is just too sad to bear. We need variety, we need different ladders of opportunity, we need to take the best of some older models and modernise them. Modern Grammar Schools would be good for opportunity, good for social mobility, good for equality, and good for the country.