What about the Comprehensive Failures?

A thought-free (but often successful) tactic of the anti-selection lobby is to ask grammar school supporters to consider the plight of 11-plus failures, suffering cruel rejection at a key moment in their lives.

 

Readers here will know that I favour mutual agreement rather than a sudden-death examination for selection, but why are these people never asked about the cruel rejection suffered by so many thousands of children each year, thanks to the operation of the 'comprehensive' system?

 

Today is 'National Offer Day', on which half a million children in England are told which secondary school they will go to. One in five will not get into their first choice, probably about 100,000. As a result, they will in many cases be cruelly robbed of a good education, by an arbitrary division far more cruel than the 11-plus because it is based mainly on their parents' wealth and their willingness to use sharp elbows.

 

In some places, the matter is actually being decided by lottery , a more or less mad way of allocating school places, though not much madder than the one we have.

In any system there will be selection, winners and losers. Even in the most just such system, some of the decisions will be the wrong ones. But it seems to me that selection by ability is immensely more just than what we now have.

It is not that I favour selection and my pro-comprehensive opponents are against it. It is that we favour different kinds of selection. They should be made to defend theirs, a system which many of them have learned to work and manipulate to their own advantage.