‘Academic selection,” the Conservative spokesman on education David Willetts announced last week, “entrenches advantage, it does not spread it.”

The truth is that grammar schools have contributed more to social mobility than any other institution this country has known. In the 1940s and 1950s, when there was a grammar school in every town, more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds won places at top universities than before or since. Head teachers at public schools wondered about their future. Why, they asked, would parents continue to pay huge sums of money for their child’s education when a similar or better education was available at no cost in state grammar schools?

Then in 1965 Anthony Crosland vowed that if he did nothing else he would abolish every grammar school in the land. The cull began and the independent sector flourished. Now grammar schools survive, just, in Northern Ireland and in a handful of local education authorities in England.

Grammars constitute just 5% of state schools and they routinely dominate the league tables. As, of course, given their selective intake, they should. But research shows that children at grammars make better progress than their peers at comprehensive schools. In Northern Ireland pupils of all abilities routinely outperform pupils in England at GCSE and A-level.

Not so long ago Willetts, acknowledging these results, declared that he was a strong supporter of selective education. He has now changed his mind. Why? Because, he says, new evidence shows that grammar schools do not contribute to social mobility. I do not believe him.

His U-turn stems more from his party’s desire to rebrand itself than it does from the pursuit of a serious policy on secondary education. Grammar schools have been jettisoned because they are thought to smack of a right-wing Conservative past. The interests of bright children from disadvantaged homes have, in one of the bitterest ironies of modern politics, been sacrificed on the altar of compassionate Conservatism.

The killer fact for Willetts is that only 2% of pupils at grammars claim free school meals. Grammar schools, he concludes, have become middle-class institutions and, therefore, a bad thing. What matters in David Cameron’s desperate drive to convince the electorate that his party has discovered its social conscience is the underclass. You pay your taxes and worry about your children’s future? Hard luck. It is the 2% who claim free school meals that matter to Cameron’s Conservatives.

Willetts would have done well to ask himself why so few grammar school pupils claim free school meals. It is not after all a difficult question. Grammar schools are hugely oversubscribed. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds often attend underperforming primary schools. They find it difficult to compete with middle-class children who have, more often than not, benefited from a challenging intellectual environment.

The solution is equally obvious. Create more grammar schools so more children have an opportunity to benefit from the education they offer. Do more to raise levels of expectation and standards of education in our bog-standard inner-city primary schools. Encourage grammar schools to identify and support able children in poorly performing primary schools. Level the playing field.

This would have been the pragmatic solution. A common sense response would, however, have denied Cameron his clause 4. No dragon would have been slain and no headlines would have followed. Those headlines are deserved. Forget new Labour. This Conservative decision to abandon selection is old-style socialism, red in tooth and claw. If everyone cannot have it, nobody will.

Cameron and Willetts might just as well apply their argument to Oxford and Cambridge. Working-class children are underrepresented there so, whatever the contribution these institutions make to the nation’s intellectual and economic life, they must be dismissed as an elitist anachronism, a blot on the face of Cameron’s socially inclusive Britain. Sorry, chaps, but that is the inevitable consequence when compassionate Conservatism functions at its illogical best.

Having abandoned grammar schools, the Conservatives are now embracing Tony Blair’s city academies. They have, I suppose, to offer some solution to the problems of state secondary education. That progress is woefully slow in so many academies is a little awkward. The fact that their much trumpeted independence from state control is an illusion is neither here nor there, as is the lack of convincing evidence that the involvement of a sponsor who knows little about education makes much difference. They are new, they are glitzy, they demonstrate a Conservative commitment to waste as much public money as Labour, so who cares?

The great thing for Willetts is that academies are socially inclusive and are contributing, he claims, a great deal to the holy grail of social mobility. This claim is spurious. Few have achieved half-satisfactory examination results and none has existed long enough for anyone to know what its former pupils have done with their lives.

If Willetts is suggesting that the original city technology colleges, established by the Tories, have proved to be an academic success, then he is right. But he has conveniently forgotten that these colleges were allowed to interview prospective pupils and their parents, and therefore to eliminate those deemed likely to impact negatively on results. Socially inclusive they were not.

Grammar schools succeed for two reasons. Their pupils are all academically gifted so there is peer pressure to achieve and they attract teachers with first-rate academic qualifications who want to work with such children. Some comprehensive schools can recruit similar staff and attract enough able children to replicate this kind of competition, but not many.

In particular, it is difficult for the inner-city comprehensive and city academy. It is the inner-city child who needs the grammar school the most. The middle-class child who attends a half-decent suburban comprehensive school is going to survive reasonably well. The bright boy or girl from an inner-city ghetto who has to attend his or her inner-city comprehensive or academy won’t. However stunning the accommodation and cutting edge the resources, the city academy is never going to replicate the intellectual challenge of the traditional grammar school.

Lord Adonis, the architect of Blair’s academy programme, must know this. Like Willetts he used to be a supporter of grammar schools, even writing a book to extol their virtues. Now, having persuaded the Conservatives that academies are the way forward, he will no doubt be hoping that Gordon Brown becomes, as rumour suggests, similarly enthusiastic.

Nowhere is there any radical thinking. No party is committed to the creation of secondary modern schools for the 21st century which offer pupils who are not academic, but who have different, practical skills, the opportunity to develop their particular talents. No party appears willing to accept that teenagers are markedly different in their abilities and aspirations and that a vocational education in a vocational school might easily come to be seen as equally desirable as an academic education in a grammar school.

No, the political debate remains locked in the old clichés about the unfairness of selection and the desperate attempt to buy our way out of educational underachievement through the establishment of ever more expensive city academies.

Cameron dismisses any discussion of grammar schools as “pointless”. He caricatures those of us who continue to support grammar schools as being interested only in the education of “the select few”. I can reply only that I am interested in a meritocratic society in which academically successful schools are open to every child irrespective of the parents’ ability to pay.

Cameron and Willetts tell us they are going to transform every comprehensive school into just such an institution. There are just two questions we all need to ask: how are you going to do it? And how do your ideas on the reform of secondary education differ from Blair’s failed initiatives? They do not, I am afraid, have an answer.

Simon Jenkins is away

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