Sir, Stephen Pollard is mistaken in many of his beliefs about the development and consequences of the move from selective to comprehensive education in the second half of the last century (Opinion, June 24). R. A. Butler’s 1944 Education Act did not “enshrine the tripartite system of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools”. The 1944 Act did not enshrine any particular system; it allowed the development of free secondary education for all within a system determined by the local education authorities and the government of the day. The origins of the tripartite system lay in the Norwood report of 1943 and, to an extent, the Spens report of 1938. Butler was happy to see experimentation with comprehensives and would have allowed the few LEAs that wanted to go down this route in 1944, including Conservative authorities such as Surrey, Westmorland and the West Riding of Yorkshire, to do so. It was the post-1945 Labour Government of Clement Attlee that stopped this, on the ground that grammar schools were more egalitarian.

Mr Pollard quotes the objectives of a couple of socialists, yet support for comprehensives was not a uniquely left-wing idea. The first English LEA to go comprehensive was Conservative-controlled Leicestershire in 1957. Many Tory counties followed in the 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher, then the Education Secretary, closed more grammar schools than any minister before or since. According to the Conservative Party Campaign Guide of February 1974, she approved 91 per cent of about 3,600 secondary reorganisation proposals put before her.

History has proved her right. We now have a decade of results from the huge Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. These use a sample of 400,000 15-year-olds across Western and some developing countries. All those countries at the top of the surveys have comprehensive systems of secondary education, while those with selective systems have fallen down the list. The director of PISA, Andreas Schleicher, has stated repeatedly that differentiated systems of secondary education have a negative impact.

There are many factors that impede social mobility and it is wrong to blame the school system. Canada and the US have comprehensive systems with far tighter admissions procedures than the UK, yet social mobility flourishes there. While grammar schools did give opportunity to a few people from poor backgrounds, the tripartite system locked far more up in secondary moderns where they were written off as failures at about the age of 10. Very few were able to transfer later to grammar schools, at 13. The reality is that comprehensive education, both at home and abroad, has created far more opportunity for a broader range of ability and social background than the tripartite system ever did.

Demitri Coryton
Editor, Education Journal
Crediton, Devon

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