‘Someone got chucked out of the window. A girl had her hair set on fire. Someone else was shot. You know,” the speaker concluded — I take ironically — “the usual sort of school week.” This was an ex-pupil at Risinghill, reminiscing about life at the infamous London school in Radio 4’s compelling history of comprehensives, Comp!, broadcast on Thursday mornings.

Not all comprehensives, even in the 1960s, pushed their progressive theories to this anarchic extreme. The problem then, as now, was more often low expectations on the part of teachers and low-level but persistent disruption from pupils.

It’s the sort of aggravation that drove teacher Francis Gilbert out of his profession for four years, “burnt out” by his time in London’s comprehensives — as he graphically details in his new book, Teacher on the Run: True Tales of Classroom Chaos.

Some comprehensives, particularly those in middle-class suburbs, succeed. Many, perhaps most, serving inner-city communities, do not. Yet no government in the last 40 years has had the courage to reintroduce selective education.

It was not always like this. The post-war Labour education minister Ellen Wilkinson, a veteran of the Jarrow crusade in 1936 and a firebrand of the left, was a staunch believer in grammar schools. She had gone to one herself and saw them as public schools for the poor offering a meritocratic opportunity to everyone.

They did, too. Two-thirds of grammar school pupils in the early 1950s were working class. Only four of the 21 heads of big civil service departments listed by Anthony Sampson in 1971 were ex-public school pupils. The rest had attended grammar schools.

The tragedy is that the huge success of grammar schools became, to quote the sociologist Frank Musgrove, “apparent precisely when they were destroyed”. Social mobility in Britain, according to a report published last April by the education charity the Sutton Trust, is now lower than in any of the eight countries studied other than America.

More young people from disadvantaged homes won places at Oxford and Cambridge in 1960 than is the case today. For all the egalitarian rhetoric that accompanied the abolition of the grammar schools, the move to comprehensive education has damaged the life chances of the very children it was meant to help.

It ought to have been obvious back in 1960, but it was not.

Middle-class families whose children had failed the 11-plus grew increasingly resentful. Academics such as A H Halsey at Oxford, who claimed that the exam allocated a quarter of children to the wrong school, argued that it was impossible to decide at this early age which children would benefit from which kind of school. Administrators such as Andrew Fairbairn and Stuart Mason in Leicestershire, brooded on stories of distress caused by the selection process and were converted to the comprehensive cause.

But the real revolution began when Labour came to power in the mid-1960s. Anthony Crosland, the then education secretary, famously declared that he was going “to smash every f****** grammar school in the country”, and started bribing education authorities with capital grants to ensure they did his will. Some resisted, but most did not, and by the end of the 1970s 3,300 comprehensive schools had been created and 80% of pupils were being educated in them.

In retrospect it seems that the whole project was driven by political rather than educational considerations. The aim was to create a more equal society and if a few wonderful schools were destroyed in the process, so be it.

Nobody asked the question whether it might be better to keep selection and develop a more intelligent, secure mechanism to identify the children who would really benefit from an academic education. Nobody thought for a moment about the curriculum the less able would be offered in these new comprehensive schools. Nobody wondered whether it was really a good idea to create schools for 2,000 or more pupils.

If Tony Blair was serious in his education reforms, he would be asking these questions. I suspect that if he had a free hand he might, for all his public protestations to the contrary, create new grammar schools. But he hasn’t. Caught between the Scylla of the “bog standard comprehensive”, which he knows has failed, and the Charybdis of backbenchers apoplectic in their hatred of the “elitist” 11-plus, he can only struggle manfully to square an impossible circle.

So we have “specialist” schools that in many cases are not that different from bog standard comprehensives and are, according to the Office for Standards in Education, failing even to teach their specialism adequately. We have city academies, which can cost the taxpayer £24m each only to deliver results little or no better than the failed school they replaced.

Ruth Kelly, the secretary of state, apparently expects us to swoon in grateful admiration at her announcement that the government is to shut failing schools more quickly. What will she replace them with? Presumably yet more city academies, which, since they can select only up to 10% of their pupils, share the wrongheaded notion of comprehensive schools — that children, no matter what their abilities or backgrounds, can successfully be taught together in the same classes.

The grammar school, a proven instrument of social mobility, ought to be at the heart of Blair’s education strategy. It is not, and, because of ideological opposition, never will be.

Why not reform the 11-plus, re-define and properly resource the secondary modern school as a technical school for the 21st century, and introduce new grammars, particularly in inner-city areas where comprehensive schools will never attract sufficient numbers of bright pupils and academically well-qualified staff to stretch the most able? There is only one reason and that is a lack of political will. Sad, isn’t it? Forty years ago the powers that be had the courage to close Risinghill. The time is now right for similar political decisiveness.