When we still had a national grammar system, 64 per cent of its pupils came from the working class. And during that period, such schools wiped the floor with expensive private schools, their products storming into Oxbridge in unprecedented numbers, without quotas or concessions.
Labour fanatics and Tory cowards spent the late 1960s and early 1970s bulldozing hundreds of fine grammar schools in poor areas.
Almost all the remaining grammars are unsurprisingly in better-off districts, and are besieged by well-off, long-distance commuters.
Far more important for most British people today, who have no access to grammars at all, are the hundreds of elite ‘comprehensives’. These are closed to the poor, and just as socially selective as the few dozen surviving grammars.
And that’s the way the liberal elite want them to stay, protected from the common people by a barricade of expensive houses called a catchment area.
The House of Commons Library recently produced a briefing paper comparing school exam performance in the year 2014-15. On the key measure of the percentage achieving five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, including English and Maths, grammars achieved 96.7 per cent.
The average for all state schools was 58.1 per cent.
Did you ever wonder why the old O-level exam was first watered down and then abolished? And why A-levels are so much weaker than they were? It is because comprehensives couldn’t cope with them, whereas grammars could.
Germany, which retained its grammars, remains a country of fairness, competence and efficiency. Without them we have become a second-rate country in which the wrong people are making most of the decisions and making them badly.