Grammar schools

Cameron wants to no longer commit the conservatives to creating new grammar schools.

The Conservatives are to abandon their support for grammar schools by saying academic selection is unfair to poorer families and limits social mobility.

They are wrong about social mobility, during the period where grammar schools social mobility was much higher than after. Children from poorer areas do particularly well in selective schools.

If they are trying to say that children from poor backgrounds would be unable to pass the entrance exams then he is not only wrong, but also very insulting.

If they think that Academies would be better for children than Grammars then will be right, and wrong. For some people Academies would be better, for some Grammar schools, but then for others home schooling would be best or one of the many other approaches to schooling.

What is best for whom is something that cannot be set from central government dictat. The only people that really know what is best for an individual child is the people that really know the child in question, parents of the children themselves, and even then it might take some trial and error. Instead of simply being yet another politician with a Plan for what he thinks is best for everybody, it would be better to have proposed a framework to allow parents to be able to pick what is best for their
individual children.