I attended a grammar school, it served me well and I went off to university. The first in my family. However, there were 8 grammar schools in my local area (an anomaly I grant you) and what it did was cream the academic top off and leave the local comprehensive schools without aspiration. The local education system failed my siblings and my cousins and leftbthem all feeling like they weren’t bright.

By the time I left, the grammar schools were mostly admitting middle class kids hot-housed to jump through verbal reasoning tests. My siblings, though not as academic as me, were crowded out by kids whose parents paid for a grammar school gamble and then put them through private school if they failed the grammar school test.

We live in an era of private tuition, grammar schools no longer serve their purpose. I would close them all.