Few intra-governmental memos have sparked more anger than one called Circular 10/65, a memorandum sent 51 years ago by Anthony Crosland, then the education secretary, to local authorities. The document instructed local officials to commence converting grammar schools into comprehensives. Only a few English counties, such as Kent and Lincolnshire, retained many.Today, we learn, we have a new education secretary – Justine Greening – and she went to a comp. She is the first post-Crosland education secretary – and it has taken longer than one might have hoped for the new system to attain this position. But we also know, though, that Theresa May – and her advisers – are rather keen on a return to a world of grammars.
This might be an apt moment to quickly rattle through what we know about the grammar system. This is an argument that is, in truth, really about more than what is known, in the jargon, as “tracking” – the process of making pupils sit an academic test and separating the highest-performing from the rest.