So, the latest UK budget includes £320 million to fund the return of the good, old-fashioned grammar school. Personally – and speaking as a teacher – I am in favour of a selective secondary education system – provided that it has some safety mechanisms built in so that, for example, late developers can switch schools if they need to.

There are, however, two issues that I find ridiculous about these latest proposals to mess around yet again with the British education system.  First, there is still no hint of any politician with a passionate, innovative, forward-looking vision for schooling that better prepares young people for the unstoppable advances of technology and globalization. A vision that might include, for example, deconstructing the obsolete modernist division of the school timetable into discrete subjects taught in narrow blocks of time. Secondly, I am disappointed by the appalling way that the education system has for the whole of my lifetime been used as political football, demoralising educationists and screwing up the destiny of millions of children.

Hence, as usual, the conservative party blames the labour party for blocking the re-introduction of grammar schools and selective education, as if to forget that it was the conservative party that abolished grammar schools and brought in non-selective, comprehensive education in the first place!

Yet the politicisation of education in the UK is only the tip of the iceberg. The real issue – which seems to receive almost no attention – is that nearly all the children of politicians attend private schools, known actually as “public” schools. (See Footnote 1).

Even to this day, the majority of Oxbridge students  still come from the private schools and go on to be senior politicians (e.g. David Cameron, Theresa May, Tony Blair), civil servants, journalists, diplomats, doctors, lawyers and businesswomen and men. For as long as this is the case in the UK, why should any politician be seriously concerned about the state education system? More than anywhere else in Europe, the UK education system is no more than a socially constructed set of keys that unlock the door of future financial security. It has very little to do with either academic or applied knowledge, applicable skills or life-enriching culture.

A very brief comparison with other European countries, where politicians’ children predominantly attend state schools, serves to confirm this opinion as fact.

Marx was right when he observed that capitalism can only thrive when there exists within its ranks an alienated underclass. Surely Theresa May must know deep-down that her pontificating about meritocracy and access for all is no more than empty, political posturing? Or maybe she doesn’t? After all she went to an independent Roman Catholic school and then on to St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

I rest my case. For today. Have a nice weekend.

Footnote 1: I hate to sound cynical, but maybe the reason this issue receives little attention has something to do with a) that fact that these private schools are called public schools as if to disguise their identity and to imply that they are accessible to all children and b) because many of the most successful journalists also attended public schools and are either blind to the issue or are happy not to disturb a stable, self-perpetuating status quo.