IN recent times Melinda Tilley, Oxfordshire County Council education “supremo”, has made one or two critical noises about her party’s polices and practices on academisation, which earlier she had vigorously supported.

How depressing, then,to find Cllr Tilley (‘Make us one of first for a new grammar says education boss’: August 11) has reverted to type and has written (is writing?) to spur Theresa May on in the lifting of restrictions on the creation of new grammar schools, as if these socially and academically divisive set-ups are an educational golden or silver bullet.

Mrs Tilley has been around for long enough to remember the moves towards the comprehensive ideal in the 1960s, an ideal which, like most ideals, was never likely to be fully achieved, but an ideal that aimed to end educational segregation. As for the notion that grammars somehow raise standards and enhance equal opportunity, this has been shown to be a pre-comprehensive fantasy, false nostalgia for a time when grammar schools did not universally achieve high academic standards, nor facilitate any significant measure of equal opportunity.

Mrs Tilley is quoted : “I think academies in the county might like to select by ability. … It is a good idea to give children who are academically gifted the chance to go to grammar school.”.

So will this be a return to the old grammar secondary modern divide, a summary dismissal of any number of children based on unreliable assessments (of potential?) at age 11, the ghastly eleven-plus brought back for universal and mostly meaningless application.

If this is Mrs Tilley’s position, then she is speaking from prejudice rather than knowledge, not a constructive position for a county councillor responsible for education and children’s services.

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH
Bowness Avenue
Headington
Oxford