"Andy Hall" wrote in message
...

I'm not really arguing against your choice of local school, I'm only
arguing with the implied premise that grammar is necessarily better.

I think that it's a question of suitability.

Somehow people seem to confuse a school focussed on delivering a good
education to those
with a strong academic ability as being "better" and one which focusses on
those with skills
in other areas as "not as good".

That's part of the problem. However what also happened in practice is the
one which focussed on those with skills in other areas suffered in other
areas - funding, ability to get good teachers for example. The former should
never have happened, but did, and the latter is unfortunately harder to get
round.
The other fatal flaw is that segregation at age 11/12 is rather inflexible -
there are many cases of people ending up in an unsuitable school because eg
they developed at different ages to others.

The outcome was therefore to socially engineer an arrangement where
everybody could be seen to get
the same, whether it was suitable or not with the net result of a loss of
more than a generation of opportunity
in most areas. Thus education falls short based on trying to be all
things to all men and not achieving excellence
in any of them.

The comprehensive system wasn't the failure its detractors make it out to
be. It wasn't the inclusion of all which caused the problem they're seeing,
it was other factors. This is apparent because a lot of schools have made a
success of it - whether streamed internally or not. (the latter did come as
a surprise to me, but apparently it can be made to work - it may just
require effort which people aren't prepared to put in.)

cheers,
clive