I have a confession to make: I was an 11-plus failure. That was half a century ago, but I can remember it to this day.

First, the exam, in that classroom packed with 60 girls (I presume the boys were doing the same in their end of the grim inner-city primary school). The girl next to me - illiterate, I realise now - sat chewing her pencil and staring into space. I did better than that, though maths was a complete mystery to me; but I loved books and must have sailed through the English paper. It wasn't enough. Of all of us, only two or three actually got a place at grammar school. There weren't many to go round.

The day we got the results I made my way home from school with a sense of dread. No-one had said anything either way, but I knew I was a failure. Apart from anything else, not going to grammar school meant you ended up at the terrifying secondary modern, full of rough, noisy boys, the repository of social and educational rejects.

"I've failed the scholarship," I told my mother. She took it calmly. It was just one of those things.

I was lucky. Even in those days having middle-class parents who understood the system was a help. I had a year in a private school, took the "second chance" 13-plus, and got to grammar school.

I bet if you look at the background of all those people who want to bring back grammar schools, you wouldn't find any among them who'd failed the 11-plus. Yes, grammar schools provided wonderful opportunities for many bright working-class youngsters. But it was a lottery, depending on how many places local schools had to offer. Lots of equally bright youngsters ended up in the sort of sink secondary moderns I feared so much.

There were good secondary moderns, and for the less academic child the skills taught by such places gave them a good start in life, but most of them did not cater at all for academically inclined children. It was a cruel and rigid system and I'd hate to see it back again.

Which brings us to the "bog-standard comprehensive" so despised by the current government. The trouble with the comprehensive system is that it's only ever been applied in patches. In many places grammar schools have never gone away, creaming off the bright children and leaving the less able in schools that are secondary moderns in all but name.

In London, in particular, comprehensives face massive problems and state provision of secondary education is - very largely - a mess.

Too many of our MPs only have experience of London schools, which gives them a totally false picture of the comprehensive system as a whole.

For in large areas of the country comprehensives have worked well: County Durham is a case in point. Perhaps instead of downgrading local education authorities, government ministers could set about learning something from the successful ones. At their best, they provide a flexible system that caters for all abilities, as far as any system can.

If politicans only had the will and the vision to take it on, we could have a nation-wide network of excellent local comprehensives, staffed by happy, well-motivated teachers, meeting the needs of all our children, instead of the mish-mash of patchy provision that seems likely to emerge from the latest Government proposals.

Published: 12/01/2006