David Davis has been relatively quiet for the past couple of months, perhaps nursing a
hangover after this. But he’s back making a seismic racket today, with an article on the coalition’s social mobility report for PoliticsHome. He dwells on the education side of
things, and his argument amounts to this: that the government’s school reforms — from free schools to the pupil premium — will not do much to improve social mobility, and may actually
make the situation worse. Michael Gove may be praised as “intelligent, dedicated and wholly admirable,” but there is enough gelignite elsewhere in the piece to ruffle some coalition
feathers.
I thought CoffeeHousers may have some thoughts on this passage from Davis’s article, in particular:
“The hard data shows that the post-war improvement in social mobility, and its subsequent decline, coincided exactly with the arrival, and then the destruction, of the grammar school system.
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