With all the talk about social mobility, it was inevitable that those who believe grammar schools were the doorway to opportunity would wade into the debate. The most prominent of these interventions came yesterday from David Davis, who said:
“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. This is the clearest example of the unintended consequence of a purportedly egalitarian policy we have seen in modern times.”
The “hard data” Davis refers to is this 2005 study by Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg and Stephen Machin for the LSE and the Sutton Trust. It claims to show that “Intergenerational mobility fell markedly over time in Britain, with there being less mobility for a cohort of people born in 1970 compared to a cohort born in 1958”.
However, there has since been much criticism of this study’s methodology and its conclusion, particularly from Stephen
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