Letters | 6 October 2016

Studying grammars

Sir: Isabel Hardman (Politics, 1 October) states that no reputable research backs up the belief that grammar schools promote social justice. I am not sure she is correct. For instance, Lord Franks’s 1966 report on Oxford University recorded an accelerating rise in the share of places taken by state school pupils at that university in the 1939–1966 period. This increased from 19 per cent to 34 per cent, excluding the semi-private direct grant schools. Include the direct grants and the figure rises from 32 per cent in 1939 to 51 per cent in 1965. This change, reversed in the comprehensive years after 1965, coincided with the introduction of a national system of academic selection throughout the United Kingdom. More recently, the Higher Education Statistics Agency recorded that children from poor homes in selective Northern Ireland had significantly greater chances of reaching university than their equivalents in largely comprehensive England. The difference was even more marked by comparison with wholly comprehensive Scotland. Critics of grammar schools make much of the outcomes in the few remaining besieged grammar schools, perhaps forgetting that these results are distorted because they are so heavily oversubscribed.
Peter Hitchens
London W8

A cheer for Patrick Minford

Sir: For those of us who are perennially suspicious of economists in general, there are a few whose opinions are worth considering. For me, Patrick Minford was one of those who back in the 1980s seemed to talk sense, following in the footsteps of the controversial monetarist Milton Friedman (‘Brexit’s philosopher king’, 1 October). My Keynesian economics professor at Harvard Business School in 1973 told us sceptically: ‘If you believe Milton Friedman, the US will be in recession this time next year.’ It was.

It was Roger Bootle’s column in the Daily Telegraph which drew my attention to the remarkable research paper by Michael Burrage for Civitas, and it was he and Liam Halligan who in the run up to the referendum seemed to make most sense.