Improve education for all, not just privileged

Councillor Simon Dudley, leader of the council, has apparently said: ‘Time to bring our hundreds of grammar school pupils home’. This is entirely predictable but untypically revealing.

The ideologically driven proponents of selective education, ignoring all the evidence, will always concentrate on the minority and ignore the majority.

They will always talk about choice for the privileged few, and seldom if ever about provision for the four-fifths of our children who are denied those privileges in a grammar-secondary modern model. There may well be hundreds of grammar school pupils travelling outside the borough, Cllr Dudley, but there are more than nine thousand pupils in our excellent comprehensive schools. Public money should be directed to improving the standard of education for all young people, not disproportionately diverted to those with a social head start.

Graeme Smith

Courthouse Road

Maidenhead