The Social Mix

Last week I had the misfortune to attend a 'Ladies Supper' at my sons' school. The name alone says so much. Others may, for all I know, have 'Women's Suppers' or even 'People's Suppers'. Here in the backwoods of Warwickshire we still have 'Ladies'. And when you sup with these Ladies, you really do need a longish spoon.

I asked the Lady seated beside me what she thought of the school.

'I do find it rather mixed' she said plaintively. 'Really a bit too mixed'

The comment left me speechless. Surely, my sons' pompous, archaic Grammar School as about as unmixed as you could get. It's single sex, for a start. Ethnically, there is a smattering of Chinese and Asians, but they are barely distinguisable under the smart, expensive blue and gold uniform. No, she was referring to the alarming social maestrom in operation. This is a school where Upper Middle Class children can find themselves obliged to hob-nob, alarmingly, with the merely Middle Middle Class ones.

The Grammar School I went to was mixed. Many of us wore second-hand uniform. A handful of us smelt. My best friend lived in a council house with various half-siblings and a single harassed parent. From Year 9 onwards, the odd student (generally female) got pregnant. For those of us who didn't, it was a matter of luck as much as chastity. We had boys, in every sense; ours was a mixed sex school. For which I am grateful - it allowed me to recognise early the essential whackiness of the male. We didn't have any ethnic minorities that I can remember, at school or in our own community. But maybe we just didn't notice. We certainly had one child with cerebral palsy (or 'spastic' as it was then known) who was a maths genius and mercilessly bullied. We may have been mixed, but were not always kind.

We didn't have Upper Middle Class children at my school. They went to the paradoxically-named Public Schools. The thickos went to the Secondary Mod, and the rest of us went to the Grammar. Those were simpler times.

We still have Public Schools, of course, and also, around our way, plenty of private prep and pre-prep schools, their job being to get children through the 11-Plus and into the Grammar School. The initial investment in private school fees is thus recouped by getting an elitist secondary education for free later on. The Public Schools are there mainly to pick up the leftovers.

The local state primary schools, meanwhile, are restricted by law as to how much they can prepare children for the 11+Plus exam. So, naturally, fewer state school children make it to the Grammar.

The result is the stagnation of social mobility. The well heeled are bribing their children's way through the doors of our top state schools, at the expense of the merely bright who ought to be there. The coached squeezing out the clever.

Today, I'm not so sure a gal like me would make it to Grammar School. If I did, I'd find it pretty mixed. Not in ethnicity, sex or social class. But in ability.

And I don't think I'll go to another Ladies Supper. All a bit too mixed for me.