[dofm]

There has apparently been a little bounce in the last few years, a sort of long term consequence of changes made to education policy by New Labour and the consequent movement of teachers from selective education into comprehensive education, but for example here is an article from twelve years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/08/england-yo...

We were, for decades, a country in considerable literacy decline, and the only one of its kind. Some of this might have been a consequence of scrapping the grammar school system without giving the comprehensive system access to the same resources.

I tend to think that when Americans observe that British politicians and actors speak with a larger vocabulary or more eloquently, the people they are observing are products of the tail end of the grammar school system and the growth of a bias towards private education that emerged in its wake; the school system that turned out men and women of letters used to be available to all and now is available only to those with money.

[teamonkey]

> considerable decline

Again, I think, citation needed, since conservative media does like to bang on about this a lot, but I’ve not seen actual proof that education standards are falling, or worse than they were when I was at school.

What I think has happened since the close of grammar schools is that the gap between most educated and least educated has closed significantly. This government report from 2023 shows that gap closing, while also showing an improvement from previous years.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/675330e020bcf...

[dofm]

The guardian article cites the OECD study that asserted this.

I do think that it took a generation to figure out how to put into the comprehensive school system the same deep focus on “maths and english” that was always the grammar school advantage.

My own feelings about having been through grammar school education are complex (I can see, in retrospect, what I lost as well as what I gained) but I do think that in a world where success might come from communicating with considerable nuance with a computer in written form, more of the grammar school model may need to come to general education: perhaps nothing matters more now than a facility with language and semantics.