Best news day

The flaw in Michael Gove’s plans for free schools is that they exclude the creation of new grammar schools. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

When Ellen Wilkinson, secretary of state for education in the 1945 Labour government, was asked why she chose grammar schools over “multilaterals” (as comprehensives were called), her reply was candid. Wilkinson had been educated in a mixed-ability school. She recalled the anguish she and a few other exceptional pupils felt as they were repeatedly held back. Thirty years later, I experienced comparable misery at my Scottish comprehensive. That and the powerful peer group pressure to underachieve that is deplorably common among mixed-ability groups of adolescents.

The Labour movement has invented a collective memory according to which social democrats were always opposed to selection. According to this misleading narrative, Wilkinson implemented Rab Butler’s plans for free secondary education – the only important item of social reform passed by the war-time coalition – by default. But collective memory is a social construction synthesised to suit ideological preferences, and rarely more blatantly than in this case.

Despite the grammar schools’ obvious contribution to Labour’s success (Gordon Brown, Dennis Healey, Barbara Castle), public schoolboys such as Anthony Crosland gleefully promoted mediocrity as the best the state should supply. Rigid statists in the modern Labour party promote it still. For people who see themselves as knights leading peasants toward truth, the idea of choice is horrifying. The producer interest must be defended and Whitehall knows best.

But for radicals who cherish equality of opportunity, excellence and social mobility, a glorious opportunity now presents itself. The flaw in Michael Gove’s plans for free schools is that they exclude the creation of new grammar schools. The left has chosen to ignore the benefits of academic selection; Conservatives have had injustice imposed upon them by a leader whose sensitivity about Eton renders him a poor judge of what working families really value.

The challenge is clear. Who will have the courage to promote new selective schools? The emphasis must be on “new”. There were flaws in the grammar schools of the 1950s. They helped many very able pupils to win places at top universities. They were powerful instruments of social mobility. But many were poor at educating their less ambitious pupils and some became enclaves of privilege.

Selection is not a complete answer to equality of opportunity, but it is an important part of any coherent answer, and in a new era of choice, it is daft to deny this most cherished of choices to communities that crave it. If Gove will not do it, here is a golden opportunity for Labour to revisit its own myths and recognise the good selection can do for those it claims to care about most.