“Grammar Schools For All” is the name of the collection I am making of new w/trem songs (at the time of this writing, it comprises All Saints, Problem Child and The Caretaker’s Daughter). The title refers to a Daily Mail headline of a few years back about the Conservative party’s plan for the education system, which was apparently to bring to an end the “failed experiment” of the comprehensivisation of the UK’s schools. It also refers to the Wilson government’s description of the comprehensives, at the time of their introduction, as “grammar schools for all”. These are quite clearly opposed senses of the same phrase: in the first case, what is being promised is ubiquity of selection by academic ability, in the second case the abolition of such selection and the tendering of a “grammar school education” to all-comers.

But in both senses the phrase contains the same underlying contradiction, which is that “a grammar school education” is by definition not “for all”: selection is intrinsic to it. The principle of such an education is that the academically able, once identified, should be separated from their wider peer group and educated together. That separation is at the heart of what a grammar school is; just as gathering-together is at the heart of what a comprehensive school is.

The expression “Grammar schools for all” promises, or asks for, the impossible, the internally contradictory. Transposed into a soteriological register, it is like declaring that all are saved while still insisting on the possibility of damnation. This is not a Universalism without hell, offering an essentially empty and tokenistic salvation, but a Universalism for which hell exists but is empty. The title of Melanie Phillips’s educationist-baiting All Must Have Prizes is intended as a mocking denunciation of this ambition. But if “all must have prizes” denounces the first Universalism, in which the prizes are no longer prizes for anything, it fails to acknowledge the second, in which the distinction between greater and lesser achievements remains but all are “high-achievers”.

The perennial “debate” about exam results and grade inflation is at bottom a debate over which of the two “salvations” this year’s increase in A-C grades represents a step towards. I wouldn’t dare adjudicate, except to say that it’s perfectly obvious to me that all young people are dolts and the whole thing is a patent sham. But it seems to me that the second salvation, in which hell is harrowed and all are gathered in by love, represents a demand-for-the-impossible that it is necessary to make and to uphold. “Grammar schools for all” is a Universalist battle cry.