I SINCERELY hope that your paper's interest in the grammar schools debate will stimulate a movement to defend this essential system of education, which is Buckinghamshire's greatest asset. 'Essential' because anyone in the position of recruiting and employing staff knows intuitively the result of the suppression of excellence and the dumbing-down to the lowest common denominator which are the characteristics distinguishing comprehensive education since the late 1960s.

The selective education system is not, in my view, about elitism or discrimination. It is about opportunity for all, no more and no less. I did not win a place at grammar school, but my two eldest daughters attend the very excellent Dr Challoner's High School. All I asked of the state (and received in Buckinghamshire) was a fair chance for them to achieve whatever potential they might have. The rest is up to them, with a little support from a positive family environment. In this, even their three-year-old sister does her bit, insisting that they do their homework while she does hers!

Of course not everyone can go to grammar school, but everyone should have an equal chance to attain their own level of excellence. To abolish selective education on the spurious grounds that if we can't all be grammar school educated then nobody should, is absurd and flies in the face of the natural order of things. This 30-year-old dogma has surely been discredited beyond all reasonable doubt and belongs in the same historical dustbin as black and white television, fondue parties and Watney's Red Barrel!

And before anybody rushes to berate me with arguments about 'bias', 'unfair allocation of resources' or 'favouritism' towards grammar schools, they should consider the good performance in national league tables of Buckinghamshire's upper schools.

As you say, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', but, alas, the politics of envy are a powerful force for change under New Labour.

Alan Fulford

Lodge Lane

Prestwood

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