Selective schools
Contrary to what Dr Alfred Layton asserts (Letters, 24 September), the arguments against selective education systems are not ideological but are based upon evidence, of which there is a great deal. For a start, not one of the world’s half a dozen most successful educational jurisdictions, as identified by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, employs selective schooling. After carrying out repeated research it concluded that selective systems result in poorer overall outcomes than non-selective ones. Any gain in learning to the selected minority is outweighed by the poorer performance of the majority, for whom rejection results in loss of confidence, self-esteem and motivation to learn. This helps to explain why Kent, which has retained the post-war selective system and whose results are boosted by the inclusion of some prestigious private schools, is out-performed by Hackney, which has no grammar schools and no private schools of note.

Dr Rebecca Allen at Datalab, who has made a detailed study of the effects of selective schooling in England, calculates that the added value of attending a selective school varies from zero to three-quarters of a GCSE grade. In higher education, this added value disappears: both the Sutton Trust and the Higher Education Funding Council have established that, at Russell Group universities, among students with similar A-level grades, those who have been to comprehensive schools regularly outperform those who have attended grammar schools.