My mother went to a Grammar school. She didn't find a great mismatch between her home background and school because:
- Then, like now, many people did not live in socially mixed areas. Almost all the children who went to my mother's grammar school were working class because almost the whole town was working class.
- My mother had a rich educational experience in a working class home, as many working class children did. Through a lot of the 20th century the WEA and other organisations connected to the trade union movement were educating working class adults outside of mainstream education, so to be working class was not to be culturally or educationally impoverished.
As I said on the other thread about 'Posh & Posher', the 164 remaining grammar schools are less socially selective than the 164 most socially selective comprehensives, according to the Sutton Trust. Comprehensive education is simply more socially selective.
As for the idea that Grammar schools are for children that would otherwise go to independent school. Where is the evidence for this? The research into grammar schools generally looks at how many children from low income families get in. It doesn't tell you how many children are getting in whose household income is £80,000 or £26,000. My anecdotal evidence is that my son is a grammar school and there is no way we could afford independent school of any kind, and neither could the parents of his classmates that I know of.
One of the major points of the programme was that truly middle class, middle income parents on £26,000 are not any more capable of paying for their child to go into an independent school that a family on income support is.
David Cameron and others are trying to push this idea that the 'middle class' includes people like him and people who are truly on a middle income. It doesn't. I would say that one of things that has destroyed social mobility in this country is the focus on dividing the working class from the middle and lower middle class, when in fact one of the greatest divides that has opened up is between people on high incomes and the rest of us.
A lot of middle income are going to get in 'middle class' jobs like teaching, social work and managing insurance. Actually these are the kind of jobs that bright working class children were pushed towards in my parent's generation. But jobs with some actual power - serious journalism, politics, senior civil service and law are still overwhelmingly in the hands of people from independent schools.
On a different note, if we want a grammar system back we need to sort out vocational training, which we have failed to do since compulsory education began. Secondary moderns often did a poor job, but we still fail children who want vocational training just as badly in the current system.