from b&wcat:"Since the comprehensive system was introduced the number of kids leaving school with qualifications has increased, kids going to university have increased. DRAMATICALLY. You can't argue with that." But I'm taking issue with the assumption you make about (or conclusion you draw from) this - i.e. that this automatically means the class gap has narrowed. I don't think it necessarily does. There is an ongoing debate - yet to come to any happy conclusion - about the implications of the rising GCSE and A-level pass rates and all these extra people doing degree courses.
b&wcat - we're never going to agree as, like politicians cross the despatch box, we can each produce conflicting statistics.
I think the problem may arise because we are not comparing like with like - the research I cited in my original post compares children born in 1958 with children born in 1970 across 8 countries. The conclusion reached is that Britain is the only one of those eight nations where the class gap IS widening. And these two points in time represent either side, more or less, of the almost-total abolition of grammar schools. I admit it's not explicitly stated as a proven causal link, but one would have to be daft to overlook the implication.
I say "almost-total", of course, because I was born not far off 1970 into a professional family, but one not in an income bracket to afford private school fees, and I had the benefit of a grammar school education... I agree, other people in my school year didn't have that. But were they disadvantaged by not having had the chance, or were they actually given more of a chance to thrive in a school more suited to their abilities?
I transferred at 13, and plenty of people were much happier to be staying where they were - they (or their parents) wouldn't have touched the grammar-school with a barge-pole. There were lots of things you could do at the comp which you couldn't at my school. The grammar certainly wasn't the place to go if your aim was to be, say, a chef, for which you'd probably have needed a Home Economics O-Level or CSE, among others, to go on to catering college.
It's very difficult to say this sort of thing without having it turned back on you - usually someone claims you are trying to say "ooh, keep the sweaty proles where they are, doing their shabby little catering and drama courses, while we, the hoity-toity intellectual elite, ensconce courselves in towers of learning to peruse Virgil and ponder the mysteries of Higher Mathematics." I hope you'll realise that's NOT what I'm saying.
It's horses for courses. We've got to get away from this idea of stigmatising secondary mods and comps as somehow 'worse'. If the people who went to them believe that they turned out well - and in my experience they usually do - then why do they feel that others having had a grammar school education has somehow deprived them of something? It's almost as if the stigma is attached by the comprehensive/ secondary mod kids themselves, not by others.