I think the head of St Paul's summarises things very well in today's paper
"The earth failed to move for many people when the staggering news was announced that a smaller and smaller number of schools and institutions (two thirds of them independent) were responsible for sending a larger and larger number of pupils to Oxford and Cambridge. This is old news. The reason is simple. Put several hundred bright young people together and there comes a time when they reach critical mass. They strike sparks off each other, egg each other on and create a peer-group culture in which it is cool to succeed, to work hard, and to go to Oxford or Cambridge.
In turn, such a concentration of bright young minds is wonderfully attractive to teachers. It is difficult to describe the stimulus of teaching in such an environment, as when a 13-year-old raises his hand and announces: "Please sir, no one has ever satisfactorily explained to me why hedonism is not just as viable a moral philosophy on which to base your life as Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Can you explain?"
Those young people have a huge head start when it comes to applying to university. They are not overawed at being surrounded by people at least as clever as themselves, are used to the white-hot heat of intellectual debate and know that every statement they make has to be justified.
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Such concentration of talent was responsible for the success of the grammar schools, destroyed not by what they did but by the failure of society to work out what to do with the 70 per cent of children who could not go to them. It was a truth spotted by one of the great Victorian headmasters who, when asked the secret of his school's academic success, announced simply: "We educate like with like." It was an intellectual similarity he meant, not social or economic.
Yet, there is an even deeper truth than this. "Elite" has increasingly become a word of abuse, but every citizen in the United Kingdom works with, accepts and even admires elites. If we end up in court, we do not want to know that our solicitor got his job because he went to a bad school. We want him or her to be at the top of their profession, the more elite the better. When I underwent major surgery, I did not want to know my surgeon had potential; I was far more reassured that he had a reputation as one of the best surgeons in the North West.
Millions support soccer, the ultimate elite, every week. I would love to be there when Sir Alex Ferguson is told that his team had to keep three places aside for players who showed potential, and that he had to choose his team so that it matched exactly the religious, racial and cultural mix of the UK at that time. There is a force in nature that creates an elite and laughs in the face of legislation, posturing and pouting.
Look at universities. We have faced a 10- to 15-year onslaught of legislation, initiatives and whatever, designed to create hundreds of thousands more university places, and level the playing field. The result? An inexorable rise of Ivy or Premier League British universities, perhaps 15 or so in number. It has arguably never been harder to get a place to read medicine, law or English at these universities. While Government pushes with all its might to open access, that de facto Ivy League becomes harder and harder to get in to.
Now that same force is spreading downwards, in to schools and colleges. In part, this is because the comprehensive experiment, which did actually have serious social justifications, has never delivered the goods academically.
Recent research, focusing on American high schools, revealed panic that these schools were failing to bring on the most able. We have refused to recognise that there will always be an academic elite, that we need one with the inevitability of the tide coming in, and that if no one creates those elite schools they will create themselves.
If, instead of relying on nature, we had recognised the inevitability of what was going to happen, we could, for example, have ensured that the elite schools were at least free at the point of purchase and thus, at a stroke, made a place at a top university available, regardless of the economic standing of the child.
Instead of wringing our hands, we need to discard the politics of envy and replace them with the politics of emulation. We need to feel huge pride in our best schools and colleges, and instead of blaming them for doing so well, fund them so that they can be the seed-corn and get their message out to the whole sector.
Most of all, we need to realise that, in too many cases, we have allowed the unchallengeable truth that equality of opportunity is a basic human right to metamorphose into the belief that all children can only be offered the same opportunity, a dreadful one-size-fits-all philosophy that kills aspiration and achievement."
Dr Martin Stephen is High Master of St Paul's