6 OCTOBER 1973, Page 4

Labour and public schools

Sir: Mr Hattersley's recent statement of Labour's intentions with regard to the direct grant and independent schools need come as no surprise. The strategy of successively destroying first the grammar schools and then these schools was, of course, set in motion long ago. Unfortunately for the egalitarians, part of the grand design has become badly unstuck: parents everywhere — and the public in general — have become aware that the great comprehensive revolution has been a deplorable and expensive failure. The parochial vision of the enthusiasts for non-selective schooling has been disastrously myopic: the dismal experiences over the years in other countries in the matter of over-large high schools being wilfully ignored! To avert attention from the appalling decline in educational standards, since more and more of these giant dustbins of the intellect were erected on our own shores, what more fitting than to raise the old cry that the private sector must be abolished — an end all the more to be desired because these schools are tending to become more popular as the state system declines and current trendy educational permissiveness further undermines it!

Whatever one's views on the relative merits of state and independent schooling, undoubtedly most people deplore the decline in the variety of education in so many areas. It is to the task of providing once again this opportunity to send children to more than one type of secondary school that the Tories ought to be addressing themselves in opposition to the sterile rigidity of the Labour party in this vital sphere. Above all the tendency to regard schools as instruments of social change must be resisted, a notion that has done more to pervert the true aims of education in this country in recent years than any other whether supported by trendy Conservatives or doctrinaire Socialists.

J. H. K. Lockhart 21B King's Avenue, London, W.5.