“More people from poor families went to University and got a Degree since State Granmar Schools were abolished.”
Of course they did, Gromit. And it has nothing to do with secondary education. It stems from when polytechnics and technical colleges (which previously existed principally as supplementary education to those already in work) converted to “universities” and started offering “degree” courses instead on training for ONCs, HNCs and the like. Tony Blair’s ludicrous target to get 50% of young people into “university” exacerbated that trend and so we see today young people accumulating huge debts (which many of them will never repay) to gain a so-called degree in “Catering Management”, “Hospitality Administration” or “Films”.
Prior to that the only people that went to university were those needing a degree to follow a specific career path and the numbers going to uni roughly reflected the number of jobs that required a degree. Now we have young people leaving “university” with a worthless degree, £30k in debt and many of whom finish up frying hamburgers for a living (because, strangely enough, still only about 10% of jobs in the UK actually need to jobholder to be educated to traditional "proper" degree level and this is likely to diminish at the nation's economy becomes increasingly deskilled).
State grammar schools gave those of a higher academic ability the opportunity to make the most of their talents regardless of their background. Many of their pupils did not go on to university because they were already sufficiently well educated to make their way in the world. I went to a superb grammar school where pupils from all walks of life enjoyed a great education but very few of us went on to university. I can still recall reading their names in the school magazine and it was quite a short list. All their abolition has done is to confine such education to the very small number of decent State schools (which, unsurprisingly, are heavily oversubscribed) or privately funded establishments.
The most critical misunderstanding that many socialists suffer from is that you do not make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. And so it is with education – you cannot make those less academically gifted more so by jeopardising the education of the brighter. And that’s what comprehensive education has done.