The entire education system should be reshaped to better assist social mobility rather than a narrow focus on academic selection, the Conservative former minister David Willetts has warned ahead of the government’s publication of its plans for new grammar schools. “We need a social mobility strategy that includes all the stages of education, throughout our lives,” he writes in an article for the Guardian. The prime minister said a move to create more grammar schools heralded “a future in which Britain’s education system shifts decisively to support ordinary working-class families”. “But when these trends slowed down the underlying problem was revealed more starkly,” Willetts argues. In the modern era, he says, the interaction of the education system with changes in the job market “has not been good for social mobility”.

Source: The Guardian September 12, 2016 12:00 UTC