What School, Prime Minister ?

Balfour - Conservative, Eton (fee-paying, private)
Campbell-Bannerman - Liberal, free grammar ("For centuries it was an integral part of the city's educational system, but in 1976, despite its high standing and achievements, it was closed when education in Glasgow was reorganised along 'comprehensive' lines.")
Asquith - Liberal, private
Lloyd George, Liberal - free parish school and home-educated;
Bonar Law - Conservative - free grammar, the same one that educated Campbell-Bannerman
Stanley Baldwin - Conservative, Harrow - fee-paying, private
Ramsay MacDonald - Labour, free parish school (he was a pupil-teacher at 15 - bright students were recruited as teachers and learned at the chalkface)
Neville Chamberlain - Conservative, Rugby - fee-paying, private
Winston Churchill - Conservative, Harrow - fee-paying, private
Clement Attlee - Labour, Haileybury - fee-paying, private
Sir Anthony Eden - Conservative, Eton - fee-paying, private
Harold Macmillan - Conservative, Eton - fee-paying, private
Sir Alec Douglas-Home - Conservative, Eton - fee-paying, private
Harold Wilson - Labour, State grammar
Edward Heath - Conservative, State grammar
James Callaghan - Labour, State grammar
Margaret Thatcher - Conservative, State grammar
John Major - Conservative, State grammar
Tony Blair - Labour, Fettes - fee-paying, private


For thirty three years, from 1964 to 1997, State grammar schools provided Britain with five successive Prime Ministers, before the previous public-school dominance was restored - ironically by a Labour Prime Minister.

A public-school education produced some pretty cool dudes, though - not that I'd ever thought of Harold MacMillan in that category before.

"During the Battle of the Somme, he spent an entire day wounded and lying in a foxhole with a bullet in his pelvis, reading the Greek writer Aeschylus in the original language."



UPDATE - Speccie interview with schools minister Lord Adonis.

The good :

The battle to reform state schools has been a bloody one for Tony Blair, on a battleground which his party regards as sacred. From the offset, Lord Adonis has been his chief adviser. Ten years ago he was a journalist writing about education in robust terms. He denounced the ‘comprehensive school revolution, which destroyed many excellent schools without improving the rest’. He deplored the end of grammar schools, a move ‘carried out in the name of equality but which served to reinforce class divisions’.

It’s the kind of stuff which is too hardcore for a Conservative manifesto these days. Yet its author tells me he still believes every word. ‘I have not changed my mind in ten years,’ he says. ‘If I could redo the 1960s and 1970s education policy, I’d do it very differently.

The frankly depressing :

But I think the debate has moved on from the abolition of the grammar schools. Nobody sensible, including today’s Conservatives, David Cameron or David Willetts, wants to turn the clock back.’

He maps out a three-pronged consensus: that education spending must rise, reform must continue and there must be no return to selection by ability. ‘The Conservatives have accepted that too. They’re not for bringing back grammar schools either. Put all this together and we have established a new consensus.’

So he thinks abolishing grammar schools was a disaster, and that's the way it's going to stay.

And could someone tell me what the point of voting Tory is again ?


UPDATE2 - "A telling hiss of heresy from Tony’s blue-eyed boy" says the Sunday Times.