Don't blame private sector for the crisis in our schools

It's an instinctive reaction which overcomes me regularly. I stopped listening to Radio 4's Today programme when its presenter Sarah Montague, formerly of Blanchelande Girls' College, spluttered at a supporter of grammar schools, "We don't want elitism."

I won't vote Tory because the party has been taken over by Old Etonians. But I could write a book on how Labour public school boys from Anthony Crosland to Ed Balls via Charles Clarke stopped the best state schools competing with the private sector. In my darker moments I think private schools have ruined England by presenting it with smooth, grasping operators on the Right and dangerously unworldly utopians on the Left.

I could go on, but I wonder if my resentments are the result of the "social apartheid" that Anthony Seldon, the head of the £25,620-ayear Wellington College, warned against this week.

I don't think so because Seldon's comparison was ridiculous. Leaving aside the tastelessness of equating the citizens of a free country with South African blacks under white rule, my best friends and the writers I most admire are the products of the English public school system. I value a love of learning more than any competing virtue, and if private schools inculcate it, good for them. I am also a middle-class Londoner which is a short way of saying I am a thoroughly devious manipulator of the educational system and won't blame others for doing the same.

I'm not angry with private schools per se but with the state of the state system. As every parent ought to know, allowing Eton to select but not comprehensives has created an educational racket, greased by money and defended by hypocrites.

Dr Seldon is one such. Like the presenters of the Today programme, he sounded radical when he denounced apartheid. Only when you read the small print did you learn that he was objecting to private schools being forced to take children from modest backgrounds to justify their charitable status. This "would deprive state schools of their most talented children".

Can state schools then select, say, these talented boys and girls and give them an elite education as good as anything Wellington College can provide? Certainly not, said Seldon, because that would be a return to the ethos of the despised grammar schools. In other words, the wretched man was invoking the struggle against apartheid in the cause of keeping Wellington College the preserve of the rich.