In this very interesting discussion on 'Why the Left is winning, and why it shouldn’t' at the Oxford Union from Dec 17, Sir Roger lays out a very plausible explanation as to how/why our educational system was weakened by closing the traditional Government High School in this extract.

He puts it a little more bluntly in this article entitled 'What's The Point of Education' from November 2016:

"Critics tell us that selection divides children into successes and failures, and that the failures are ‘marked for life’. I see no reason to believe that. Future generations need knowledge; but they also need skills, strengths and technical know-how. Schools that provide those benefits — like the German Technische Hochschulen — are as important as grammar schools: and if children have the possibility of freely passing between schools in the process of discovering their aptitude, then selection need in any case never be final.

"In the world of education those thoughts are heresies. After years of ‘child-centred’ indoctrination the educational establishment has become lost in a kind of fairyland, believing that education is really a form of social engineering, and that its primary purpose is to boost the pupil’s ‘self-esteem’. Once we see that the primary purpose of education is to safeguard knowledge, all the fairy castles of the educationists tumble in ruins. Hence they are up in arms, and, as so often, in arms against the truth."