Young Independence Chairman Michael Heaver was in today's Daily Express, explaining his support for grammar schools.
The printed version can be read here at the Express online: http://www.express.co.uk/ourcomments/view/214504/I-survived-my-sink-scho... Comments on that site are welcome.

The full unedited version is as follows:

When people normally think of Cambridge, they think of superb academic triumphs. Big buildings. Grand occasion. Fine achievement. Excellence in education. Unfortunately, if you go down the road from Cambridge’s fine buildings and pretty landscapes, you find a sight not unfamiliar in Britain nowadays: failing state schools that are failing the poorer parts of a city, especially the poorer kids.

While David Cameron went to the elite Eton College and Nick Clegg went to the exclusive Westminster School (at which I have given a talk to pupils, followed by what I think was a pheasant lunch), I went to a failing state school. Coleridge Community College is located in Cambridge. My experience as a pupil of this school right through to where I am now as a final year University student has convinced me beyond any shadow of a doubt that Britain’s widening gap between rich and poor will continue until we bring back what Tory MP David Davis called the “greatest instrument for social mobility ever created”: grammar schools. It is this policy of UKIP’s that made me join them and look pretty carelessly at a Tory Party which seems to be dominated by out-of-touch public school boys and millionaires.

The school I attended was almost closed and was put on “special measures” by the government after 15% of students in 2003 got the bench mark of 5 good GCSE’S(A* - C). Subsequently just 9% of pupils got these qualifications in 2004, though that steadily rose to 23% of students in 2005 and went upwards until it crashed back down to 18% in 2008.

Let me be very clear: the school had some very good teachers. Not many, but a few, and they are the ones who helped inspire me and push me. But the school had a massive tendency to focus on the pupils who got the worse academic scores on tests or were the most disruptive and badly behaved. Believe me, classes were out of control aside from the one’s by teachers who were respected. There was horrendous bullying, fights, the pelting of teachers with sweets, swearing at teachers, throwing chairs, I could go on. The standard of teaching was extremely sub-par at times. My penultimate year was spent with a softly spoken elderly English teacher who was so bad at controlling the class that I had to get my dad into the school to talk to the head of English as I felt my chances of a good English GCSE were being destroyed. She subsequently left soon after. I ended up getting an A for English language and a B for English literature which I was bloody grateful for.

There was no reward for being intelligent, keeping quiet and pushing onwards for the top grades, but big incentives like trips out and heaps of praise for those troublemakers who decided to behave every now and then. I was no angel myself but compared to certain other pupils I was deemed safe, made Head Boy and never really given the extra help I would have liked. That came into play a little later.

I was the only kid from my year to come from this school and get into one of the best state sixth forms down the road, Hills Road Sixth Form College. The place was amazing. The environment was astounding to me, at times the accents and décor reminded me of the Harry Potter movies compared to what I was used to. Teachers helped me, guided me, pushed me, challenged me. The result was that I got two A’s at A-Level and a B. There was never any question of looking at aspiring to Cambridge or Oxford University however no matter how good my A-Levels were: Oxbridge take into account GCSE grades and you need A’s and A*’s across the board from secondary school to even be looked at, was what I was told. So even a working class kid who got on despite of and not because of his secondary education, can never realistically go to Oxbridge even if his A-Levels are good enough. No wonder only 40 out of the 80,000 kids on free school meals got into Oxbridge last year.

This all brings me on to grammar schools. You see, selection is often vilified as being elitist by middle class Labour politicians. But look at how many of them went to grammar schools themselves: from Diane Abbott to Alan Johnson, from Hazel Blears to Frank Field, they all owe their positions thanks to the opportunity of a grammar school education. MPs in Parliament seem happy to slate grammar schools while sending their kids to private schools themselves.

There is already selective education in this country: those who have the money to choose which public school they went to pay for their child to go to or what area to move to, and the poor who are stuck with the disgusting state school system that Labour did very little to improve.

This is not about good and bad, about separating the supposedly clever from the stupid. It is about giving every child the best opportunity to reach their potential, whatever their strengths are, whatever their background is. There are still pockets of grammar schools in places like Kent where there is demand from parents for more to be built, such is the popularity of these fine learning institutions that are free for all. In a recent school league table nine of the top ten state secondary schools in my region of East Anglia are in Essex, thanks to the county retaining grammar schools that are giving poor kids the chance of a top quality education they would otherwise miss out on.

The figures speak for themselves. This argument is not one of theory or potential, but of expanding opportunity across the country to all children and not just those lucky enough to live in one of the few remaining areas that have selective education.
As the state education system continues to fail, the Coalition government seems to be very proud of their pupil premium as a potential solution. The Conservative Party have abandoned their support for building more grammar schools and so through the pupil premium seek to effectively bribe good schools to take on poorer kids for extra cash.

This is a nonsense, won’t work and is cowardly way out for the privileged front bench Coalition to pretend they seek to help the poor. Sadly the lack of ambition for real urgent reform on education is another area where Cameron and Clegg lack true conviction and fail to represent change, and where my Party UKIP are once again the torch bearers for common sense and real, tangible, radical reform. It is hardly a surprise that the Coalition similarly fail to recognise that not everyone should go to University, but those who are academically gifted, rich or poor, should not have to leave in tens of thousands of pounds of debt just because they seek to better themselves. Just as with selective education, the Coalition sit in their Ivory Tower pledging that it is not fair to select the best, but somehow more fair to allow everyone to go to University but get into huge debt while doing so.

I have very clever friends who failed their GCSE’s because overwhelmingly it was about writing essays on a piece of paper. I happened to be good at this, but friends of mine would have been a million times better at building a brick wall than me. With a new equivalent of the 11+test we can set the academic from those more suited to vocational courses, while not setting apart the rich and the poor as we are at the moment. If we want true social mobility, if we really we want more poor kids achieving, then we need to listen to the 85% of 18 – 24 year old’s in a recent poll who said they want a grammar school system.

That is my opinion as a product of New Labour’s education system.