The grammar school debate has caused quite a stir within mainstream media. Unsurprisingly, it’s a particularly touchy subject within an institution like Cambridge, where a large majority of students come from a grammar or private school background.

The truth is that those like myself, who are arguing against the incredibly biased funding of grammar schools, don’t care about your individual experience. We don’t care if you feel that you got in purely on merit, if you want to reassure yourself that, if you didn’t have money, you would still be at the University you are now. And we really don’t want to hear about how you personally never experienced or witnessed any discrimination, how you ‘had that one poor friend’, and how you never treated them any differently.

We care that the system is institutionally classist, racist, and ableist. It is formed to widen the divide between rich and poor, while giving Oxbridge a scapegoat for access, being able to bundle grammar schools into their state school statistics, when really it is no reflection on their efforts to increase diversity. Over the three years from 2012 to 2014, one in five of the state school students admitted to Oxford were from a grammar school. When you compare it with the fact that only five per cent of students in the UK attend grammar schools, this perspective is rather shocking.

While the government is funding grammar schools, local schools are dangerously underfunded, under-resourced, and understaffed. Many are facing cuts of up to seven per cent per student. Unsurprisingly, researchers have found that the new government funding scheme diverts funds away from the most deprived students. Meanwhile, grammar schools currently admit just three per cent of students on free school meals as opposed to the national average of 18 per cent, and yet still claim to be the ladder holding together social mobility. According to a recent report, they are still dominated by the wealthy and middle class.

Even anecdotal evidence I’ve heard from peers reveals the utter inaccessibility of grammar schools for many pupils. One grammar school in Derby refused to let students bring in their own lunch, forcing parents to pay for the expensive lunches prepared on site. Extra tuition, with a lower limit of £20 an hour, was not just recommended but expected for every student. This is hardly an environment in which students struggling even to attend will thrive.

“What people don’t realise is that it’s far more about the culture of classism than the fees themselves”

Meritocracy has become the rhetoric for justifying such schools, but this is nothing more than a pipe dream. Labour policies entrenched an abundance of education types: grammar schools, comprehensives, faith schools, academies, independent schools – while Tory policies siphoned funds away from the struggling schools to those producing the best GCSE results. In a system of such disorder and chaos, meritocracy is used as a weapon against the poor. The failure of the schools, like the NHS, is no longer the fault of government policies or spending but the individual student, forced to carry full blame for missing opportunities never presented to them. Just as the apparent ‘failure’ of the NHS, caused by under-funding, is used as an excuse to privatise health care, we are, worryingly, approaching the same situation within education.

What people don’t realise is that it’s far more about the culture of classism than the fees themselves. Grammar schools are often inaccessible to lower-class families, minority families, and immigrant families, because there is an extensive rhetoric that these places are just not for them. And if we are being realistic here, what parents that are struggling to feed their children are going to push them to apply for grammar schools at the age of 10? If they have already faced a poor to unacceptable standard of primary education, it’s unlikely.

The return of the grammar school: a backward step for social mobility?

‘No one fails an exam because they are poor’. Perhaps this would be true, if students in poverty weren’t forced to take up part-time jobs to help support their family, or they weren’t directly billed for the cost of a retake exam. Maybe this might be accurate if grammar schools, and the specialised teaching they supply, were, in fact, accessible for all. But this isn’t the case. This toxic mindset blatantly supports the idea that poor people are deserving of their economic status, that they are poverty-stricken because they are uneducated and never ‘worked hard enough’. You are holding academic work over the manual labour that allows you to live your privileged lives, looking down on those who supply it. People don’t just fail exams because they are poor, they fail school. They have to work to support their families, so their attendance is low. They feel sidelined in schools because they are lower-class, a minority, and can’t afford the books to work or the compulsory trips. They find themselves in social situations in which they are being constantly told that they can’t achieve, they can’t go to a good university, and that their only options are poverty, crime, unhappiness and illness.Those who will later attend these grammar schools sit through private tutoring for the 11-Plus, while working-class children are sitting in overcrowded classrooms in a school that can’t afford printing costs for classroom resources. How are they to access these schools, painted as their saviour, their path to a middle-class paradise, if they aren’t even given the basic tools to pass the entrance exams?

So, no – I don’t care about your personal experience within such a corrupt institution. If anything, you’re merely revealing your state of privilege within an already privileged system. But you should care about our experiences, about our struggles, about the bigotry and discrimination that the people who supply your elite education are inflicting upon anyone deemed ‘less than’. You should care that your school, dubbed as the path to class mobility, is cutting off and abandoning the large percentage of the population they claim to aid. By denying the institutional corruption of grammar schools, all you’re doing is shining a light on your own privilege.