Grammar schools - social mobility or social pariah?

This week the opening of a new grammar school was approved by the incumbent Tory government in my home country of Kent. Based 10 miles away from Tonbridge's Weald of Kent Grammar school, the building in Sevenoaks has been decreed as an annex to that existing complex - thereby neatly skipping around the "no more grammar schools" rule installed by that very public schoolboy Tony Blair in 1998.

As a result of yet another Tory deception social media went ballistic at the news and there were many commentators putting their two pennies worth into the mix... so here's mine:

Brought up on a council estate by a single mother in the 1960s I, like many other children, were consigned to a life path of low paid, unskilled work with no ambition of owning our own homes.

But along with several others in my primary school, I passed my 11 plus. I didn't even know what that was and didn't even realise I'd taken any test that would take me from the comfort of my peer group and place me smack bang into a world I'd never experienced. I was just told I was going to the grammar school. I wanted to go to the (awful) local secondary.

My protests fell on deaf ears. My family was proud. I was the first one to pass the 11 plus. It was something to be celebrated. It would lift me out of the inevitable drudgery of factory or shop work. I could be a secretary, or even go to university.

I didn't fit in. I was the one who queued on a Monday morning, with a select few, outside the secretary's office to collect our free school dinner tickets. I didn't have parents who encouraged me to do my homework. I didn't have a clue about how to study to pass exams.

My old primary school friends now saw me as "posh" and that social circle withered away. My new school associates saw me as "the poor kid" dressed in a second-hand uniform so I remained outside their cliques.

I hated every day I walked through the gates of my grammar school. I left with two O levels... grade C.

So much for social mobility.

Of course, as those have argued so vociferously on social media have said, how can you decide a child's fate at 11 years old?

And, more importantly, those old days of supposed grammar school social mobility have now been overtaken by the feeding frenzy of pushy middle class parents who can afford to tutor 10 year old Henry and Felicity to pass the exam to attain that elusive school place... and continue to fund their progress on that extending social ladder.

Me? Well I did just fine in the end. My education came through my work experience as an adult. I bought my first property at 22 years old. I got that nice little job in the City on an above average salary. And just to add the icing to the cake, I received my BSc First Class Honours degree in Psychology, after five years of studying with the OU, in 2008.

Grammar schools? Who needs them.