Well I went to a Catholic direct grant grammar school for boys. When I first arrived there in 1962, I had been the best pupil in my primary school for 20 years (I have my final school report to prove it). I had even been promoted from the third junior form to the fourth, and I came top of that class (of 48) despite being a year below everyone else.

Now I was a secondary teacher for 25 years for my sins, so I am at least able to take a view on my own childhood experience and contrast it with the regime that obtained during my career, whilst at the same time acknowledging that other regimes are available. I can see now that most of my teachers were just terrible. They were dictatorial, authoritarian, punitive, unimaginative and frequently relied on our keeping silent while we copied interminable passages from out-of-date books. For three years I had a chemistry teacher and a biology teacher who never took us into a lab or into the field to do any practical work. The hold they had over both us and our working-class parents ensured that no-one complained. We knew no different. Of course, there were shining exceptions, and they're the teachers you always remember the most. Being a bit of a rebel, I slid downhill for the whole seven years of my secondary education and I wasn't alone. I did OK in the end and got to university, but loads of other lads did better than me, and loads of other lads followed my slippery path and did a lot worse. Only two other lads had passed the eleven-plus along with me at my primary school, and by 15 they had both been expelled.

My teaching career was entirely within comprehensive schools, three in all. There were various strategies for dealing with the wide ability range, we didn't always get it right but we tried, and we always opposed those troglodytes who tried to impose "grammar streams" versus the rest. Given the right support via classroom assistants and decently-small class sizes, mixed-ability teaching can be amazingly successful, and I saw (and was personally involved in) many shining examples of its success.

My strong feeling is thst it's far better for all children to get in there and mix it with the best and the worst. Schools should never be places where cases division is perpetuated. I don't believe in private schools, home schooling, single-sex schools and religious schools. Every one of those concepts will increase division in society. That doesn't mean that I think everyone should end up being a part of the homogeneous same. Not at all. A good education system starts off with the predication that everyone starts off with the same chances. After that, we can develop, and celebrate, different rates of progress an a diversity of progress. Given the resources, of course, at which point any Tory will tell you that all we really want is more money to waste....