"What are they thinking of?" fumes Stephen Pollard in the Mail. "No one can deny that our state education system today is shamefully bad ... One small area, however, manages to do well. Very well. 98.5% of grammar school pupils get five good GCSEs at A to C grades, compared with the overall rate of 58%. So what's the marvellous notion that David Cameron's Conservatives have come up with? Ditch any remaining attachment to the one proven, successful type of state school that's left."
It does not escape the papers' notice that the vast majority of the shadow cabinet were educated privately or at grammar schools.
David Willetts, the shadow education secretary, told the CBI that the 164 remaining grammar schools - which the party would not abolish - were no longer a leg-up for poorer Britons and their intake was overwhelmingly middle class. But 15 Tory MPs spoke out against him.
"This looks like a Clause 4 moment," says Alice Thomson in the Telegraph. "The Tories seem to have ditched what they always held dear - a belief that those who worked hard and were talented would be rewarded - to embrace the socialist principle that all must have prizes."
Boris Johnson weighs in. "How dare we ban selection? you may ask, when we [the media and political Establishment] use it ourselves; and of course we should not ban it: it is a fact of life.
"It exists in the grammar schools; it exists in the rapidly expanding fee-paying sector; and one way or another it exists throughout the maintained sector ... But if we think that 'Bring Back Grammar Schools' is the solution to our problems, or that the Conservatives are on to a winner with the 11-plus, then we are frankly deluding ourselves." Even Margaret Thatcher, he adds triumphantly, did not reintroduce grammars.
* This is an extract from the Wrap, our emailed digest of the daily papers. Try it free for a month here.
