When I was at Oxford, in the late 1960s, the university was changing from something akin to a finishing school for academically-inclined public school pupils to a university for the most talented, irrespective of background. There was a rich variety of regional accents from schools such as Manchester Grammar, Bradford Grammar, King Edward’s Birmingham, Rhondda County Grammar, and a feeling that we were in the early stages of establishing a genuine meritocracy.
I visited Oxford again in the late 1980s, after many years working abroad, and was surprised to find that it had not opened up as we had expected. The schools from which the students had come had either disappeared or were now private. Even the grammar school I had attended had gone private, now charging ?6,000 per year. It had been transformed- from a school drawn from all social classes to the preserve of children of the well-off.
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