WHAT’S wrong with elitism? Are we supposed instead to think it better to support what’s mediocre? Does anyone in her right mind think there is something wrong with excellence?

Yes, there is such a person: Lucy Powell, shadow education secretary, has described the new grammar school to be opened in Kent as “a hugely backward step".

Ms Powell is faithfully reiterating the Labour Party’s decision of 1997 not to create any more grammar schools.

A little clarification is necessary. When is a “new” grammar school not a “new” grammar school? Answer: when it’s an annexe. Weald of Kent Grammar School in Tonbridge is to open a site in Sevenoaks and this is what is referred to as the annexe. I admit it stretches the meaning of “annexe” rather - a word I’d always thought meant something tacked on or at least nearby. Difficult to tack something on when it’s in another town.

Nicky Morgan, Tory education secretary, has promised that the new – or sort of new – school will not “open the floodgates to more schools being allowed to select pupils by ability”.

Why not, Mrs Morgan? I think the more grammar schools the better.

Let me tell you a story. The other night, I was at a dinner provided by the Fuellers Livery Company in the City of London.

John, the Master of that Company, whose Mastership was being celebrated, was the eldest child of seven born into the family of a coalminer in Goldthorpe, South Yorkshire.

His father spent 42 years of his life down the pit. John passed the 11-plus into Mexborough Grammar School but required a grant to enable him to buy his school uniform. He was a diligent pupil, got his “A” levels in maths, physics and chemistry, studied engineering at Leeds university and went on to a highly successful career in the fuel and power industry. Without that grammar school education, none of that could have happened.

Good, then. Good for John. But critics such as Lucy Powell and the rest of the Labour party deplore educational selection in all its forms. It’s not fair, they say. It discriminates. It allows advantages to some pupils which are not available to all.

Ms Powell and her colleagues have a point. If a small percentage of children are creamed off at the age of 11 and the others left to rot in a lousy secondary modern system, then indeed it is not fair. But it’s not fair either to penalise the intellectually gifted child by condemning him to that lousy secondary modern schooling. Of course, it’s not called secondary modern; it’s called comprehensive, but it means the same.

Why do parents mortgage and re-mortgage themselves to secure a decent education for their children? Because comprehensive education is a failure. On the Department of Education’s own figures, 43 per cent of our children leave school, after 11 years of compulsory education, unable to read, write and count efficiently. The state schools system is a disgrace.

But the remedy is not to forbid grammar schools and to level every pupil down into mediocrity - and worse. The task is rather to be even more selective: to identify the academically bright pupils and provide for them, but also to look to the suitable education of the great majority of youngsters who have practical minds and practical talents. In other words, we need an education system which recognises differences in kinds of abilities and which nurtures them all.

We should put an end to this 50 years programme of levelling down, and start to do some levelling up.