15,000 pupils pass the 11-plus but fail to get a grammar school place

The remaining 6,100 or so children were turned away because they did not meet other entry criteria as closely as those who were offered places, such as the distance they live from the school.

A small number of pupils who applied for and sat more than one test will be included in the figures.

They do not include children who have narrowly missed a place at "superselective" schools, which only take the top performers and do not have a pass mark.

If a similar number of eligible pupils are being rejected from the other 108 grammars in the country, it would mean that nearly 20 more establishments would be needed to meet the demand for places from about 15,000 extra students.

Bob McCartney, the chairman of the Grammar Schools Association, said: "These statistics demonstrate the great demand for grammar schools compared to the small number of places available and the unfairness to children who are qualified to fill them but are denied a place.

"The Government continues to blatantly ignore parental choice. Its approach is based on political motivation and not the pursuit of education excellence."

New Government admissions rules introduced last month make it easier for oversubscribed schools to expand or even establish "overflow" or "satellite" schools nearby.

However, there is no new capital funding for buildings and it is unclear whether a "satellite" grammar school would contravene the 1998 legal ban against the setting up of new selective schools.

Wallington High School for Girls, in Sutton, received 1,400 applications for 180 places and had to turn away more than 300 pupils who passed the 11 plus.

Barbara Greatorex, the head teacher, said: "I just think it is a shame that the opportunities that grammar schools afford are not more widespread. Most grammar schools are so oversubscribed that they take as many pupils as they possibly can but without capital funding, they do not have the space to take more."

But the admission rule changes have offered renewed hope in some areas which do not have grammar schools or have an acute shortage of places, such as Sevenoaks in Kent.

Plan are under discussion for existing grammar schools in Tonbridge and Tonbridge Wells to establish campuses for the 1,100 Sevenoaks children who travel about nine miles everyday to grammar schools in other towns.

Michael Fallon, the Sevenoaks MP, said: "The cost and time spent transporting these children is a huge waste and there is growing demand for grammar school places beyond that, including a big new housing development in north Sevenoaks.

"Parents, primary schools, head teachers are increasingly vocal about the need and the county council is supportive.

"We are actively exploring the establishment of a campus of two existing grammars and there is definite interest."

A Department for Education spokesman said: "We're giving all schools the freedom to offer more places but they will not be getting money from the department to expand."

Ministers are instead funding new free schools. An extra ￡600 million to build 100 more free schools will be announced in Tuesday's autumn statement.

Have the middle classes lost their place?

Every day, we see another sign. A generation ago, the average middle-class family had one breadwinner. Now they have two. But they’re poorer. Why? Food, clothes, and appliances are cheaper. Yes, but mortgages are much, much bigger than they used to be. The middle class is hugely in debt. In a typical family, both parents must work to pay the interest on those debts. If interest rates – or petrol prices, or heating costs, or stealth taxes – go up much more, they’re finished. Bankruptcy looms. The middle class is under threat like never before.

Sometimes, the threat becomes reality, and things unravel in the most spectacular and gruesome of ways. A middle-class man, having built up a business, having bought a nice house for his family, reads his company balance sheet one day, comes back home, kills his wife and daughter, burns his house to the ground, and tops himself. “He was such a decent, hard-working man,” say the neighbours. Meanwhile, there’s a grim drift of statistics — the middle classes are boozing more (wine, naturally) and larger numbers of them are being charged with domestic abuse. Vivian Blackledge, of Domestic Abuse Service, has speculated that financial problems are the cause. I’ve also heard tales of the middle classes turning up in droves at the doctor’s, baying for Prozac. Being middle class, these days, can be pretty depressing.

Not so long ago, I heard the often-repeated line: “Everybody’s middle class these days”, and believed it, even if I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. But it sounded cheerful and upbeat. It sounded as if everybody could expect a good standard of living, good manners from their peers, and a sense that they were contributing to the world. It sounded like progress. But it’s not true, is it? In fact, the opposite is true.

Now that the top one per cent own around a quarter of the wealth – or to put it another way, now that the top 25 per cent own three quarters of the wealth, with the middle class scrabbling around for the crumbs; now that the rich are getting richer, and everyone else is getting poorer; now that the underclass is smouldering away, ready to smash our windows and steal our stuff; now that our jobs are going and our mortgages are hanging by a thread – it seems to me that pretty much nobody is middle class.

That’s how it’s been for most of history, and that’s how it is even now, across most of the world. There’s the rich, and then there’s the rest. I’m using a phrase cited in a recent edition of The Atlantic magazine; that’s how they describe America in the 21st Century. It’s getting to be the same over here, too. Most people are wallowing in debt, living hand to mouth. A tiny group sits at the top, sipping champagne. They are the people who, directly or indirectly, make money from all the debt. They are the financiers – the investors, the bankers, the traders – and the small group of toffs who court them and flatter them. And, of course, bail them out. Well, just look at the cabinet. It’s not exactly middle class, is it?

But who were the middle classes, anyway? They haven’t been around forever. The middle class started in Europe three or four centuries ago, depending on who you ask. They weren’t risk-takers. They didn’t create wealth. No – they worked for the people who created wealth. You might say that the middle classes only exist as long as the rich need them.

In his book The Poker Face of Wall Street, the American writer Aaron Brown defines the middle class as “people who value security over the chance to get rich”. They save rather than spend. They’re keen on deferred gratification. Having taken up their place in society, they’re desperate not to be overtaken. They despise those on the rung below. You might say they are snobbish time-servers. Now it looks like they are on the way out, you might say “good riddance!”

If you think about it, the middle classes are hard to like. I say this as somebody who is solidly middle class. I went to an expensive independent school, founded in the Victorian era to mould the sons of Empire. If you heard me speak, you wouldn’t know which part of the country I came from, but I don’t think of myself as remotely posh. I wear jeans, which are quite cheap, with shirts that are quite expensive. I own a terraced house, but I have a large mortgage. I make the same amount of money as a very bad football player — maybe someone who plays for Tranmere Rovers or Oldham Athletic. I’m probably about as well off as my dentist.

But am I more middle class than my dentist? If I know one thing about the middle class in this country, it’s that there are lots of tiny nuances. Kate Fox, the anthropologist, says that if you’re middle class, you would put your dog in a caged-off section at the back of your car, whereas if you’re upper-middle class, you have the dog in the back seat. That sounds about right. I was always aware that social climbers always pretended to be cleaner and more polite than people who were actually posh; real posh people farted and said “what!” rather than “pardon”.

In her book Class, Jilly Cooper, a middle-class person (on the posh side, if you ask me), writes that when she met an upper-class chap, he was smoking in the street. She pointed out that, in her book, this was bad manners. “I do what I like,” said the chap. For Cooper, this was a revelation. The higher up the class system you were, the more vulgar you could, and possibly should, be. Except you had to do it in the right context. It’s all very confusing, and the borders are policed with a gimlet eye. In any case, you can see why toffs often get on with chavs – both classes can swear, drink and gamble with impunity. You see them at Epsom and Ascot, betting slips in hand, with half-cut, identical expressions on their faces.

I say all this to illustrate the insane complexity of the middle class. It’s a complex class because it served a complex institution — the British Empire. People with brains and bullishness trekked all over the world, inventing brilliant and nefarious ways to suck resources out of it. These people needed administrators — people to keep the books, arrange the logistics, run the factories, market the goods, and teach the next generation how to carry on the good work. The richer we got, the bigger the middle- class grew, toadying away expertly, aping its superiors (never quite accurately), and eventually trimming its hedges and waxing its cars.

At some point, around the time when our empire folded, politicians began to call for a classless society. Harold Wilson wanted a classless society. So did John Major. Tony Blair wanted us all to be middle class. But, as a society, we were living on borrowed money. You can’t support a vast swathe of middle-class people if you’re a society with escalating debts. Various governments tried. By making education comprehensive, they created the illusion of equality. By making exams easier, they created the illusion of a better-educated population. By chartering more universities, they enabled lots of people to be given degrees.

Meanwhile, something else was happening. As a nation, our debts were maturing. Just when we thought we were getting richer, we were getting poorer – far too poor to support an enormous middle class. A very small number of people, the risk-takers and financiers, were making huge amounts of money. The rest of us were being left behind. As Ferdinand Mount points out in his brilliant book about the British class system, Mind the Gap, “the average pay ratio of chief executive officer to employee has risen from 47 to 128 in the last 10 years. Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco is paid nearly 900 times as much as the average Tesco worker. Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP receives 631 times the wage of his average employee, Paul Adams of BAT 391 times.” On the other hand, the middle class is getting poorer – by the day. Some are losing their jobs, abusing their spouses, going off the rails.

And loss of income, of security, of a sense of identity and belonging, is destablising what long seemed to be this most respectable of classes. As Ferdinand Mount, writing about the chav-based novels of Martin Amis, James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, puts it, “the brutality and hopelessness they describe are not restricted to the very poor, but rather as seeping upward like some mephitic gas”. Artists and fiction writers are always ahead of the game: Amis, Kelman and Welsh have known something for a while that we cannot yet face up to.

That’s us, that is. Just look at Shameless on television. That’s us. In some deep inner recess of our collective brain, that’s how we feel. And that’s why, in our droves, we love The Apprentice and Big Brother. We know we might just make it. But we are beginning to cotton on to how sharp-elbowed we’ll have to be. We used to watch The X Factor ironically. Now less so. We love the aspiration. We need the hope. Because the middle class, as we knew it, is not long for this world.

University: there's no better place to be at the age of 18

Welcome to university. You’ve probably received a lot of advice about what lies ahead, but now you have to cast that aside and find your own way. Before you embark, however, can I offer a few words of wisdom? I’ve been at university (as a student or teacher) since 1973, so hear me out.

Life starts here. For most of you, this will be the first time you experience living on your own, away from the watchful gaze of parents. Even those who continue to live at home will find that family life is never quite the same. Dare I say it, but you are now officially an adult.

Be careful. Independence, like Jagermeister, is an intoxicating brew. You are now able to stay out late, drink to excess, and pursue whomever you fancy. (You may have done all that already, but possibly not with such complete abandon.) Beware, though, for the freedom to do anything often turns into a temptation to do nothing. Every once in a while you will need to remind yourself that you’re at university not simply to get a life but also to get an education.

Your time at university will probably be the most turbulent and intense period of your life. A huge horizon stretches before you; you’ll learn and you’ll love with a passion that is frightening. Not all the lessons will come from books; in fact, few of them will. The best thing you’ll learn is how to live with others.

You’ll make friendships that will endure for ever, and the times that you’ve shared with fellow students will, 50 years hence, be bathed in a warm glow. You’ll also probably fall deeply in love, since most students do – some in serial fashion. University produces what I like to call a surge in the urge to merge. So look around during that first lecture: your future spouse could be two rows back, or a few in front.

I love students. I love the fact that, every year, I come into contact with so many bright, inquisitive minds who enrich my life. Most are a credit to good parenting; I constantly find myself hoping that my own children will turn out as well-rounded, dynamic and just plain nice.

Students are the true believers in education – without them, there would be no universities. Most are hungry to learn and still idealistic enough to believe that the little chunk of knowledge they acquire might make the world a better place or, at least, make them a better person. That is what you give me – a belief that progress is still possible.

You’re an elite, but please don’t act like one. Your performance on exams has qualified you for special treatment. While others your age are struggling to find work, or being ground down by it, you have been given three or four years of cossetted treatment in a completely unreal world. The Ivory Tower beats the factory floor hands down. So enjoy yourself, but don’t forget that you have a mandate to fulfil and those who have invested in you rightfully expect a return.

A university education used to be free. It is no longer. Many of you will have to find part-time work to pay your way; some will find that poverty diminishes the educational experience. But always remember: the fees you pay are a small part of what it costs to run a university. Don’t ever forget that the costs of your education are paid in the main by the working people of Britain, the majority of whom have never had the experiences you will enjoy. Higher education is a privilege, not a right.

The football manager Paul Sturrock, a good man, deals every day with young men who take their gifts for granted. They sometimes forget that the ability to kick a ball is not enough by itself to succeed. He has constantly to remind players that if they don’t work hard, they are traitors to their talent. In order to drive that message home, Sturrock occasionally puts those who forget their good fortune on to a roof for a few hours, so that they might understand what life would be like if a living had to be made by fixing slates. There but for the grace of God go you…

A university education will bring untold riches, not all of them financial. Some of you will find your way into highly paid professions, others will land careers which pay no more than the roofer earns. But the experience should not be measured by salary alone. Wealth comes in many forms. Whatever income you eventually earn, you will one day understand that higher education is the best bargain on earth.

When I see young students chatting with new friends in coffee bars during freshers week, I can’t help but enjoy vicariously their blossoming world. There’s no better place to be at the age of 18. The real world will remain on hold while you indulge in glorious enrichment. Enjoy yourself. But don’t blow it. Don’t you dare betray the gifts you’ve been given.

Gerard DeGroot is professor of modern history at the University of St Andrews

School can be a lonely place if you're the only boarder

Dominic Moon says that there are some signs that may help a parent to ascertain how “boarding” a boarding school actually is. “If you look for a school that teaches on Saturdays,” he says, “then this creates a more active weekend environment and effectively guarantees you more pupils for the weekend.”

My daughter does Saturday school but it isn’t always enough. There’s still Sunday, which can feel very long when you’re on your own. He continues: “Parents can ask the school how many pupils are around all weekend so that they get an idea of what to expect, and if you have a tour of the school by pupils, they tend to be quite honest about the atmosphere at weekends. Even if these pupils have been told what to say, they still give an honest account of the school.”

Many schools that were once predominantly full boarding – or simply boarding and day (as Oundle still is: 860 full boarders and 250 day pupils) without any of the in-betweeners – have morphed over the years into something that is less clear and compromised (if it’s a full boarding environment you’re after) by weekly and flexi arrangements.

Sue Hird, at Giggleswick in Yorkshire, explains that this is largely the result of demands by the UK boarding market. “Until September [2011], we offered either full boarding or day. Full boarding meant that boarders were expected to be in school all weekend, every weekend, except for the two exeat weekends either side of half-term and half-term itself.

“However, we have found that, increasingly, UK parents are not buying into the idea of full boarding and although happy for children to board during the week, want them home at the weekends. We have resisted this for quite a while, but have found that, in the end, our policy is affecting recruitment.”

Schools must, of course, be mindful of numbers – it’s how they survive – but as my daughter miserably observed a few months ago: “Not if it means I’m unhappy.”

How, then, does a school accommodate the demands of all sorts of parents, the needs of myriad children? As Janette Wallis of The Good Schools Guide reminds me: “Schools have an unenviable tightrope to walk between local parents, who generally want to see as much of their children as possible, and overseas or more distant parents, who want their children well looked after on the weekends and engaged in a full programme of activities.” Or just want their kids to be part of a big gang in-residence on a Sunday morning rather than kicking about on their own…

Sue Hird details Giggleswick’s solution to the different parent-body demands: 'This year we have introduced closed and open weekends. We hope that this will help to maintain the boarding ethos of the school, while giving parents the opportunity to have their boarding children home a bit more.” During the Christmas term there will be four closed weekends to coincide with major school events.

Harrow – all boys – is one of very few schools in Britain that has resisted the urge – or the need – to resort to offering day, weekly and flexi boarding. “We are one of a very small number of full boarding schools that do not take day pupils or weekly boarders,” says the school’s communications manager, Kirsty Shanahan, “which means that we avoid the tensions that arise when some pupils go home at the end of the day while others do not.

“Furthermore, at the weekends we can lay on a full programme of activities in the knowledge that all boys are able to participate – it is very hard to have a play practice or sports tournament if pupils are missing. There are more organised activities at Harrow on a Sunday than at any other similar school.”

That’s not to say there is no parental contact during term time. “Parents are encouraged to come to the school whenever they can to support matches, plays and concerts.”

Richard Harman, head of the co-educational Uppingham (778 full boarders, 18 day students – a sympathetic nod in the direction of staff children) says: “We feel that there is still, and will always be, a market for full boarding and, as a culture in our school, we are committed to it. Of course, you always have to listen to your customers, but actually, we find that the tremendous sense of belonging and range of opportunities that full boarding offers pay off in spades for those who commit to it.”

But in schools where the numbers dwindle at weekends, is there still the same emphasis on occupation? Ralph Lucas warns: “There has always been a lot of incentive for schools to fib about weekends.”

He suggests that parents develop a firm idea of the sort of thing they want to be going on at weekends. “Get numbers (of who does what at weekends, of which weekends, if any, are compulsory exeats) and see round the school when full boarders are there to chat to. If weekends are great, they should tell stories about them without being prompted,” he says.

Sheila Lambie, marketing manager at Gordonstoun (513 children on the senior school roll; 445 full boarders, just 68 day) suggests, when I ask her how to ascertain how “full boarding” a boarding school is, that “parents should ask to see the programme of activities at weekends, and how many students would be expected to take part in these. They should also ask to see the breakdown of full boarders and weekly boarders, and the ratio of international students to home students, and how many of the home students live locally. They should be firm in asking what the policy is on allowing local students to take other students home for the weekend as this in some schools causes an 'exodus’ at weekends.”

Gordonstoun has striven consistently to maintain a full boarding ethos and, interestingly, this year has its highest-ever intake. So there is a demand. Janette Wallis says: “Parents should not be afraid to ask the school directly how many children in their child’s prospective year group were in school last Sunday (and then ask if it would be possible to speak to a parent of one of those children so you can get to the nitty-gritty).”

Boarding doesn’t mean what I did when I was my daughter’s age. Today, it comes in different shapes and sizes: some kids go home on Fridays, some on Saturday; some come back on Sunday evening, some not until Monday morning; and day children can enjoy the adventure of a night at school as a “flexi boarder” when their parents are away from home.

Worst case, and thankfully rare, scenario, “boarding” might mean that a school is dipping an experimental toe into boarding waters and your child is the dummy-run.

Janette Wallis related a case where a British girl living in Bahrain arrived as a new pupil at her “boarding” school to find that she was the only boarder. That’s why you need to do your homework: to understand precisely what sort – and how many sorts – of boarding is on offer.

For further information, check out the UK Boarding Schools Guide or the The Good Schools Guide. Investing in a little detective work via a personalised school search may well prove to be a worthwhile outlay.