We’ve had, I think we can all agree, a spirited and entertaining debate. I’m disappointed that Rhianon Passmore doesn’t see me as a Byronic hero, but that of course is only today. If she’d known me 40 years ago, she might have come to a different conclusion. But, I’m very happy to swap nineteenth-century literary allusions with her: she has reminded me, from the passion with which she delivered her speech today, of a character in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, Madame Defarge, the tricoteuse who sat at the bottom of the guillotine and who sent in coded messages to the committee of public safety by the speed of her knitting to identify those who were to be condemned to the guillotine. So, it shows at least that she has had a decent education that she understands the point of my barb.

But, we started the debate with the entertaining spectacle of my friend, Darren Millar, standing on his head. It is difficult to see why the Conservative Party in Wales should differ so markedly in its policy on education from the new regime in England, because Theresa May has justified the change in policy fundamentally on the basis of parental choice. That is something that I think ought not to be denied to the people of Wales. About seven in 10 Britons, according to the UK Government’s press release, want to see the ban on new grammar schools lifted and eight in 10 believe that grammar schools can boost social mobility when undecided voters are removed from the mix.

Of course, we have had from various contributors to the debate—Llyr Gruffydd and Lynne Neagle; both of whom I greatly respect as parliamentarians—we have had from them various allegations that the system of grammar schools is to be condemned because they deny the children of relatively poor parents access, and that is true in England because there are only 163 of them left. In England, what you get is selection by wealth rather than selection by ability, because people move into the catchment areas of the best schools. That is something that cannot be supported. Of course, we don’t have that problem in Wales because we don’t have grammar schools. But, that also means that we have a system that is one size fits all.

We’ve had, from Lynne Neagle and from Rhianon Passmore, a blast from the past about the enforcement of comprehensivisation. Anthony Crosland was mentioned by Rhianon and, of course, he was famous for his declaration that he wouldn’t be satisfied until he had destroyed every effing grammar school in the country. His policy was one of enforcement and the removal of choice from parents. That’s not something that I think, in the modern world, we ought to support.

We’re not proposing in this motion to go back to the situation as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. I went to a grammar school, the Amman Valley Grammar School, in the 1960s and it was a world of grammar schools and secondary moderns. David Rowlands and Caroline Jones showed that maybe it wasn’t quite as inflexible in their areas as it might have been in others. All that this motion is doing, it’s not a call to go back to grammar schools and secondary moderns as they were, but to introduce a much more flexible structure to the education system, like, for example, in Germany, where you’ve got four different types of secondary school, according, basically, to ability or whether you want a more academic or technical and vocational education. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not about dividing children at the age of 11 into sheep and goats; we want a system of flexibility because children develop at different speeds at different ages, of course. The big problem with the grammar and secondary modern system in my day was that it didn’t have enough flexibility, and the secondary modern schools were indeed the cinderella of the education system. Nobody is asking to go back to that. What we want is an upgraded and modernised version of the system of parental choice, which, in other countries, is uncontroversial.

The big problem with Kirsty Williams’s approach to education is that she insists on having a straitjacket in the education system, whereby even if you live within the catchment area of a school that does not provide children with a decent education, they’re forced to accept that outcome and they can’t move between them. What this motion tries to do—and some of the Conservative amendments we approve of—. What this motion attempts to do is to say that it’s parents, ultimately, who should be the drivers of education policy, rather than politicians and bureaucrats. That, in a modern and democratic world—[Interruption.] Well, I’m not sure we’ve got time to do that. We have, have we?