Now, class, pay attention, and answer the following question. What is the purpose of education? Is it (a) to create adults equipped to compete in a global marketplace, (b) to develop imaginative and well-rounded individuals, or (c) to establish a homogeneous society with equal opportunities for all? If you are British, of a certain age and ticked (c), then you’ll almost certainly have heard of Holland Park School, London’s most celebrated comprehensive, which this September celebrates its 50th birthday. Far from being, in the words of Alastair Campbell, a “bog-standard” comp, Holland Park, in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, has from the first been known as “the Eton of comprehensives”.

In Britain, comprehensive education was an ideal that gradually emerged after the second world war. Butler’s Education Act of 1944 had introduced free secondary schooling for all up to the age of 14. But, while the act improved equality of opportunity, in practice most local authorities continued to opt for a tripartite secondary system: grammar schools for the most able; secondary technical schools for vocational training; and secondary moderns for those “whose future employment will not demand any measure of technical skill or knowledge”.