On September 29th 2026 Andy Burnham gave his first conference speech as Labour prime minister. He called himself "the son of a man who failed his 11-plus." His father, Roy, had died of Alzheimer's disease a few weeks earlier, earlier that month, in fact. "If only, if only he had been able to appreciate that moment," Burnham told the hall. He "could have gone to university himself", but "it wasn't an option". England is supposed to have gotten rid of the sorting of children by exam decades ago. But the country still has 163 grammar schools, state schools that select pupils by test. In Buckinghamshire four out of ten children of secondary-school age go to one. In 1998 their number was frozen by law. On the only occasion on which a community has voted on whether to end selection, in Ripon in 2000, the people chose to retain it, by 1,493 votes to 747. Children take the test in September of their last year of primary school, when most are ten. In Buckinghamshire they are told to take two HB pencils and an eraser in a transparent bag. A practice question asks children to identify a hidden four-letter word in "The film ended happily after all". The answer is "mend". This has nothing to do with the national curriculum, and Kent's primary schools are told not to teach it. So families hire tutors. In London they charge £80-90 an hour (120) and can cost up to £15,000 ($20,000) over the years. Vanessa Kushner, who has been a tutor for 30 years, says she gets calls about kids "aged three to seven" all the time. Katheryn Sharp, who has tutored for over 20 years, calls the preparation "Olympic training". "Any Year 5 who goes away during the summer holidays is out of their mind," she says (children are nine in Year 5). A study of children in England and Northern Ireland by UCL found that around 70% of tutored children got into a grammar school, compared with 14% of those who did not use a tutor. In Kent just 12% of children eligible for free school meals pass the test, compared with 30% of their peers. At the Henrietta Barnett School, in north London, there was a year when 2,944 girls took the test for 100 places. The exam that Roy Burnham failed is now mostly a test of parental wealth. The younger Mr Burnham promised to "rebuild a system of comprehensive education" in his speech. He did not mention grammar schools, and his government has not proposed changing the law that keeps them alive. In 2023 about 17,000 children in Kent took the exam his father did.