In the 1950s and 1960s it required considerable moral courage to stand out against the dominant educational opinion, which had settled dogmatically upon scrapping grammar schools in favour of the supposedly more egalitarian comprehensive system. He advocated a pure meritocracy. Selection at Manchester Grammar School was by competitive examination, with no marks added for wealth or family connections. It was the essence of his philosophy that grammar schools should serve as ladders, giving all levels of society access to the highest places in the land. His approach bore fruit; in the mid-1950s Manchester Grammar School was attaining up to 45 scholarships every year at Oxford and Cambridge. However, in the short term his efforts were doomed to failure; Manchester was forced to become a fee-charging school.