If you are over 45, there’s a good chance you’ll remember secondary modern schools. If you can’t, don’t worry, because in five years’ time Labour will have reintroduced them, renamed community schools, where you’ll be able to study leisure and tourism, or hairdressing with an extension module in perming and tinting.

In Kent, the secondary modern never went away. That Fifties time-warp of a county has an active, well-financed pressure group called Save Our Grammar Schools. But I have yet to hear of any equivalent campaign to preserve the secondary modern.

When, in 1995, the Conservative prime minister John Major promised a grammar school in every town, he made no mention of an accompanying secondary modern. They remain the dark and ignored side of the selection debate. In Kent, and in a few other outposts of selection in England, the secondary moderns have become high schools, but they remain the institutions to which those who fail the 11-plus are consigned.

Memories of the secondary modern system were prompted by a reunion that came courtesy of Friends Reunited (www.friends reunited.co.uk), the website that puts former classmates in touch. I was one of 12 ex-pupils of a secondary modern in Basildon, Essex, in the late 1960s who recently met up after contacting each other through the site.

Basildon was a model of the 1944 Butler tripartite system in action. It had 11 secondary schools, all but two purpose-built for the new town. There were two grammar schools, a technical school, a bilateral secondary modern (that counts as two schools) and six other secondary moderns, one of which had a small farm for training agricultural labourers.

After four years of primary school we were sorted into sheep and goats. Of the children in my class, three went to the local grammar, 25 to the secondary modern and none to the technical school. I never again spoke to any of the three who went to the grammar school. A form of apartheid existed as rigid as that in Soweto in the Eighties. We didn’t even meet on the sports field. They played rugby; we played soccer.

At the secondary modern we were given an education deemed adequate for our needs. This was particularly true for the girls, who did a subject called housecraft, in which they were shown how to make a bed and wash plates. This instruction took place in a small purpose-built flat within the school. At the start of the fourth year they were all shunted into a room with 30 heavy manual typewriters, where they thundered away all day while the teacher chain-smoked at the front. The boys, meanwhile, were herded into metalwork and woodwork rooms, where, in my case at least, months of labour yielded a small copper bowl and a teapot stand.

We were not allowed to learn a foreign language until the third year. As the teacher regularly bemoaned having to teach “slum children”, few of the class had any love of French.

Even for a group of children deemed unacademic, a rigid system of streaming was in place; football-style divisions operated within the seven forms of entry. We were formally tested at the end of each term, and the overall average percentage determined whether or not we were relegated. It was an old-fashioned, two-up, two-down system. Having been promoted one season I was, in true Manchester City style, in severe danger of immediate relegation the next. I saved myself by stealing a copy of the music exam, which consisted of a series of short essay questions on the lives of great composers. Having swotted the careers of Mozart and Beethoven from the Oxford Book of Great Lives, a prescient gift from my grandmother, I survived on goal difference and felt only a twinge of guilt over the boy who was relegated in my place. I consoled myself that if he had anything about him, he would bounce back the following season. In fact his descent continued, Luton Town style, until he arrived in the schools equivalent of the Ryman League. I followed his decline with a grim satisfaction at having survived in this world of educational Darwinism.

We were a solidly white community. The only non-white face was Miss Shariff, who taught biology. The head told us reassuringly that “she is no ordinary wog. She is a Parsee from a good family.” At the time we were not shocked, but then this was the man who told us that “Mr Powell is right about these people”. (In 1968 Enoch Powell made his notorious “rivers of blood” speech, warning of the dangers of mass immigration.) When a boy called Rajiv joined the school, we were told to call him Roger. I suppose we would have found Rajiv a bit complicated.

Our weekly treat was to march off to a distant field to play football with a heavy leather ball. If it was raining, which it always seemed to be, the games teacher would drive up in his Triumph Herald and park it straddled across the halfway line at the side of the pitch. From there he would referee the match by flashing his headlights on and off. At the signal, a rain-sodden child would approach the car and be informed of the offence through a half-opened window.

I once approached, only to be told apologetically that he had flashed the headlights by mistake while trying to tune the radio. It was so dark and overcast that I could see his cigarette glowing inside the cabin.

For the 12 who met a few weeks ago, 30 years had passed since leaving. If you attended independent schools and, to a lesser extent, the old grammar schools, you probably find staying out of touch almost impossible. The long reach of old students’ associations extends all over the world. But few secondary moderns have such alumni associations. Many secondary modern buildings have disappeared under Tesco superstores or Brookside-style housing developments. Some have suffered an even worse fate, becoming the lower school of a grim 1970s split-site comprehensive.

The secondary modern school is a topic neglected by educational researchers, partly because so little information is available. Until 1966 more than 85 per cent of pupils left at 15. A small proportion stayed on to take the CSE exam, which was always a poor relation of the traditional O-level, a palliative to a system that did not work.

Or did it? Myself and the other 11 representatives of a discredited system had achieved some modest distinction. We included two teachers, two Metropolitan police inspectors, a Church of England vicar, a chartered accountant who is a partner in a West End firm, an insurance broker, a technical author, a printer and a website designer. With a couple of exceptions we were all in the top stream of the school.

But we were hardly the typical product of the secondary modern systems. We were a self-selected group. By merely registering on the Friends Reunited website, we were saying to the world: “I have something to say, I have made a modest success of the past 30 years.” Of an intake of 210 pupils in my year, only 18 have registered on the site. For the same year the two local grammar schools, with an intake of 180 each, have more than 80 pupils registered for each school. The enhanced life chances the grammar schools gave have made their ex-pupils much more likely to want to proclaim: “Look what I have done.” It would appear that the 190 or so from my school who have not registered feel no compulsion to relive their secondary modern experience, which for most was a catalogueof failure.

There is poignancy to the website entries. A large proportion have emigrated (19 out of 87 people registered as leaving between 1967 and 1971), most to Australia, New Zealand, Canada or the United States. In most cases they left the UK in the mid-Seventies. The response to my question “Why?” is always the same. A secondary modern school pupil in the mid-Seventies faced limited opportunities beyond factory work. Judging by the descriptions of lavish lifestyles and happy lives, they made the right choice. For the equivalent grammar school years, 21 ex-pupils have moved abroad, but this is out of almost 700 registrations.

Some would argue that in the large urban areas, where selection takes place by ability, postcode or aptitude, many local comprehensive schools have become de facto secondary moderns. This is no reason for Labour to seek their revival under the guise of vocational education.

The arguments in the Green Paper Extending Opportunities, Raising Standards are ominously similar to those aired in the House of Commons before the passing of the 1944 Education Act. Those who are ignorant of the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them. This government appears to be very ignorant indeed.

What was your experience of secondary modern school? Email Andrew Granath at:granath.magnus@virgin.netAndrew Granath is head of history at the Latymer school, north London