Mind you, I head this on that show where they put comprehensive kids into a grammar school for the summer to see how they'd cope, and the narrator mentioned it during their English lesson, where none of them had ever done dictation before and couldn't spell 'bachelor'... it may have been exaggerated, but I literally went "WHAT?"

Discipline and teachers who give a damn, more to the point. And the kids are hopefully more likely to have been at least partly educated at home before they start, rather than the responsibility falling solely onto some poor sod of a nursery teacher. My kids are learning to read as soon as they can bloody talk.