Grammar schools: Should we build more?

Education secretary Nicky Morgan has defended claims her party has made a U-turn on its stance on selective schools after allowing a grammar school to expand on to a new site.

Andrew Shilling of the Sevenoaks Grammar School Campaign welcomed the government’s approval but criticised the fact that boys would be barred from the new school.

Not all her colleagues were disheartened though.

“It is this government’s policy that all good and outstanding schools should be able to expand to offer excellent places to local students”.

This is great news for girls from the Sevenoaks area who are assessed as suitable for a grammar school place. Many Tories bitterly opposed the policy of phasing them out during the 1960s and 70s.

In 2011 research by the London School of Economics concluded that “comprehensive schools were as good for mobility as the selective schools they replaced”.

The 1944 Education Act envisioned a three-part education system divided into secondary, grammar and technical schools.

“Further applications from good selective schools to expand will continue to be considered within the framework of the statutory prohibition on new selective schools and would have to meet the criteria for being a genuine expansion”.

The approved plan will se both sites being all-girls with a mixed sixth form.

It comes almost two decades after Labour’s 1998 law that banned new grammars, which take only the top 25% of pupils and have been wiped out in all but a few areas.

Shadow education secretary Lucy Powell described the move as a “hugely backward step”. Rather than aid social mobility for poor children, grammars actually make it worse. Gove’s enemies on the left always warned that the big push for self-governing schools could lead to selection somewhere down the road, but Gove himself, who – in the right mood – has real interest in evidence and argument, never did anything practical to bring it about.

“Tiny numbers of children from disadvantaged backgrounds pass their tests because they are the preserve of the privately tutored”.

The pledge was outlined in the Conservative’s manifesto earlier this year.

“Whilst today’s announcement is most welcome, excluding boys from the Sevenoaks grammar annexe is very unfortunate”, Shilling said in a statement. At present, too much entry to grammar schools is dependent on your parents’ bank balance – and their ability to afford prep school or private tuition. We await the official explanation but Sevenoaks will – surely – set an obvious precedent for England’s other 164 surviving state grammars to follow in selective areas.