Education Secretary Justine Greening told Sky News: “We should not forget that there are many parts of our country still where parents and children don’t really have access to good schools on the doorstep”.
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Mrs May’s announcement comes after a document outlining proposals to open new grammar schools was caught by a photographer outside Downing Street on Tuesday.
Lincolnshire is one of just a few local authorities in the country which now has grammar schools.
County council education chief Melinda Tilley has supported new grammars.
Schools would have to open up for a fresh wave of selections for 14 and 16-year olds, which Mrs May said would avoid the “cliff edge” fears in the selection system.
“We are extremely proud to be the first local authority in the United Kingdom to have relentlessly pursued this ambition”.
Expanding grammar schools will be highly controversial and will be opposed by Labour.
If the Prime Minister is serious about improving social mobility, she would do well to listen to her predecessor who warned his backbenches nearly a decade ago that their obsession with grammar schools was “splashing around in the shallow end of the educational debate”. I can see that happening more and more across the country’.
Angela Rayner, Labour’s shadow education secretary, said grammars would work for the few at the expense of the many.
Alan Milburn, who chairs the Government’s social mobility watchdog, said grammar schools risk creating an “us and them divide”.
“But the only place it has got us to is a place where selection exists if you’re wealthy – if you can afford to go private – but doesn’t exist if you’re not”, she said.
New grammars are also expected to have to sponsor non-selective free schools.
Richard Jones, headteacher of St Christopher’s CE High School in Accrington, said: “The current discussion around the expansion of grammar schools offers an unwelcome sideshow for school leaders and yet more uncertainty”.
Writing in the Daily Mail, May insisted her plans would give all parents the chance to send their children to a “great school”.
And this chart, from the Government’s school performance checker, appears to show that selective schools don’t take the poorest children.
Mrs May confirmed that she wants to relax restrictions – maintained by her predecessor David Cameron – which prevent the creation of new selective schools, the expansion of existing ones or the conversion of non-selective schools into grammars.
Heads and parents have given mixed reactions to Prime Minister Theresa May’s speech announcing plans for more selective education in England.
Instead he said Oasis aimed to improve standards “by a ruthless commitment to helping every child reach their potential, regardless of their starting point”.
“It could be a distraction from the principle task to make sure that there are good schools everywhere for all pupils”. With this in mind, the focus on grammar schools seems inappropriate to say the least – especially at a time when Britain has a shortage of school places, the highest rate of teachers leaving the profession in a decade, and over half a million pupils in super-sized classes.
The Redditch MP, who went to a grammar, said her opposition was based on her own experience of the two-tier system.
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“The Prime Minister can talk all she wants about delivering for everyone but what matters is what she does, and her actions reveal the Tories’ true colours: working in the interests of the few while everyone else is left behind”.
