Sutton and Devonport MP Oliver Colvile, whose constituency contains the three Plymouth grammar schools, has also welcomed the extension of selection in schools.
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This will include relaxing the restrictions on new or expanding selective schools – as well as allowing existing non-selective schools to become selective in some circumstances. “This is about what parents want locally, the institutions that come forward, groups of parents who want to set up a new free school”.
Mrs May will claim that the current education system – which sees wealth and a family’s postcode used as a means of back-door selection – is “simply unfair”.
The premier will dismiss Labour’s opposition to selection as sacrificing children’s potential for “dogma and ideology”.
“I want a good education for every child”, he said.
He said: “If you look overall, not just in Britain but around the world, at those school systems we admire that have got high performance and high standards, from Shanghai to Finland, by and large they don’t put their effort into trying to pick which kids they educate”.
Mrs May said any new grammar schools would be expected to guarantee a certain number of places for children from poorer homes.
“My fear is that by dividing children at 11 and by creating grammars and secondary moderns – because that’s what we’ll do – that we won’t be able to achieve that ambition”.
It is striking how much consensus there is among experts that more selection would damage social mobility and the life chances of children from poorer backgrounds, across organisations as diverse as the centre-right Reform Think Tank, the Socialist Educational Association and the government’s own Social Mobility Tsar.
However, Labour’s shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, accused the government of “wilfully ignoring the overwhelming evidence that selection at 11 leads to a more unequal country”.
But in a speech in central London, May also set out new proposals to force independent schools to contribute more to the state sector if they want to keep the charitable status that brings sizeable tax advantages.
A Downing Street source said: “The admissions cap had the best of intentions but it has failed in its two key tests”.
May’s plans will form part of a wider package of education reforms, including an attempt to narrow the gap between universities and the schools system.
In a speech today (Friday) about school reforms across Britain, the Prime Minister stated her intentions for schools to help the country become a meritocracy.
“Instead of adopting this fundamentally flawed approach, the Prime Minister should be investing in schools for everyone, not the chosen few”.
She also said the 11plus would not act as a cliff edge for children, as they could move to a grammar school later, with intakes at 14 and 16 too.
Given the increasing acceptance of streaming (not just setting – rather, an across-the-board separation in classes by ability) within non-selective schools, even the critics of grammar schools seem to accept the principle of teaching children with similar ability ranges is effective – for children at all points of development. “There’s no evidence at all that that is the answer to numerous problems in our education system”.
Nearly all existing grammar schools (orange) get the best results.
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The argument of selection supporters is now that all of the evidence that grammar school systems are bad for children in poverty is irrelevant because they are going to design a new system which is “inclusive”.
