“Selection is deeply rooted and the warnings on the adverse impact on social mobility are too late”.
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The Prime Minister unveiled proposals to lift the long-standing ban on new or expanded grammars – with a £50 million annual Government subsidy to support new places – in a speech outlining her ambition to make Britain “the great meritocracy of the world”.
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Mrs May’s comments could be interpreted as an attempt to calm fears that lifting the ban on new grammar schools will only benefit children of the rich, at the expense of the disadvantaged.
She also said the new generation of grammar schools should be flexible in the age they take pupils, selecting them at 14 and 16 as well as 11.
May, like other Tory MPs who mainly reside in the right of the party, however, argues that a selective education system allows children from less-affluent backgrounds to achieve their academic potential.
But Ms Rayner shot back: “At a time when our schools are facing a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, with thousands taught in super-sized classes and schools facing real-terms cuts to their budget for the first time in almost two decades, pushing ahead with grammar schools shows a unsafe misunderstanding of the real issues facing our schools”.
‘So many comprehensive schools at the time were not fit for goal that working class families had no way to help their children out of poverty’.
Writing in the Daily Mail, May insisted her plans would give all parents the chance to send their children to a “great school”.
And Keith Simpson, who attended a grammar school, attacked their expansion, saying: “I often wonder, if I had failed the 11-plus, where I would be”.
For families seeking good school places in their new relocation destination, the promise of an increase of quality school provision can only be a good thing, but the decision can be a tricky one when faced with so many diverse school choices.
“My only concern about our policy is to ensure that we do not create another batch of second class schools, [but] I’m sure we won’t”.
However, he was notably silent on grammars and ended his address by urging Greening to “be driven entirely by data and what works”, a pointed appeal given the majority of studies on grammar schools suggest they do not help social mobility – a finding reiterated on Tuesday in a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The escalating opposition to grammars was revealed when Education Secretary Justine Greening gave a statement to MPs, three days after the prime minister announced the policy.
The leaked memo said it needs to work with existing grammars “to show how they can be expanded and reformed in ways which avoid disadvantaging those who don’t get in”.
“100% faith schools can have nothing to contribute to a more integrated and cohesive society”, she argued.
“As ever with the Tories, they focus on the few not the many”.
“We should be encouraging people of different faiths and none to come together more rather than become more separate”, he said.
On bringing back grammar schools, she claimed that: “this is not a proposal to go back to a binary model of grammars and secondary moderns”. “It’s called selection by house price”.
“We believe in serving the whole local community and it is a question of getting the best possible results for all students”. “If the Conservatives are serious about improving our schools they should reverse the cuts they have made to schools’ budgets”.
Educationalists and unions also criticised the plans.
“These proposals are a distraction from the very real issues facing our schools”, he said. When were grammar schools first introduced?
When he was Tory leader, Michael Howard landed a rare rhetorical punch on Tony Blair when he said: “This grammar school boy will not take lessons from that public school boy”.
“A Sutton Trust report previous year, for example, suggested that its not good for getting children from disadvantaged backgrounds into higher education”, explains Dr Luke.
The consultation paper notes that just 2.5% of pupils in the current selective schools are eligible for free school meals, the standard measure for deprivation, compared with 31.2% for all state schools.
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They also say well-off parents can pay for private tutors before selection exams.
