She insisted the ambitious shake-up – which would overturn decades of education policy by allowing new schools to choose pupils on the basis of their ability – would not lead to a “binary” system of good schools for bright pupils and bad ones for the rest.
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The sources confirmed she said, to cheers in the room: “We already have selection, haven’t we?”
It could also underline the influence of one of her long-time advisers, Nick Timothy, who previous year called for the creation of new selective grammar schools to give parents more choice and has frequently praised his grammar-school education for offering him chances his working-class parents did not have.
There are also plans to relax rules that stop faith schools from selecting more than half of pupils according to religion and to allow more faith schools to open.
His comments followed a stinging attack from the former education secretary Nicky Morgan who blasted the proposals as risking undermining six years’ worth of Conservative education reforms.
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) accused Mrs May of “taking education back to the 1950s, when children were segregated at age 11 and their life chances determined by the type of school they attended”.
Speaking under a banner which read, “A country that works for everyone”, Mrs May made no apology for the sweeping reform, claiming that she is determined to create a “true meritocracy”.
“The notion that the poor stand to benefit from the return of grammar schools strikes me as quite palpable tosh and nonsense – and is very clearly refuted by the London experience”.
“The truth is that we already have selection in our school system – and its selection by house price, selection by wealth”.
Mr Carmichael said he and other Tories with misgivings about the plans have convinced Mrs May not to reheat the old model of grammar schools.
“We will fail as a nation if we only get the top 15-20 percent of our children achieving well”, he told the BBC.
“We’re fortunate in Kent, we have a grammar school system, they have it in Buckinghamshire as well, and parents have a choice”.
She is the first education secretary to have gone to a mainstream comprehensive school.
Bringing back grammar schools might make some very happy, but it won’t increase opportunity for the vast majority of those who need it most.
But t he Government’s social mobility tsar, Labour former Cabinet minister Alan Milburn, said that grammars could be “a social mobility disaster”.
THERESA May last night defended her plans for new grammar schools, which were blasted by an ex-Tory education minister.
And in 1998 the Labour government banned any new selective schools from being established.
Mrs May said the European Union referendum in June had exposed a “profound sense of frustration” among large sections of the population about the struggles they face – including the fight to find a good school for their children.
Most obviously, the government would like academy chains to sponsor or build new grammar schools – and some chains may see it as a way of reviving struggling schools. “This is about what parents want locally, the institutions that come forward, groups of parents who want to set up a new free school”. But instead a system that isn’t “saying to poorer and some of the most disadvantaged children in our country that they can’t have the kind of education their richer counterparts can enjoy”.
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She praised the Prime Minister’s “real commitment to delivering for the next generation and building a country that works for everyone”.
