“We want all schools to be outstanding in our borough, we have recently invested over £30million into our secondary school estate and we continue to support all schools in delivering their plans to secure outstanding education, particularly for those from disadvantaged family backgrounds”.
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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.
“Most of the major public schools started out as the route by which poor boys could reach the professions”. “Between 2010 and 2015 their fees rose four times faster than average earnings”. “But I know that their commitment to giving something back to the wider community remains”.
“So I want to relax the restrictions to stop selective schools from expanding, that deny parents the right to have a new selective school opened where they want one, that stop existing non-selective schools to become selective in the right circumstances and where there is demand”.
And they nearly always have the lowest proportion of disadvantaged students.
“My fear is that by dividing children at eleven and by creating grammars and secondary moderns, because that’s what we’ll do, then we won’t be able to achieve that ambition”.
“It is not a proposal to go back to the 1950s, but to look to the future, and that future I believe is an exciting one”.
Modern grammar school set a test known as the 11-plus, which aims to see if prospective pupils would be suited to the school.
In Britain, the class system and the classroom are intertwined, and education reforms inevitably cause political controversy.
Whatever about the Lords, May could even struggle to get the plan through the Commons given the opposition to grammars among the modernising wing of her own party.
“We will fail as a nation if we only get the top 15-20 percent of our children achieving well”, he told the BBC.
In the past, children who didn’t pass the grammar school entrance exam, known as the 11 Plus, were sent to a secondary modern – a school focusing on vocational or “technical” education rather than academic subjects.
Liverpool council is set to fight any attempts to bring back grammar schools, with a motion put forward by the ruling Labour group that says education by selection is “wrong”.
“This is about opening the system up to a greater diversity”.
Ashworth, shadow Cabinet minister without portfolio, also said May must come to the House of Commons on Monday to explain why she is announcing a policy that was not in the Conservative manifest a year ago.
And Torbay MP Kevin Foster, whose constituency contains the two Torquay grammar schools, said they add to the “mix of educational opportunities” on offer.
And it is this level of academic excellence that Theresa May wants to offer to more children in the United Kingdom and formed the backbone of the raft of reforms she announced today.
Removing the bar on selection in state schools, which was kept in place by her predecessor David Cameron, Mrs May argued it was “completely illogical to make it illegal to open good new schools”.
May delivered an apparent dig at Cameron as she criticised politicians who supported a ban on grammars despite having benefited from privileged educations themselves.
Jon Ashworth has issued a stinging condemnation of Tory plans to expand selective education which, he says, will benefit a “select few”.
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What is the evidence base on which you’re making the argument for new selective schools?
