Lift Labour’s ban on new grammar schools, May told
THERESA May will face pressure to lift Labour’s ban on opening new grammar schools, a senior Conservative said yesterday.
Backers of the academic selection system welcomed the announcement of £50million new funding for England’s remaining 163 grammars to expand.
The cash will be dependent on promising to boost the number of poorer pupils, as well as proving their areas need extra school places.
But the Government still has no plans to lift the ban imposed by the last Labour government on building new grammars.
Choice
The promise to allow new schools was a keystone of Mrs May’s Tory leadership campaign in 2016 and was in last year’s Tory manifesto.
But it was dropped after the Conservatives lost their overall Commons majority.
Labour and teacher unions attacked the announcement of expanding grammars, complaining it was a waste of cash when the state school system faced financial shortfalls.
But Education Secretary Damian Hinds said the extra money would “give parents better choice”. It will enable grammars, which select all their pupils on the basis of the 11-plus ability to grow bigger. In what opponents say is a loophole, they are also allowed to develop “spin-off” sites in their local areas. But the Government made clear it had no plans to try to change the law to allow entire new grammars to be created.
The expansion cash was welcomed by Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the powerful 1922 committee of Tory MPs. He said he still wants new grammars allowed.
Sir Graham added that Mrs May should still lift the bar on building new ones, adding: “Raising the ban was the most popular policy in last year’s manifesto.
“In that election, while the Conservative Party lost its majority, we gained 2.5 million more votes and a big increase in vote share, demonstrating that the public has an appetite for good Conservative policies.
“I strongly welcome the fact that the Government is moving forward with the grammar school expansion fund and would urge it to seek opportunities to widen choice still further by removing the absurd ban on a type of school that is both popular and proven to work.”
Mrs May pulled back from trying to lift the ban because her lost majority means she would not get the measure through the Commons.
Sir Graham insisted the cash for grammar expansion just put them on a par with other types of school, which had more funding to add new places, and was in line with a Tory manifesto commitment.
“It would be perverse to say there is one type of school, which is very popular with parents and for which there is enormous demand yet should not be able to meet that demand,” he said.
DAMIAN HINDS, the Education Secretary, has announced a £50million funding package to support grammar schools that wish to expand. An underlying intention is to increase the number of grammar school places for children from underprivileged backgrounds. They may even be given some preferential treatment in the 11-Plus selection process.
It is thought that between 1,000-2,000 new places could be created in areas where there is a high demand from parents.
One cheer only, though, for the Government. It’s window dressing. Theresa May’s election manifesto pledged to expand the number of grammar schools but she seems to have been too busy with Brexit to follow through with this promise. But now what we need are lots of the promised new grammar schools – not just new places – if we really are to improve social mobility.
Unfortunately the teaching establishment strongly opposes grammar schools and the unions oppose them too. Many teachers would support grammar schools but because of the tyranny of the unions they are unwilling to say so.
GIVEN the choice huge numbers of parents would jump at the chance of sending a bright child to a grammar school. They like the traditional values that grammar schools embrace and the importance of competitive sport, music and drama in the curriculum.
They like the idea of their child being educated with those of similar abilities. Not everyone is suited to an academic education which is why, in parallel with new grammars, we should see new technical schools opening up as well. Mr Hinds has to bite the bullet and go to the parents and find out what they want.
Fifty years of comprehensive schooling and, as ex-PM David Cameron told his party conference a few years ago, we have the worst rate of social mobility in the developed world. Educational and social disasters do not come much bigger than that.
Selection by academic ability at the age of 11 is not perfect but in terms of fairness it is streets ahead of selection by house price, which is at the heart of our comprehensive system. Move to a nice neighbourhood and you can effectively “buy” an education at one of the better comprehensive schools.
In addition to its promotion of postcode-based social apartheid, the comprehensive system has had a catastrophic impact on standards. This is partly because when most grammar schools disappeared so too did the grammar school exam: the GCE O-level. It was replaced in 1988 by the dumbeddown GCSE exam that more or less everyone passes.
When the rate of top grades approached 70 per cent and an undercover reporter secretly filmed an examiner admitting that the system was a cheat, Michael Gove, then education secretary, took action. He made exam syllabuses a bit tougher.
The first reformed GCSEs were sat last year. In order to sustain the credibility of this comprehensive-school exam the “good pass” mark has to be lowered to 15 per cent for maths. The youngsters were defrauded into believing they had achieved something worth celebrating. The boss of the exam regulator Ofqual declared: “All our kids are brilliant.” The great lie about comprehensive school attainment is deeply embedded.
When the BBC gave a GCSE maths paper to 15-year-olds in South Korea the pupils completed it in 15 minutes and admitted that our GCSE was at the level of what they had studied in primary school.
The truth is that in order to compete with the best education systems around the world our comprehensive schools too would have to start with GCSE rather than, for many pupils, finishing with it.
Employers’ organisations are forever bemoaning the consequences of the UK version of comprehensive schooling. About 20 per cent of school leavers lack literacy and numeracy skills. The internationally respected OECD points to Britain as the only country in the developed world where grandparents outperform their grandchildren – grandparents schooled under the now maligned grammar/technical/ secondary modern school system.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, spending on education in the UK has increased by 900 per cent in real terms since the 1950s but produced a comparative decline in standards.
WHERE has the money gone? Much of it has gone on sustaining child-centred teaching methods. This depends on the employment of thousands of classroom assistants and teacher support workers. Many primary schools have more assistants than teachers.
Without the classroom assistants, teachers would be forced to use the traditional, wholeclass, teacher-led methods that characterise teaching in the superstar school systems around the world. Such methods are far more characteristic of grammar schools here in the UK than in comprehensives.
If the Government wishes to have three cheers rather than one it should be balloting parents on setting up new grammar schools alongside technical-vocational schools.
The future of post-Brexit UK depends on maximising the talents of our young people. Grammar schools alongside top quality technical-vocational schools are the way forward. The one size fits all approach has to go!
‘Lowest social mobility in the developed world’