New grammars to be told: Put families on less than £33k first

QUOTAS could be introduced for new grammar schools to prioritise pupils from families earning around £33,000 or less.

Education Secretary Justine Greening said these ‘ordinary working families’ had previously ‘fallen under the radar’ and deserved access to better schools.

Outlining her target group for priority entry to grammars for the first time, she focused on families on the median household income or below.

Yesterday, a No 10 source said imposing a quota for these families in new selective schools was ‘ on the table’ among other options.

The Government wants to create the first new wave of grammar schools in decades in an effort to help more bright disadvantaged children gain access to an academically rigorous education.

In a keynote speech yesterday, Miss Greening said the schools would help to create a ‘true meritocracy’ that ‘ worked for everyone’.

She added: ‘ The new schools we will create will support young people from every background, not the privileged few.

‘This will be a new model of grammars, truly open to all – we will insist on that – and it will reflect the choices of local parents and communities.’

Governments have previously focused on the very poorest pupils – those eligible for free school meals – but Miss Greening said families on modest incomes must be helped too.

A consultation document released this week suggests that the definition of an ‘ordinary working family’ should be one with a household income of around £33,000, assuming there are two parents and two teenage children.

For a single-parent family with one young child, the ‘ordinary working family’ income would be around £17,000. Department for Education data shows around one in three children fall into this category. Miss Greening said such families were the ‘backbone of our economy’ and were likely to live in the suburbs and coastal areas, mainly outside the M25.

She insisted new grammar schools must take steps to recruit children from these groups and added she would ‘not rule out’ the idea of imposing quotas or lowering entry requirements for them.

Speaking at St Mary’s University in Twickenham, south-west London, she hit out at those who ‘critique grammars and selection while simultaneously ignoring the views of parents’. Miss Greening, the daughter of a steelworker who grew up in Rotherham, added that when she was growing up she ‘hated’ having to ‘make do’ in life and there was ‘no real choice’ but to go to her local comprehensive.

Sir Peter Lampl, founder of the Sutton Trust, which campaigns for social mobility through education, said yesterday: ‘We welcome Justine Greening’s commitment to addressing the challenges that children from poor and ordinary working families face getting into grammar schools.’

‘Ignoring views of parents’

EVER since Theresa May launched her bold plans for new grammar schools last year, all we have heard from the Left, the education establishment ‘Blob’ and the teaching unions are howls of outrage.

Appealing to class prejudice, they insist new grammars will, like existing selective schools, become preserves of the wellheeled and sharp-elbowed middle classes.

But yesterday their claims were dealt a hammer blow in an impressive speech by Education Secretary Justine Greening.

She unveiled figures showing those grammars which escaped that tragic purge by Labour and Tory ministers in the 1960s and 1970s serve a great many young people from ordinary, working-class backgrounds.

Indeed, the proportion of children from families whose household incomes are less than the national average is the same as in non-selective schools.

Yes, as Miss Greening insists, grammars can and should do more to help the poorest pupils secure a place.

As the Mail has long argued, it is children from deprived backgrounds, whose parents cannot buy their way into the ever smaller catchment areas of good comprehensives, who stand to benefit most.

But in an ideal world, why shouldn’t bright, middle-class children also have a first-rate education?

One of the scandals of the last few decades is that social mobility has declined. The Mail is profoundly optimistic that new grammars will help reverse this depressing trend.

As for Labour, three shadow ministers – including Jeremy Corbyn – attended grammar schools, while Shami Chakrabarti and Diane Abbott sent their sons to private schools and Emily Thornberry sent two of her children to selective schools. Their hypocrisy is simply breathtaking.