Cabinet split over grammars

THERESA MAY’S plan to open a new wave of grammar schools across the country split the Cabinet last night, with senior ministers warning the policy could backfire dramatically.

The Prime Minister vowed to defy her critics and push through her policy of allowing hundreds of state schools to select children on the basis of their academic ability.

Mrs May’s plan delighted traditionalist Tories and won vocal support from senior figures yesterday. Her supporters accused fellow Tories of an “arrogant” approach that would deny working-class pupils an academically rigorous state education.

Mrs May faces growing dissent from others within her party, including senior MPs, Nicky Morgan, the former education secretary, and even some of her own serving ministers.

One Cabinet source said the Prime Minister was making a mistake by promoting such a controversial policy when the Tories have only a small working majority in the Commons. Mrs

SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT THE veteran Cabinet minister sighed with a weariness that hinted at a painful memory of a row long past.

In 2007, Sir Patrick McLoughlin, then the Conservative chief whip, fought desperately to maintain party discipline as rebellious MPs broke ranks to demand a return to grammar school education.

David Cameron had infuriated his party by ditching the totemic Tory promise to allow new selective grammar schools to open across the country. He claimed academic selection entrenched the social advantages of well-off families and did nothing to help the poor. In an interview with

earlier this summer, Sir Patrick, who is now party chairman, warned against reopening old wounds.

Speaking before the new policy was announced, he said it would not “help” to have “a great debate about grammars”.

Rather than focusing on introducing new structures of schools in areas of England where there are no grammars, the government should raise standards for all pupils in the many “very good comprehensives” that exist, he said.

“Where they have been in operation they are valued but in areas where they are not in operation, I’m not sure it will help us if we have a great debate as to grammar schools as opposed to no grammar schools,” Sir Patrick warned. He was clearly aware of what Theresa May must now know: the question of grammar schools is capable of splitting the Tory party with a violence that few subjects can match.

It ignites deep passions, pitches “modernisers” against “traditionalists” and divides the working-class allies of Mrs May from the privately educated members of Mr Cameron’s inner circle.

Having only recently settled its battles over Europe, the party stands on the brink of a war over the question of whether grammars help the poor – or simply make life easier for those who already hold the upper hand. How did Mrs May’s fledgling administration end up in such a conflict, and what prospects are there for peace?

The Conservatives’ woes began with Tony Blair. In the run-up to his first election landslide in 1997, Mr Blair delighted Labour with a pledge to stop academic selection in state schools.

The party never quite lived up to David Blunkett’s famous “Read my lips: no selection” promise – because it stopped short of abolishing the 164 grammar schools that remained in England. But, with the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act, Mr Blair did ban new fully selective state schools from opening, even in areas where parents wanted them.

To many Conservatives, this seemed perverse. Their belief in the liberating power of a free, academically intensive education was so deeply held that the Tories promised to overturn Mr Blair’s ban at the next election in 2001.

They merely handed the Labour leader another landslide. The Tories kept the pro-selection policy, apparently convinced of its wide public appeal, at the following election in 2005 – with a similar outcome.

Only when David Cameron, who went to Eton, and George Osborne, who also attended a top private school, took over the Tory leadership did the party decide that the policy was toxic.

Mr Cameron made it his mission to “modernise” the Tories. In the words of Theresa May, he had to stop the Conservatives being seen as “the nasty party”. He decided that academic selection seemed to embody a nasty social elitism that could no longer be supported by modern, compassionate Tories. But he had a fight on his hands.

MPs led by Graham Brady, who resigned as shadow Europe minister in protest in 2007, demanded that he reinstate the Tories’ support for academic selection. Mr McLoughlin could barely contain the rebellion.

But Mr Cameron prevailed. After the grim battle of 2007, he never returned to the question of academic selection, except to rule out revising his views. It was only when Mrs May, herself a grammar-school girl, and her allies and advisers – many of whom also benefited from academic selection – took power after the EU referendum in June that the tide began to turn.

During her brief tenure as shadow education secretary before the 2001 election, Mrs May had been among those Tories who promised to repeal Mr Blair’s ban on selection. When parents called for a grammar school to be allowed to open a new campus in her Maidenhead constituency earlier this year, she gave them her support.

Her influential chief of staff, Nick Timothy, is also a former workingclass grammar-school boy. He has described how his education defined him as a Tory – in opposition to the Labour party of the 1990s, which wanted to abolish his school.

In an interview with this newspaper last year, Mr Timothy said he saw no reason for persisting with Mr Blair’s ban on new grammars. “I don’t believe in limiting the number of good schools,” he said. “I do believe in the diversity of the system and choice for parents, and I don’t see why selection couldn’t be a part of that choice.”

Yet neither he nor Mrs May can fail to see the danger in the radical nature of their plan to allow hundreds of new grammars to open.

It has not been party policy for more than a decade. It was explicitly ruled out in the run-up to the last general election. It was not even close to being included in the manifesto on which Mr Cameron won the historic but narrow Commons majority which Mrs May has inherited. Mr Cameron’s modernising allies, including Nicky