WE NOW know that Theresa May wants to increase the number of grammar schools.

Her Secretary of State for Education, Justine Greening, made a speech to Parliament on Thursday which promised there would not be a “binary” system but what she said was devoid of precise detail and for instance did not appear to once mention the dread words “eleven plus” or “secondary modern”.

So we await the fine print.

While the PM’s ideas will surely be rapturously received at the forthcoming Tory party conference there are many, including on her own side, who are less enthusiastic.

Tory MP Neil Carmichael, chairman of the Education Select Committee, said recently: “We have issues about social mobility and I don’t think having more grammar schools is going to help them. 

“I think the creaming off of the best is actually detrimental to the interests of the most.”

His views are shared by Michael Wilshaw, the (soon to retire) director of Ofsted.

Even Nicky Morgan, until recently the Secretary of State for Education, said on the morning of Friday, September 9, that: “The evidence is now incontrovertibly clear that a rigorous academic education does not need to be the preserve of the few.”

Her stress on ‘evidence’ was echoed recently by David Willets who in May 2007 (and as a government minister) stirred up a hornet’s nest by stating that most grammar schools act as “middle class ghettoes”.

Alan Milburn, until the last election a Labour MP and now appointed as a “social mobility Czar”, appears not to have a good word for the proposals for more grammar schools.

Nor do the big teaching unions, but who listens to them?

John Ricketts
Lynworth, Cheltenham
NUT member since 1962