Theresa May will set aside decades of cross-party consensus in education policy by ending the ban on the creation of new grammar schools and attempt to head off critics by proposing measures intended to prevent poorer children losing out.
The prime minister will end days of speculation by confirming that her government will reverse the “arbitrary” ban on the creation of new grammar schools that has been in place since 1998.
Speaking in London, May will say: “For too long we have tolerated a system that contains an arbitrary rule preventing selective schools from being established – sacrificing children’s potential because of dogma and ideology. The truth is that we already have selection in our school system – and it’s selection by house price, selection by wealth. That is simply unfair.”
She will confirm that new selective schools will be allowed to open and that existing schools will be able to become grammars. “This is about being unapologetic for our belief in social mobility and making this country a true meritocracy – a country that works for everyone,” she will say.
As well as expanding selection by academic ability, May is also expected to signal that new faith schools will be able to choose more pupils on the basis of their religion, ending the admissions cap, which was aimed at preventing children from being segregated by faith, another measure likely to prove controversial.
New free schools, which are state funded, are only allowed to select half of their pupils on faith grounds, under the rule, which will now be lifted.
The Catholic church lobbied for the rule to be changed but, as recently as last September, the Department for Education said it had no intention of rewriting the rules.
May’s move to expand grammar schools is likely to prove controversial with the Conservative modernisers she banished to the backbenchers, as well as teaching unions and education campaigners.
David Cameron said in 2007 that he thought the debate on grammars was “pointless”, because “parents fundamentally don’t want their children divided into sheep and goats at the age of 11”.
May will promise to consult on ways to mitigate the risk that poor children – who tend to be under-represented in existing grammars – are relegated to sink schools as selection is expanded. Options in a paper expected to be published on Monday will include:
- forcing new selective schools to take a minimum proportion of pupils from lower income households
- requiring them to establish a new non-selective free school, or a primary feeder school in an area with a high density of lower income households
- requiring them to sponsor an existing underperforming, non-selective academy school.
The plans will form part of a wider package of education reforms, including a bid to narrow the gap between universities and the schools system.
Universities that want to raise tuition fees for students will be obliged to make their expertise available to younger learners, by setting up a new school or take over an existing, failing school, for example.
May’s speech comes after the comprehensive-schooled education secretary, Justine Greening, was called to the House of Commons on Thursday to explain reports that May had told backbench Tory MPs about her plans at a private meeting of the Conservative 1922 Committee on Wednesday night.
Greening said: “There will be no return to the simplistic, binary choice of the past, where schools separate children into winners and losers, successes or failures. This government wants to focus on the future.”
But her Labour shadow, Angela Rayner, told the Guardian her party would unite to fight the plans, which would “segregate” children.
“I have been so upset by the prime minister’s language. She looked into that camera in Downing Street and she said, I know how you’re suffering, and I thought ‘wow’; but now just a few weeks later she’s proposing the most divisive policy possible,” Rayner said.
“If you’re going to say, ‘there’s bright kids and there’s kids that are not that bright, and we need to segregate those kids, then say it’.”
Labour is fighting a bitter leadership battle but senior figures from across the party united to oppose the expansion of selection, with Hilary Benn, whose sacking by Jeremy Corbyn kicked off mass resignations over the summer, supporting Rayner’s stance from the backbenches in the Commons debate.
Rayner said she would seek to make common cause with Conservatives sceptical about the proposals. “If there are Conservatives, and I genuinely feel there are, who believe this is not going to help our children – and it won’t – then they need to speak out and do the honourable thing.”
A number of senior Tories, including former universities minister Lord Willetts, and the education select committee chair, Neil Carmichael, have expressed reservations about the idea of a return to grammar schools.
Willetts, who previously dismissed the clamour for a return to selective schooling among some of his colleagues as “bring backery,” told the Today programme earlier this week that the evidence clearly showed selective schooling was the wrong way to help disadvantaged children.
When the then education secretary, Nicky Morgan, published a white paper in the spring on proposals for improving education outcomes in underperforming areas – which led to a row about the expansion of academies – grammars were not on the list of proposals.
But several of the rightwing Tories whom May brought back to government in the wake of the Brexit vote, including David Davis and Liam Fox, are strong backers of grammars, as is Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, to which May trailed her plans.
The Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, said the idea of expanding grammars “is so flawed that it does not stand up to the most basic scrutiny”.
He added: “I assumed that grammar schools were the obsession of a few on the right of the Tory who party who seem to want to stop the world as they want to get off, but it seems this thinking has seeped into No 10.”
A string of high-profile figures have warned about the implications of expanding selective schools since Wednesday. Speaking to the Guardian, Alan Milburn, the government’s social mobility tsar, said ending the ban on grammar schools risked creating an “us and them divide”.
Milburn said pupils at England’s remaining 163 selective state schools were four or five times more likely to have come from independent prep schools than poorer backgrounds.
The Association of Teachers and Lecturers called the plan “a massive distraction from the real issues facing our education system”.
A Downing Street spokesperson said: “The [new faith schools] admissions cap had the best of intentions but it has failed in its two key tests. It has failed to make minority faith schools more diverse, because parents of other religions and none do not send their children to those schools. But it has prevented new Catholic schools from opening, which are more successful, more popular and more ethnically diverse than other types of state school.
“We’re going to change the rule, so we can allow new Catholic schools to open, while making faith schools of all kinds do more to make sure their pupils integrate with children of other backgrounds.”
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