I’ve been involved with CF for around 10 years now, and Margaret Tulloch’s excellent timeline of selective education policy led me to reflect on the many scandals and bad decisions around grammar school policy that I’ve seen.

Grammar schools were invented in the 1940s and mostly phased out in the 60s, yet politicians never seem to think selection policy is outdated. It’s been described as a zombie policy, because it keeps getting resurrected, splattered with more gore, plus a few more peer-reviewed papers exploring why it doesn’t work. In the last 10 years there have been plenty of initiatives supporting selective education, but sadly nothing to improve things for the average child stuck with sitting an 11-plus, or for the many communities divided by selective education.

Here are my reflections on policy decisions about grammar schools in the last decade.

The Weald of Kent ‘satellite’ grammar school

In 2014 Kent County Council realised the law wouldn’t let them build a new grammar school, but they wanted one anyway. There was a proposal for the Weald of Kent grammar in Tonbridge to open an annexe school 10 miles away in Sevenoaks.  In 2015 Nicky Morgan agreed that a school sized building in a different town was not an illegal new school, but a perfectly reasonable extension. I wonder if she built her conservatory a few streets away from her home?

In 2019 the Weald of Kent was found to have dropped many of the operational plans they’d put in place to convince the government the annexe was not a standalone school. The plan for pupils and teachers to regularly travel between the two sites was dropped, amongst other things. This plan was obviously only there to avoid a legal challenge, and it’s surprising it was ever thought workable.

This ‘satellite’ school clearly ignored the spirit of the law, and was bending the rules as far as they would stretch. This was long before Partygate, but it’s in the same spirit. Politicians seem to ignore the rules whenever they want something for themselves. KCC Councillors and pro-grammar Conservative MPs  found a route around a rather inconvenient law.

The second satellite grammar school

One controversial ‘satellite’ grammar school was not enough, so KCC opened a boys’ grammar school in Sevenoaks in 2021. There was very little fuss this time, mainly because community schools only need council approval to expand. The Weald of Kent grammar was an academy so needed Secretary of State approval,  but for this expansion Kent County Council  nodding through the expansion in a council meeting. They paid for this new school themselves, although I can think of many better uses for my council tax.

If a Tory council chose to do this under a Labour government I wonder what would happen? I imagine they couldn’t stop it. The mix of  academies and council schools gives us a strange school structure, with different rules for each type of school.

Theresa May, Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019

New grammar schools planned everywhere

It was ironic that Justine Greening was our first Education Secretary to be comprehensively educated, but she was tasked by Theresa May with expanding selective education. She always seemed uncomfortable with this job.

In 2016 a white paper called ‘Schools that work for everyone’ proposed lifting the ban on new grammars. That title was a strange choice because grammar schools clearly don’t work for everyone.

The Theresa May years were difficult. She didn’t only want to build new grammars, she also wanted to convert existing comprehensive schools into selective schools. That would have caused so much division in school communities. Which school would be the grammar school, which was stuck with being a secondary modern? This was a worrying time, but a good time in some ways because it felt like the whole of the education community was on our side. Everyone was united in opposing May’s plan. It’s so rare for educators to agree on anything, but this was such a bad plan no one seemed to support it.

The plan for new grammars was led by a few ideological politicians, no communities of parents were demanding this. It’s scary to think how close they came to achieving their goal.

The push for new grammars led to a pile of new research into the problems with selection, and this added to the mountainous pile of evidence that had built up already! The best argument supporters could come up with was that disadvantaged pupils did well when they attended a grammar school. They neglected to mention the fact only a handful of poorer kids ever made it through the grammar school gates.

Theresa May lost her majority and couldn’t implement this controversial policy, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Well, everyone in comprehensive England. Me and my friends in Kent, Bucks and Lincs, were left wondering why everyone was shouting about how awful selection was one month, then letting it continue unchallenged the next? I still wonder about that…

The Selective School Expansion Fund

Despite the fact the government couldn’t build new grammar schools, they wanted to show love to the 163 that were left. (165 if you count the 2 ‘satellite’ schools!) So there was a £50 million fund set up to expand grammars.

To apply for the Selective School Expansion Fund (SSEF) grammar schools had to create plans for increasing their number of disadvantaged pupils. The schools decided this was easy, lots of schools drew up plans, millions of cash was handed out…  But when Schools Week checked how many more disadvantaged pupils had enrolled in the 16 SSEF schools they found 367 new grammar places were created, but a measly 77 were pupil premium places. This policy worked out as costing £630,000 per disadvantaged pupil.

The SSEF was a genuinely bad plan. Grammar schools are notorious for admitting low numbers of disadvantaged pupils, so throwing money at expanding them to boost ‘social mobility’ was always a flawed idea. The best policy for improving inclusivity is to create new comprehensive school places, ideally by converting grammar schools into new comprehensive schools.

Memorandum of Understanding with the Grammar School Heads Association

In 2018 the government tried to boost disadvantaged pupil numbers by creating a Memorandum of Understanding between the Grammar School Heads Association and the DfE. It did lead to an increase in the number of grammars prioritising pupil premium pupils in their admissions policies. Yet anyone looking at the numbers can see the overall results are unimpressive, and the percentage of disadvantaged pupils accessing grammars has hardly shifted since this plan was put in place.

The real problem is the attainment gap which means disadvantaged pupils are much less likely to pass the 11-plus. If you combine poorer pupils generally worse results with the fact middle class pupils pay for 11-plus tutors, it’s a perfect storm of a problem. The 11-plus test itself is the barrier to grammar entry, and changing admission policy rules but keeping the 11-plus test is only tinkering around the edges of the problem. The Memorandum of Understanding made it look like the government cared about the problem, but it didn’t fix anything.

Condition Improvement Fund scandal

Do Tory politicians still think grammars are the answer to social mobility? Probably. Or maybe they just really like them, because as well as offering a second round of the £50 million Selective School Expansion Fund, the DfE was also awarding an unusually large percentage of the Condition Improvement Fund to selective schools. A Schools Week’s exclusive showed that selective schools were 20 times more successful than comprehensives in their applications for this funding. In 2016 three quarters of grants requested by grammars were approved, compared to just one third of comprehensives. In many cases the ‘conditions’ that were ‘improved’ were nothing to do with repairs to failing roofs or boilers, but actually classroom expansions.

It seems politicians do sometimes respond to evidence, because when Nick Gibb was confronted with evidence of the Condition Improvement Fund cash grab he did act. He told grammars they couldn’t use this fund to build any more classrooms, but only because they had the Selective School Expansion Fund now!

Pandemic 11-plus

Some education issues win attention, but many equally deserving issues do not. In the pandemic so much thought was given to exams and efforts were spent trying to make them fair. Decisions were made to scrap SATs and GCSE, and then later to adjust results. But, in selective areas, the 11-plus exam took place with no adjustment at all. Wearing a mask in the exam hall  was the only concession to Covid.

Children who had no laptop for home working were competing with children who were filling their home-schooling hours with expensive online tuition. Yet barely a word was said about this unfairness.

Politicians seem to treat the 11-plus test as a quirky little thing some schools do, rather than a serious exam that impacts 100,000 children a year. This means there are a host of problems no one spots. We have schools saving cash by writing their own 11+ exams, problems and mistakes with setting or marking the test, even cheating. No one notices the bits of school policy that fall through the cracks. The 11-plus seems to have zero guidance or policy focus.

So what’s next?

We’ve had a conveyor belt of new prime ministers in recent years, but now we have a new Labour government. I still remember the ‘education not segregation’ message Labour used on placards back in Theresa May’s day. I wonder if Keir Starmer remembers that message? I hope so, because segregation still exists in our education system. I hope evidence and sense will triumph so one day there will be an end to the 11-plus. It’s easy policy to simply ignore the problems of selection, but it’s clearly not the right policy.

There seems to be an idea that this problem is too tricky to fix. Yet if we look at the bold policies devised to expand selection, we can see the Tory government was often brave on the grammar school issue. So why can’t Labour be equally brave and do the right thing? They have evidence on their side. I hope one day a smart, careful, plan can be created to bring selective England in line with the rest of the country.

Our Future Thoughts series of articles are opinion pieces designed to provoke debate, they represent the views of the author and not necessarily Comprehensive Future policy.

Jo Bartley is a parent in Kent and Campaign Officer for Comprehensive Future. She is writing this in her personal capacity.