The pros and cons of grammar schools

Education secretary Nicky Morgan has reignited the debate over grammar schools after giving the Weald of Kent the go ahead.

Emily Hohler
By
published
in Features

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Has Nicky Morgan opened a Pandora's Box?

The Tory right are "thrilled" with the education secretary, Nicky Morgan, for giving the green light to what "everyone but her is calling the first new grammar school in 50 years", says Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Officially, the new Sevenoaks campus will just be an extension of the existing Weald of Kent grammar in Tonbridge (seven miles away), "not the beginning of a nationwide resurgence for selective education", but that's not how everyone will see it. Whether or not she intended to, Morgan may be "opening an educational Pandora's box".

No she isn't, says Sam Freedman in the FT. Firstly, the decision will be challenged; secondly, many of the existing 163 grammar schools would not want to dilute their selectivity by expanding; and thirdly the government has shown no sign of wanting to abolish the 1998 Act that outlaws creating new grammar schools. Indeed, under David Cameron, there has been a shift in Conservative policy to "improve the system as a whole".

Take the pupil premium, which has redistributed money to schools with more disadvantaged intakes, or the system of pairing good schools with struggling ones. Grammars actually "reducesocial mobility". Disproportionately few children from poor backgrounds pass the 11-plus, in part because their parents cannot afford tutoring, and in local authorities that still have selection, poorer children do worse than in the rest of Britain.

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It strikes me as bizarre that grammar schools are the only type of school explicitly banned by law, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. It's like "banning new bookshops because they make the illiterate feel inferior". The idea that it is "automatically wrong" that some people are richer or better educated than others is a "defiance of reality, of the power of incentives and of human freedom itself".

The "weirdest" thing about our attitude to schools is that we expect a uniform system. Why can't we accommodate every type of school from free schools to comprehensives, academies, church schools, state boarding schools and schools with fewer exams or little curriculum? Society gives itself a headache "if it tries to equalise opportunity. What it can do is maximise it. In the field of education it is hard to imagine this happening without more grammar schools."

Emily Hohler
Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.

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