Is this campaign the kiss of death for grammar schools?

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/dec/09/death-grammar-schools-tory-selection

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A year ago, the then education secretary, Michael Gove, took what seemed to be a bold and significant decision. He blocked the creation of a “satellite” grammar school in Kent, enraging local campaigners and dashing the hopes of the pro-grammar-school lobby in his own party who believed the new school in Sevenoaks might herald a return to academic selection across the country.

Twelve months on, that decision appears to have been anything but the fatal blow its critics feared. Not only has the Sevenoaks bid been resurrected, backed by Kent county council, but another “satellite” grammar school proposal has surfaced in Maidenhead, with the backing of the home secretary, Theresa May, who is the local MP.

The UK Independence party has won two byelections on an explicitly pro-grammar platform. And London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, now also a prospective parliamentary candidate, recently backed the expansion of grammar schools.

Last week, a pro-selection campaign was launched by the centre-right Conservative Voice group of MPs, which includes the chair of the party’s backbench 1922 committee, Graham Brady, and former leadership challenger David Davis. The campaign is pushing for a reversal of the 1998 Labour legislation that outlawed the creation of any new grammar schools to be included in the Conservative party manifesto.

“We know that there is support for this in the grassroots of the party,” said Conservative Voice founder Don Porter, a former party deputy chair, “but we are not saying that every community should have a grammar school. There may be MPs who already have grammars and others who feel that they already have perfectly good provision in their areas.

“This is not an anti-comprehensive campaign, nor is it about privilege and pushy parents,” he claimed. “This is about building new grammar schools in areas of high deprivation to act as a motor for social mobility, where there is very poor performance at the moment.”

So will this be a key general election issue for the first time in almost 20 years? Keeping the pro-grammar lobby at bay has been a difficult balancing act for the Tories ever since the then shadow education secretary David Willetts made a speech in 2007 challenging the benefits of academic selection.

That speech effectively cost Willetts his job. And the skilful handling of this question by his successor, Gove, in government shouldn’t be overlooked, according to his former adviser Sam Freedman, now director of research at Teach First. “Perhaps Michael Gove’s greatest achievement was to normalise comprehensive education for the Conservative party, to shift the argument from ‘saving’ a few bright poor kids through grammar schools or assisted places to creating a genuinely world-class system for all,” he says.

“In time, I suspect, that will be more widely recognised than it is now. I don’t think he ever convinced the Tory right wing, represented by Conservative Voice, but he certainly helped shift it to being a rightwing position even within the Tory party. I very much doubt the leadership will embrace grammars before the election. And at the very least Gove has given a set of arguments to those in the party who would fight against grammars should there be a proposal to reintroduce them.”

The arguments surfaced again last week when the current education secretary, Nicky Morgan, cast doubt on the wisdom of “separating people at 11”, and Jonathan Simons, education director of the centre-right Policy Exchange thinktank, published a detailed dossier of evidence about the impact of grammar schools on poor children.

As the newly elected chair of the pressure group Comprehensive Future, writer Melissa Benn believes that one of the most interesting developments of the Gove era has been the emergence of strong anti-selection voices across the political spectrum at a time when the Labour party remains silent on the remaining 164 grammar schools. Academic selection still exists in a quarter of local authority areas, 15 of which are fully selective. Benn believes the new debate opens up an opportunity for Labour.

“It is significant that influential figures on the right have made clear their view that dividing children up according to a spurious academic test pre-puberty is a surefire way to depress educational opportunity for working-class children,” she says. “This opens up an exciting new space for Labour in the education debate. If a large part of the Tory party now recognise that a grammar-secondary modern system represents a waste of human potential, Labour are in an even stronger position to advocate measures to ensure the transition, across the country, to a high-quality comprehensive system.

“It’s not a question of being against the things grammar schools do well. It’s about articulating a clear ‘one nation’ vision of non-selective excellence for everybody. That’s the political and educational task of the immediate future.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Brady, who resigned as shadow minister for Europe following the Willetts speech and is now a signatory to the new campaign, takes a different view and argues that reintroducing selection in a “permissive” way would not prove a threat to the current school system.

“I believe that selection can plug an important gap by catering to the most academically able pupils and raising standards across the board,” he says. “If all restrictions on selection by ability were to be lifted, I don’t think we would see a revolutionary change in the pattern of provision. The first step would be to see academically selective schools open in the state sector in areas where provision is currently poor – and I would welcome that.”

But might this campaign for more grammar schools have unintended consequences for the pro-selection lobby if arguments about whether it helps or hinders social mobility are drawn more explicitly into the public domain, alongside evidence of how the 11-plus test works in practice?

Campaigners in fully selective Buckinghamshire have launched their own campaign, Local, Equal, Excellent, to show parents the negative impact of selection in their area. “Children on free school meals, from BME [black and minority ethnic] backgrounds and from some local primary schools are significantly under-represented in grammar schools, which completely undermines the social mobility argument,” says Katy Simmons, an academic and school governor. Recent efforts to improve the 11-plus exam and make it fairer seemed to backfire.

“Parents are shocked when we show them the evidence,” she says. “They realise that it matters where you live and how well-off you are. They see that it’s a lottery – with the chances of winning firmly stacked against most of them and they don’t think that is fair.”

The Aylesbury MP, David Lidington, has publicly expressed concern at the very low pass rate in less affluent parts of his constituency.

Simmons adds: “And remember, if you have grammars, you also have non-grammars – and I have never met anyone who wants a return to secondary moderns. Some small-scale research done recently with local young people shows that this sense of rejection and being ‘second best’ is still a major issue locally. It affects achievement and makes the job of other local schools even harder.”

Durham University’s Professor Stephen Gorard, who has carried out extensive research into the impact of different types of schools on social segregation, says that for such a dramatic change in policy – no new grammar schools have been created for more than 20 years – the evidence of benefit to all children would need to be crystal clear. “There is repeated evidence that any appearance of advantage for those attending selective schools is at least outweighed by the disadvantage for those who do not,” he says.

“In England, social segregation between schools is much, much higher in areas with grammar schools, whether you look at immigrant status, first language, ethnicity, educational needs, parental education or income. Most obviously, grammar schools have very few students eligible for free school meals.”

Any policymaker wanting to establish more selection by ability in an ethical manner would need to prove that selective schools were more effective than non-selective ones, he says.

“Then the largely disregarded rump of such a system – the secondary modern schools – must be shown to be at least as effective as non-selective schools. And the overall benefits must outweigh any unintended harmful side effects. Yet none of these things has been established. Given the dangers, and the lack of evidence of any benefit at all, selection by ability is currently the very antithesis of an evidence-informed policy.”