WATCH: why an 11+ failure wants more grammar schools
WATCH: why an 11+ failure wants more grammar schools
Teacher turned Tory MP Jonathan Gullis debates the case for grammars expansion with fellow Commons Education Select Committee member Labour MP Lucy Powell
Most commentators think a new wave of grammar schools is off the agenda. However, a new Tory MP is determined to keep the case alive and was prepared to argue the case against a room full of anti-selection academics in Westminster.
Teacher-turned-Conservative-MP Jonathan Gullis joined the public event, chaired by his fellow Commons Education Select Committee member Labour MP Lucy Powell, where academics discussed the question: “Are grammar schools good for social mobility?”
He told the meeting he had failed his 11-plus, before arguing that parents should have more choice and that pupils in his own constituency of Stoke on Trent North were being “being failed by an education system which is quite accepting of mediocrity”.
He told the meeting: “When I go door-knocking, parents are very supportive of it when I’ve said I want grammar schools.
“I’ve said it on every local radio station and I’ve not had one negative email sent into me. And the reason for that is what it comes down to is that parents just want their kids to succeed.”
He also said his mother had “got off the estate in London” by attending a grammar and that he supported the idea of ring-fencing places for pupils in a local area to stop pupils being bussed in from “the shires” as well as having multiple points of entry with both 13-plus and 16-plus exams as well as the 11-plus.
But Ms Powell told the meeting: “It is not acceptable that out of our 163 grammar schools, an average of only 3 per cent of pupils are on free school meals.
“So prove the model works better first by showing that ordinary local families will be able to get in and get on - and that is going to take some quite big changes - and then let’s come back in three or four years and have that debate.”
Anti-selection arguments presented at the meeting at Portcullis House, Westminster, included Professor Lindsey Macmillan, saying that a family that has £100 more household income per week was six percentage points more likely to pay for extra tuition [ahead of the 11-plus] if they lived in a selective area.
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