Grammar schools: state-funded engines of educational exclusion

Grammar schools are academically-selective secondary schools funded by the state. There are 163 grammar schools in England, and 5% of secondary school-aged children attend them.

In 2018 the DfE and the Grammar School Heads’ Association (GSHA), the body which represents most grammar schools, signed a four-year "Memorandum of Understanding" (MoU) rooted in the deceptive quarter-truth that grammar schools enable impoverished children to slough off their circumstances and enter the middle class.

The MoU set out a "shared ambition": to see more children in receipt of the Pupil Premium apply for grammar school, secure a place and be accepted as students. The proportion of students in receipt of Pupil Premium funding who attend grammar schools is around 8%, according to the campaign group Comprehensive Future, while the proportion of all such secondary students in England is over three times as high, at about 27%.

The 2018 MoU also proposed closer partnership between selective and non-selective schools in a given locality, supposedly so that all children might benefit. In practice this meant more publicity about grammar schools, some help for parents to understand the nature and demands of the selection test, and token coaching for handfuls of children.

Abject failure

Theresa May’s government backed these aims with public money. May regarded grammar schools as engines of upward social mobility. She devised grand plans in 2017 to change the law and create more of them. When her poor showing in the General Election prevented this, she established funding mechanisms to finance the enlargement of existing grammar schools. One of these mechanisms, the Selective Schools Expansion Fund (SSEF), gave £64M to 22 schools.

The result? An evaluation published in June by the DfE reveals that over the four-year MoU programme the percentage of Pupil Premium funded students enrolled in grammar schools rose by all of 0.7%, from 7.2% to 7.9%. Out of 367 additional places created at the SSEF-funded schools, only 77 went to impoverished students.

As if this wasn’t evidence enough of abject failure, or calculated disdain, in five of the original 16 grammar schools which bid for SSEF money the proportion of poorer children admitted actually went down.

The SSEF ended in 2022. Grammar schools still stealthily expand. No sanctions have been applied to those which failed to admit more children of the poor. Instead, the government has rewarded the GSHA with a new four-year MoU rendered even weaker than the earlier version. Gone is any requirement to track the number of grammar school applicants in receipt of Pupil Premium funding. Schools need track only the number of such pupils actually accepted, "with a view to seeing an upward trend", the document whimpers.

Our aim is neither to enhance social "mobility" nor "improve" grammar schools. We work to establish a comprehensive education system: non-selective, free from the ideology of "ability", democratically accountable and suitably-funded. Such a system is the only foundation which can secure the proper education of all children.