The decision to approve a new grammar school campus in Sevenoaks threatens to reopen a deep split in the upper ranks of the Conservative party.
David Cameron had convinced modernisers in his party that he would resist grassroots pressure for a new generation of grammar schools and focus instead on raising standards via all-ability academies.
Yet grammar schools have many champions among influential Tories. This week more than 100 Conservative MPs flocked to a champagne reception on the Commons terrace hosted by the Friends of Grammar Schools, including a substantial number from the new intake.
The group’s patron is Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs, and supporters include cabinet ministers led by Michael Fallon and Conservative big beasts such as David Davis and Liam Fox. Theresa May has also backed grammars.
The prospect of copycat moves by Tory councils to open more satellite grammar schools will alarm supporters of Michael Gove’s school reforms.
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The former education secretary rejected two applications to open a grammar school campus in Sevenoaks in 2013 and tried to shift Conservative thinking to embrace social mobility via his expansion of academy schools.
In his speech to the party conference in 2012, Mr Gove even got Conservative delegates to applaud the principle of comprehensive education.
Nicky Morgan, his successor, has been more circumspect and praised grammar schools, but privately shares the fears of Tory modernisers that her decision risks emboldening supporters.
Selective education triggered one of the biggest rows of Mr Cameron’s leadership when David Willetts, his education spokesman, suggested in 2007 that grammar schools offered little to poor children. Mr Willetts was moved, amid a backlash from right-wing Tories.
Grammar schools, so called because they taught boys Latin, rhetoric and Greek, have their origins in the mid-16th century. Several still bear the name of Edward VI, the son of Henry VIII. More were established in the Victorian era, including schools for girls.
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The modern debate over grammar schools stems from 1944, when the Conservative Rab Butler, the education minister, introduced free secondary schooling at a grammar, secondary modern or technical school.
Few of the technical schools were built and most children were divided from 11 between grammar schools and secondary moderns that largely stopped at 15. They became increasingly controversial among parents as evidence emerged that bright children were under-achieving in secondary modern schools.
Twenty years later Tony Crosland, the Labour education minister, vowed to “destroy every f***ing grammar school”. Their demise spanned a decade despite a change in government.
Margaret Thatcher, the education secretary from 1970 to 1974, allowed local authorities to decide whether to keep grammar schools. She thought they were popular and that councils would want to keep them. This proved a grave misjudgment and many local authorities abolished them.
Some resisted growing pressure to convert selective schools into comprehensives, notably in Kent and Buckinghamshire. Other schools defied local authorities to retain their selective status, such as the King Edward VI schools in Birmingham.
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In 1975, when funding was scrapped for grammar schools with a mixture of fee-paying pupils and direct-grant places funded by government, many switched to the independent sector.
Lord Adonis, schools minister under Tony Blair and architect of his academies policy, said that half of comprehensive schools failed because they continued the low results and weak academic ethos of the secondary modern schools they were meant to replace.
In his book Education, Education, Education, published in 2012, Lord Adonis said that many comprehensives created in the 1960s and 1970s did not have sixth forms and had a dogmatic attachment to weak governance linked to local authorities.
The surviving 164 state grammar schools proved controversial for Mr Blair, too. His first education secretary, David Blunkett, resisted left-wing pressure to scrap selective schools despite declaring: “Read my lips: no selection in education.”
He later qualified this to mean no new grammar schools, and introduced rules for local parental ballots that could decide to close a selective school.
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Only one ballot was held, in which parents voted resoundingly to keep Ripon Grammar School, in North Yorkshire.
164
grammar schools in England
3%
of grammar school pupils are eligible for free school meals; the average in England is 17.5 per cent.
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54%
of adults would support new grammar schools if parents wanted them, according to a YouGov poll.
74.1%
of pupils from the top grammar schools go to the 30 most selective British universities.
40%
of grammar school pupils failed to get 3 O levels in their heyday in 1959.
Sources: Sutton Trust, YouGov, Policy Exchange