Deep in the weald and downland of west Kent a bugle has sounded that will energise grassroots Conservatives as surely as a hunting horn. The education secretary has approved the first new grammar school in half a century.
Technically Nicky Morgan has merely approved the expansion of the Weald of Kent Grammar School in the form of a girls-only “annexe”. To preserve the appearance of an annexe its girls will be required to spend half a day a week in Tonbridge, but the rest of their schooling will be in a brand new facility ten miles away in Sevenoaks. In reality this is a test case with national implications. The decision will enrage opponents and embolden backers of new grammar schools elsewhere, starting with a shelved proposal in Berkshire, where Theresa May is the local MP.
The motives of those who want a large-scale return to grammar schools are beyond reproach. They want to know that the country’s ablest children are recognised and stretched regardless of their parents’ means, and to ensure that the private sector has no monopoly on excellence. They recall the success of grammar schools in their prime as engines of social mobility and routes to top universities, and they want the same opportunities for their own offspring. This does not mean that the green light for the Sevenoaks annexe will necessarily be the best outcome of this debate for Kent’s children. Sevenoaks’ two existing state secondary schools are non-selective but one is an academy with a “grammar-school stream” and the other is a free school. Both fear that the new grammar will siphon their highest-achieving girls away, and that they will suffer as a result.
Sevenoaks is thus a microcosm of the kind of dilemma that will confront schools and parents wherever pressure builds for new grammar schools. Yet it is also a proving ground for David Cameron’s over-arching principle that good schools — of whatever kind — should be allowed to expand. It is a good principle and the Weald of Kent Grammar is a good school. To veto its expansion would, on balance, be perverse.
No politician closed more grammar schools than Margaret Thatcher as secretary of state for education in the early 1970s. She did so with the support of middle-class parents whose children were ill-served by secondary moderns and more broadly by a system and curriculum controlled by left-leaning local authorities.
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Tony Blair saw that while Mrs Thatcher had identified a fundamental problem in secondary education, she failed to produce a solution. His was to pour political capital and more than £1 billion a week into new schools, extra teachers and the academies that became his educational flagship. Some floundered, especially in their early years, but by replacing selection with streaming and specialisation academies have the merit of being able to focus on the many where grammar schools inevitably focus on the few.
Michael Gove, as education secretary, launched free schools with the same aim of higher standards across the board. He can claim some vindication in the fact that the top 250 state schools in England and Wales now outperform the top 250 private schools. Had his successor shared his determination to resist new grammars the issue might have been settled for a generation. It is now wide open.
Approval for the Sevenoaks school is a defiant signal of the government’s intent to stand by the principle of choice in education. Mr Cameron should be under no illusion that it is also a highly political decision that could divide communities as it will divide his party. He should resist pressure from his backbenchers for a nationwide return to grammar schools, and treat this as the important experiment that it surely is. The rest of the country will be watching intently, too.