Schools that work for Everyone

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

It is almost certainly because the Labour Government in Wales have failed to learn from the reforms that we have made here in the United Kingdom. It is interesting to note that many parents want to take advantage of the features of grammar schools that often make them successful, such as excellent teachers and outstanding leadership, a stretching, rigorous academic curriculum, excellent extra-curricular activities, and discipline. Those are the things that parents want throughout the school system, and our reforms have largely embedded them throughout the system, which is why standards are rising.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

I am proud to represent a town that is ram-packed with what the Secretary of State calls “ordinary working-class people”. [Interruption.] I am using the Secretary of State’s words. It is also a town that has grammar schools. People there are frustrated by the fact that their kids cannot get into local grammar schools because other people with much more resources are able to drive miles from west London and get their children into grammar schools on the basis of the 11-plus.

I am beginning to be unsure about what the Secretary of State means by a grammar school. When I talk to the heads of grammar schools, they say that they cannot devise an admission test that is tutor-proof. The point is that my constituents who cannot afford tutors are not getting places in the grammar schools, and therefore grammar schools do not serve, as her statement implies, those, in her words, “ordinary working-class people.” Unfortunately, they serve those people who can afford to tutor their kids.

[Justine Greening]

In that case, all the more reason for us to bring forward the reforms announced today. It is nonsensical to make an argument in the way the right hon. Lady has just done and then say we should do nothing about it.