Schools that work for Everyone

Flick Drummond Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

In the end, it is both. At the moment, many parents do not have the choice of a grammar school, so it makes sense to see what we can do to rectify that. I disagree with the underlying premise of the hon. Gentleman’s question, which is that if a child cannot get into a grammar, there are no other good schools around for them. We want to make sure that there are. In many parts of the country, grammars and non-grammar schools coexist very well together and, indeed, work very effectively together. We would be wrong not to respond to parents who want more good school places and the option of a grammar school for their child.

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)]

May I take the opportunity to ask my right hon. Friend to congratulate Portsmouth schools, both academy and comprehensive, on another improvement in their results this year; and to congratulate St Edmund’s Catholic School on becoming an outstanding comprehensive? Will my right hon. Friend assure me that whatever structures we have, be they academies, grammars or comprehensives, the Government will concentrate on the quality of teaching, because that has the most crucial impact in raising standards?

[Justine Greening]

I congratulate the schools in my hon. Friend’s local area on their recent results, which are down not only to the hard work of the children, but to the dedication of the teachers in those schools that has enabled the children to do so well. As she points out, in the end this comes down to improving the quality of teaching—that is how we get good schools—and we believe that grammars can play a role in that.