Grammar Schools

Rob Wilson Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Rob Wilson (Reading East) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) on securing this extremely important debate. His commitment to grammar schools is well known. I note that he is a distinguished alumnus of Dartford grammar school, along with Sir Mick Jagger.

Reading school, in my constituency, can boast my hon. Friends the Members for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) and for North East Hertfordshire (Oliver Heald) as Old Redingensians. While not easily described as rock stars, they have equally made their mark in the world of politics.

[Mark Field]

My hon. Friend has missed out the black sheep of the family: the right hon. Member for Oxford East (Mr Smith) was also an alumnus of Reading school. Despite the disadvantage of a grammar school education, he still managed to go to Oxford and become a Cabinet Minister, although in a Labour Government.

[Mr Rob Wilson]

That is an excellent intervention. I recall that his hairstyle back in those days was very much like a rock star’s.

As a keen supporter of grammar schools, I have campaigned vigorously to protect them in my constituency, and I am delighted to contribute to the debate today. Grammars have played a significant part in the important role of social mobility. Through selection, grammars offer our most academic young people and constituents across the country excellent educational opportunities. Academic selection in secondary education is often the focus of rigorous debate, and we are getting a flavour of that this morning. Some have argued that grammar schools are an impediment to social mobility, but that view is profoundly wrong. Our 160-odd grammar schools continue to offer fantastic opportunities to gifted pupils from more disadvantaged backgrounds, thus unlocking all the potential that an academically rigorous education can provide.

Far from impeding social mobility, our grammar schools encapsulate the driving principle of aspiration and ambition. The Prime Minister has said, when staving off class-based attacks from the left about his educational background, “It matters not where you come from, but where you are going.” Grammar schools reflect that ethos. They are precisely about where someone is going, not where they are from. They provide a ladder of opportunity, and I fail to see how that is an impediment, as some have described.

If we take social mobility seriously, as I do, it is fundamentally important that our grammar schools are safeguarded and that threats to their future are taken seriously, but those who wish to threaten and destroy our grammar schools do not rest. Their commitment to vandalising some of the best schools that state education provides continues undiminished, as I recently found in Reading.

Reading is on the front line of the battle to protect our grammar schools. Reading East is fortunate to have two excellent grammar schools: Reading school, which I have already mentioned, and Kendrick school, which is a girls’ grammar school. Both schools feature at the top of the nation’s league tables for educational attainment, a fact of which I am enormously proud. Despite their excellence, Reading’s grammar schools find themselves firmly fixed in the crosshairs of those who seek to kick away the ladder of opportunity that they offer by removing their ability to select pupils. This year, a mere 10 Reading residents formed an anonymous group to put a petition together to trigger a ballot to end grammar school education in Reading.

Without wishing to suck this debate into the realm of legal complexities, the law pertaining to a ballot was confusing and flawed, because the grammars had converted to academy status, as they had been encouraged to do by the Government. A lack of synergy was exposed between annex E of the academy funding agreements and the provisions of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, the legislation that sets out the regulations pertaining to grammar school ballots. The confusion focused on the 20% petition threshold of local people eligible to vote in the ballot—namely, parents at feeder primary schools.

It is also worth noting that the ballot itself, should it have gone ahead, was undemocratic, because it comprised only parents from primary feeder schools and not the parents of pupils currently in grammar schools. Why should parents of children attending a grammar school be disfranchised in decisions about the school’s future, as parents and their children will be affected by the outcome of any ballot?

Is it right that 10 faceless people can cause huge instability at local schools that have served the people of Reading so well for so long? Recently, when those faceless individuals started that ballot process, it caused huge problems. How does a school cope with a threat to its future? The uncertainty it causes for staff, parents and pupils is significant. Enormous effort and expense have to go into administering the ballot and putting the case for the school, taking time away from the important teaching effort that has to go on. It was both wrong and unfair, and it should never have been allowed to happen.

In short, the episode in Reading exposed a gaping democratic deficit whereby a tiny, unrepresentative part of Reading’s community managed to unsettle two schools along with their staff, pupils and parents. Because of the disruption and potential expense to our grammar schools, I hope that the Minister will look at the initial trigger point for initiating such a ballot, which should surely be well above 10 anonymous people. Working closely with Reading school’s head teacher, Mr John Weeds, we lobbied Ministers in the Department for Education. As a result, we have an undertaking from the Minister that amendments will be made to the funding agreement, which I hope will achieve greater clarity.

For now, the threat to Reading’s grammar schools has been temporarily beaten back, but it could return at any time. If they wish, the same 10 people in Reading could return with their protest year after year, and the Government must change the rules so that, if a ballot attempt fails one year, it cannot be constantly repeated. Such a strategy could become a device for destabilising grammar schools all over the country, and I would have grave concerns for the remaining grammar schools in England should it be repeated elsewhere. In defending the few grammar schools that we have left, it seems that the price of their retention will be constant vigilance, unless the Government make significant and necessary changes to the legislation. I am therefore encouraged to see that so many determined hon. Members are participating in this important debate.

To remove grammar schools would be to remove a specialist part of our state education system that seeks to maximise a pupil’s academic potential. Critics of grammar schools—usually, although not exclusively, from the left—say that those who do not pass the selection criteria for a grammar school education will in some way be left behind by the system. That argument, however, is flawed. Not every pupil is academic in orientation, but that does not mean that their potential should be left unfulfilled. Too often, our state education system has let down technically gifted as well as academically gifted pupils, and we need schools that reflect the abilities of all pupils.

That is why I am delighted that university technical colleges are growing in number and strength, and last week I joined Lord Baker of Dorking in celebrating and promoting the success of such colleges at a parliamentary reception with rest of the UTC community—a community which now looks more like a movement. By departing from a one-size-fits-all approach to education, both types of school serve the interests of social mobility. It is about being holistic, serving pupils in the system and reflecting their needs accordingly. Our grammar schools do precisely that, and they deserve our unwavering support.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Pawsey]

My hon. Friend’s intervention is profound. The essence of my support for grammar schools and, I am sure, of the support of other hon. Members present, is that they should be available to all children. We want them to be vehicles of social mobility. We want children from less privileged backgrounds to go to them; so my heart went out to the parents I met whose daughter had been denied the opportunity of a grammar school education.

[Mr Rob Wilson]

Why are not primary schools encouraging parents to put their children in for the examinations, and opting in on behalf of the children? Does my hon. Friend agree that primary schools do not do enough to get their children into grammar schools?

[Mark Pawsey]

Absolutely. I share my hon. Friend’s view. One of the difficulties is that in certain primary schools there is an expectation that children will sit the selection exam, whereas in other schools, perhaps in less well-off areas, the expectation may not be present; but it should be. Those schools should put all their children forward, to give them the opportunity to participate in a selective education.

I have a second point about the selection process on which I would like the Minister to comment. I have mentioned my daughter, who is currently at grammar school. My other daughter, who is older, sat the exam 10 or 12 years earlier, when the entrants sat several practice papers in school and then took the actual paper in school—an environment that they were all entirely comfortable with. I am sure that that enabled each child sitting the paper to do their best. By the time my younger daughter took the exam, it had been moved to a separate examination centre. At the age of 11, with the entire cohort of other children of that age, she was taken to a foreign environment—a school they were not familiar with. They sat in rows in the same way we would have sat our GCSE and A-level exams. For many children, the move from the comfortable environment to somewhere completely different was distressing. They are youngsters of 11 years old. Sure, the selection exam should determine which children are the most capable, and who will benefit—

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

We have made our position clear. Although I am not in favour of selection, it is up to the parents in existing areas, via the ballot mechanism described by the hon. Gentleman, to decide whether they want to keep grammar schools. That has been our policy for many years, and the decision has always been taken in that way at a local level, previously by local authorities.

The hon. Gentleman said that no one is suggesting that social mobility is possible only through the grammar school route. Perhaps that is not what he wanted to suggest, but he made a remark—and I intervened on him, as the record in Hansard will show—that might have implied that that was what he believed. However, I accept the explanation that that is not the case. I will come on to the evidence that says that non-selective systems are more effective than selective ones.

The hon. Member for Reading East (Mr Wilson) objected to the mechanism available to parents, should they seek to trigger a ballot, to change a selective system in their local area to a non-selective one. There was only one part of his argument that I did not understand. If the presence of grammar schools benefits all children and parents in an area, as many of his hon. Friends say is the case, why is he concerned about parents of children in the feeder schools to grammar schools having a vote on keeping a selective system? After all, according to him and his hon. Friends, all those parents would benefit massively from the gravitational pull of a selective school in their area.

[Mr Rob Wilson]

My concern is not about parents of children in feeder schools voting—they should be able to do so—but about parents of children in grammar schools not being able to vote and about the fact that ballots may be triggered by 10 anonymous people collecting a petition.

[Kevin Brennan]

Leaving aside the trigger, which the hon. Gentleman raised with the Minister—I am sure that the Minister will respond to it—the logic of his argument suggests that he would want parents from all secondary schools in an area to be able to vote in a ballot, because they, too, would all benefit hugely, as described by his hon. Friends, from the presence of grammar schools that their children do not attend. By his own logic, all parents in an area should have a say in whether the local system should be selective or non-selective. However, the current system allows parents of children in feeder schools to vote in that way. If he is afraid that they will vote differently, clearly he is saying that they might not feel that their children are benefiting from having a selective school in their area. That was not the point that his hon. Friends were making.

The hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) mentioned the high schools in her area and spoke with passion and persuasiveness about the school system there. It was interesting to hear that non-grammar schools in the area are now referred to as high schools. Why do we never hear the term “secondary modern” any more? Why are non-grammar schools referred to as high schools, comprehensive schools, sometimes community schools or a variety of other appellations? It is for the reason pointed out by the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood—the tripartite system that existed across the country condemned the vast majority of children to second-class schools. That is the truth and the reality of what the system was like.