Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to (a) encourage the growth of new Grammar Streams and (b) facilitate the expansion of existing Grammar Streams within schools.

Setting and streaming by ability is common in secondary schools. We believe that teachers are best placed to decide the approach in their own schools. It is therefore a matter for the school in question whether to test pupils on entry for ability and place them in a grammar stream, or to otherwise stream pupils by ability.

The census data we collect from schools does not include information on whether children are streamed by ability.