Toby Young Toby Young

New grammars won’t do more for social mobility than comprehensives. But there is a third way

One of David Cameron’s last acts as Prime Minister was to approve an application by Ashlawn School in Rugby to set up a new free school in the city. It’s not surprising that Ashlawn’s application was approved. Not only has it been ranked ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted, but last year 74 per cent of its pupils got five GCSEs at grade C or above, including English and maths (a metric known as ‘5A*–CEM’). Even more impressive, 65 per cent of its pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds met that same target.

However, before Ashlawn can open its new school in 2017 it has to overcome an obstacle. Ashlawn is one of England’s three dozen or so partially selective schools. These schools represent a ‘third way’ between grammars and comprehensives in that they select a minority of their pupils according to general ability. In Ashlawn’s case this means that 12 per cent of the 256 pupils it admits each year are selected according to their performance in the Warwickshire 11-plus exam, with the remainder being fully comprehensive. These 30 children are then placed in the school’s ‘grammar stream’, where they’re joined by an additional 60 children taken from the non-selective intake so that over a third of the children in the school are taught a grammar school curriculum.

Unfortunately, Ashlawn won’t be able to select 12 per cent of its pupils in the new free school because that’s prohibited by the ban Tony Blair’s government imposed on the creation of any new selective schools, including partially selective schools. At least, it didn’t think it would until now. With this weekend’s news that Theresa May is planning to lift that ban, Ashlawn may be able to go ahead and replicate its model.

As I’ve written before, I’m ambivalent about the expansion of grammar schools. In principle, I’m in favour because I think parents of bright children who want to educate them alongside other bright children should have that choice.

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