David Willetts

Will Theresa May’s grammars undermine David Cameron’s free schools?

Grammar schools remain one of the most highly-charged issues in domestic politics. There is bound to be controversy about how to boost social mobility and educational standards. But grammar schools bring to the surface other deep undercurrents as well. Were things better in the 1950s? What was Margaret Thatcher’s role in closing so many of them and did she want to see them brought back? Does the call for more grammar schools represent the best of authentic politics shaped by our own experiences, or does evidence-based policy making mean going beyond that? And it is where the Conservative Party fights its own version of class war – those who were privately educated versus those who went to grammar school, while those who were comprehensively-educated look on in bafflement from the sidelines.

My own experience of this potent mix came with an education speech I delivered on the subject in the spring of 2007. It led to one of the biggest rows of David Cameron’s period in opposition. The current argument brings it all back.

That speech has gone down in folklore as an attack on grammar schools. It is seen as an example of Tory modernisation, breaking with the ‘bring back’ politics which had bedevilled the party during its decade in opposition. And the opponents suspected, just as they did with gay marriage, that the issue was deliberately used by the leadership to redefine the Conservative Party by picking a fight with our own supporters. But what I was really trying to do in the speech was rather different.

The key argument in the speech was that too much of the education policy focussed on who goes where – on the demand side. During the long years of opposition, Conservatives had put our efforts into designing voucher schemes with the aim of delivering school choice, leading us into tricky arguments about whether people should be allowed to pay more on top.

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