Hooray! First British grammar school in 50 years to be approved
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education...-approved.html
First grammar school in 50 years to be approved
Education secretary Nicky Morgan expected to approve plans for Britain's first grammar school in 50 years
Quote:
Originally Posted by Daily Telegraph
The first British grammar school in 50 years is expected to be approved on Thursday.
The long-awaited school in Sevenoaks in Kent is due to be given the go-ahead by
education secretary Nicky Morgan. The new school, which already has planning permission and funds for a £16 million building, would take in 90 students a year from 2016. The move could herald a wave of selective schools, it is believed. Under plans, the new school would be run as an "annexe" of the already-existing Weald of Kent school nine miles away in Tonbridge.
Previous
proposals were rejected by Michael Gove, then education secretary, after they failed to clear bureaucratic hurdles put in place by the previous Labour government. Kent county council has insisted the updated plan will be "compliant with the regulations" which state that any new grammar school must be the satellite campus of an existing institution.
Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary and MP for Sevenoaks, is among senior figures who have supported the Kent school plan, saying it was “deeply unfair to parents in my constituency” that the town did not have a grammar school. Labour introduced legislation shortly after winning power in 1997 banning the opening of any more grammars because of the party's long-standing opposition to academic selection. However, England’s 164 existing state grammar schools can grow to meet additional demand from parents for more places.
London mayor Boris Johnson has described the decline of the grammar school system as a "tragedy".
Hooray, hooray, hooray is all I can say.
Whilst this may be symbolic, let us hope the Unconservatives actually prove themselves useful and do something conservative for once and roll them out across the country. This grammar school is going to be an expansion in Kent, a rural broadly wealthy English shire, yet grammar schools are most needed in inner city areas where clever children are simply let down by state education and forced to endure unmanageable and huge state comprehensives: another disaster born in the 1960s. It's time they were given a chance at social mobility.
Interestingly, as soon as the Berlin wall came down in East Germany parents clamoured for the restoration of grammar schools and got them.
Thoughts?
