Grammar school expansion plan costing £50m will only benefit ‘few thousand’ deprived students, admits education minister

‘You’re already helping the haves. It will still benefit more leafy areas that tend to have grammar schools than those disadvantaged areas around the country’

The £50m grammar school expansion policy will only benefit a few thousand disadvantaged students, a minister has admitted.

The government’s decision to expand existing grammar schools came under fire by MPs – including the Tory education select committee chair who says it will not reach enough deprived pupils.

When pressed by Robert Halfon, the Conservative MP and committee chair, schools minister Nick Gibb agreed that “a few thousand” disadvantaged students would benefit from the plan.

Mr Halfon accused the government of already “helping the haves” by rewarding existing grammar schools with funding – even though the number of disadvantaged pupils in these schools are low.

He suggested that the £200m of funding over the coming years could have been better spent on means-tested vouchers for children from deprived backgrounds to get one-to-one tuition, as he claimed this would help reach approximately 285,000 poorer pupils, rather than a few thousand.

Earlier this month, education secretary Damian Hinds announced that £50m would be handed to existing grammars from September this year to expand the number of places, but selective schools would have to demonstrate how they will increase the number of pupils on free school meals.

Details of the remaining £150m of funds for the expansion of existing grammar schools – confirmed in the budget in November 2016 – have yet to be set out by the government.

The most recent figures show that around 2.6 per cent of grammar school pupils are currently on free school meals, compared to 14.1 per cent across all school types.

Addressing the minister in the select committee, Mr Halfon said: “What I dispute is that you are giving grammar schools a reward when the actual free school meal pupils are very low.

“What you should have done is to say actually you should increase the number of free school meal pupils in your schools substantially, and then we might consider giving you capital funding.”

On the figure of deprived pupils that the scheme would help, Mr Gibb said: “It’s low because there are only 163 grammar schools, and we are only allocating £50m to this fund.”

Ian Mearns, Labour MP for Gateshead, asked the schools minister how many children from disadvantaged backgrounds in the northeast of England that would benefit from the proposals.

After Mr Gibb was unable to give an exact figure, Mr Mearns branded the grammar school policy as being like “building hospitals for the healthy”.

“You’re already helping the haves,” Mr Halfon added. “It will still benefit more leafy areas that tend to have grammar schools than those disadvantaged areas around the country.”

But defending the policy, Mr Gibb said they wanted to incentivise the grammar schools with low intakes of disadvantaged pupils to do more to boost the number of poorer children attending them.

Mr Gibb said: “We made it a condition that if any grammar schools wanted to expand that they must demonstrate there is a need for more secondary school places, and secondly they have to demonstrate how they will increase the intake of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.”

The minister told MPs that existing grammar schools could lower their entrance exam mark, or they could allow parents to see previous versions of the 11-plus test to help widen access.