Findings from the recent Education Policy Institute report on selective schools and social mobility have been raised in today’s House of Commons debate, ‘Grammar and Faith Schools’.
Moved by Lisa Nandy MP, the debate responded to recent proposals to expand the role of grammar and faith schools, calling on the Government to ‘conduct a full assessment of the evidence relating to the effect of grammar schools and faith schools on children’s learning’. The MP for Wigan cited several key findings from the EPI September report Grammar schools and social mobility.
She was joined by Lucy Powell MP, who claimed that “top-performing comprehensives, which take in many thousands more poorer children than the grammar schools do, are just as good as, if not better than, the best grammars”. The former Shadow Secretary of State for Education then went on to highlight a key finding from the EPI report – that other interventions have proven to be more effective than grammar schools in raising the attainment of disadvantaged pupils, such as that of the sponsored academies programme.
You can read the debate in full here.
See also:
‘Grammar schools and social mobility’: our first report on this area – the most detailed impartial study of the data and evidence on selective schools for almost a decade.
‘Faith Schools, pupil performance, and social selection’: this report considers the premise in Schools that work for everyone that faith schools are high-performing and support increased social mobility.
‘Grammar schools and social mobility’ – Further analysis of policy options’: this second selective schools report examines what the effects would be of putting new grammar schools in different parts of the country, and the impact of introducing quotas for Free School Meal children in grammar schools.
‘Schools that work for everyone’: read the Education Policy Institute’s official response to the consultation.
‘The 11-plus and access to grammar schools’: we examine the current barriers to entry to grammar schools for disadvantaged pupils; whether it is possible to design tests that are ‘tutor-proof’, and the impact of employing quotas or lower pass marks for FSM (free school meal) pupils.
