NASUWT comments on Greening speech on grammar schools (speech itself will not be released until after it is made at 10am)

Commenting on Justine Greening’s speech on grammar schools, Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT-The Teachers’ Union, said:

“The Government’s plans to introduce new grammar schools are a distraction from the real challenges and crises it has created in the education system.

“A crisis of not enough teachers as a consequence of the Government’s attacks on the teaching profession is the issue which is having the most profound effect on the majority of children from ordinary working families.

“We are already witnessing increased covert selection in the school system as a result of the Government’s deeply misguided deregulation agenda.

“Permitting schools to send out strong advance signals to prospective families that if their child obtains a place at a school they can be expected to make significant financial contributions to school funds, purchase uniforms from expensive sole suppliers and expect to meet the costs of expensive school trips are all strategies of covert selection which the Government is failing to tackle.

“The Government’s proposals on selection are about extending privilege, not about tackling the problems of inequality, poverty and social exclusion which blight the lives of too many children and young people in our country and which are preventing them from achieving their full potential.”