Grammar schools underperform, says top academic

Grammar schools in Britain's biggest selective area are underperforming and have failed to deliver the exam results the brightest pupils deserve, new research by a leading academic and government adviser suggests.

Schools in Kent, the largest county local education authority (LEA) in England, and neighbouring Medway will be unable to deliver the Government's "transformation" of secondary education because they are locked into a "divisive" selective system, an analysis by David Jesson, an economist from York University, found.

Although the grammar schools' exam results may appear good in national comparisons, they should be "substantially" higher considering that these schools select the county's brightest students at 11, he concluded. The report, commissioned by Stephen Ladyman, the Labour MP for Thanet South, could have important implications for Britain's remaining 164 grammar schools.

The Government has previously named grammar schools that it believed were "coasting" and hiding behind what seemed to be respectable exam scores when they should have been doing much better.

Kent County Council denied that its schools were under- performing. It argued that the research failed to recognise the social problems in the county, including high numbers of asylum-seekers and children in care. An analysis comparing Kent with 10 similar local authorities had ranked Kent third for A-level results and fourth on GCSE scores, Graham Badman, the council's director of education. said.

Professor Jesson has published several similar studies comparing different types of schools, and is a member of the Technology Colleges Trust, which advises the Government on specialist schools.

While the Government has cited Professor Jesson's work to support its expansion of specialist schools, ministers prefer to ignore his research into selective schools.

His latest research was commissioned by Mr Ladyman, a fervent anti-selection campaigner, at a cost of £4,500, after the Department for Education and Skills and Kent Council Council refused to commission their own studies.

Kent and Medway are two of the 11 local authorities that still operate a selective system. The other selective areas are Bexley, Buckinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Slough, Southend-on-Sea, Sutton, Torbay, Trafford and Wirral. A further 64 grammar schools are scattered across the rest of the country making a total of 164 remaining selective schools.

Parents opposed to grammar schools can trigger a vote to scrap selection if 20 per cent of eligible parents sign a petition demanding a ballot. But campaigners against selective schools say the procedure is biased against them. Since the regulations came into force in 1998, only one ballot has been held – in Ripon, where the campaign failed.

Professor Jesson's analysis of schools' results concluded that Kent and Medway were underperforming. This was "almost certainly" also true of individual pupils, he said, but he had been refused access to this data by the education committee of the Conservative-run Kent County Council.

He compared the performance of the 39 grammar schools with those of the 164 grammars nationally and found that only four Kent in Kent scored in the top 25 per cent while 17 schools ranked in the bottom 25 per cent.