News

.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser

24 May 2007

On my way to my Westminster Office on the second floor of Portcullis House, I found myself sharing the lift with David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary who last week declared that David Cameron’s Conservatives were abandoning grammar schools and throwing their support behind Labour’s academies - he wasn’t very talkative.

This change was such a capitulation from their former promises “to build a grammar school in every town” that to call it a u-turn would be to understate it – this was a high speed reversal.

When I was fighting my first general election in Dover, way back in 1992, Jack Straw came down to Kent to announce that an incoming Labour Government would legislate to end academic selection. For the next 24 hours Radio Kent headed up all their news bulletins with “Labour pledges to abolish Kent’s grammar schools” and suddenly I was being inundated with a barrage of complaints on the doorstep and at my street stalls.

Once that story was out of the box no amount of explanation and clarification was capable of repacking it and reality was overtaken by myth. And so it will be for the Tories.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been against selection and in my view, if Kent had followed the rest of the country and gone comprehensive in the seventies then we’d now have a far better standard of education and a generation of kids would have been spared the traumas of the selection exams and the divisive and damaging impact of being declared a failure at eleven.

At every general election I fought, and there have been four so far my Conservative opponents have sought to contrast my well known opinion of selective education with the fact that my eldest daughter went to Dover Grammar School for Girls and they wrongly tried to label me as inconsistent. They were as wrong in their analysis as they were in their decision to involve my family in their unsavoury election campaign and I think most reasonable people recognised that.

Predictably, Cameron’s decision to give up on the grammars has not been received gladly by his Party. In Westminster it’s well known that at least three of his shadow ministers are growing under their breaths and a host of backbenchers are up in arms - including my political neighbour in Folkestone who until recently was the Leader of the Conservative Party. And in the country at large Tory diehards are queuing up to vent their spleens in the letter columns and on personal blogs and websites.

But despite all the internal opposition, the Tories have taken the right decision, the question is, why have they taken so long to see the light. Well maybe it’s got something to do with the make up of the shadow cabinet. David is a posh boy from a privileged background, over half his front benchers went to private schools and five of them are old Etonians – what would they know about state education ?