When Nigel Farage described the abolition of grammar schools in the 1960s and 1970s as an “absolute wanton act of vandalism,” he was not merely rehearsing a familiar culture-war line. He was staking a claim on one of Britain’s most enduring ideological fault lines. As The i Paper reported in March 2026, Reform UK is actively mulling the creation of new selective schools should Farage enter Downing Street – lifting a ban that has stood since New Labour outlawed the practice in 1998. There are currently 163 grammar schools in England, educating roughly 188,000 pupils. The question now is whether that number is about to grow – and whether the meritocratic promise those schools represent can survive scrutiny.
The Political Resurrection of Selection
The grammar school debate has been dormant, but never dead. Theresa May attempted to revive it in 2016 with a green paper proposing expansion; Liz Truss pledged to lift the ban during her brief premiership. Neither succeeded. What makes Reform UK’s intervention different is the combination of polling momentum and ideological conviction. Suella Braverman, Farage’s education and skills spokeswoman since February 2026, has advocated county-level referenda on new grammars. Robert Jenrick, the party’s economic spokesman, has called himself a “strong supporter” who would scrap the ban outright.
A senior Reform source told The i Paper the party could legislate to allow new grammars via the free school programme – “not committing extortionate new amounts of money, you’re just saying we’re not banning things for the sake of banning things.” It is a framing designed to neutralise cost objections while appealing to parental aspiration. Reform already controls England’s two largest grammar school counties, Kent and Lincolnshire, giving the party practical infrastructure alongside rhetorical ambition.
What the Evidence Actually Says
The empirical case for grammar schools as engines of social mobility has always been contested, but recent research has tilted the balance firmly against the orthodoxy. A 2023 paper by Lu et al, published in Educational Review, analysed large-scale data on England’s selective areas and found “no evidence” that selective schooling systems improved overall educational attainment. More strikingly, higher-attaining pupils in comprehensive areas actually received top GCSE grades at higher rates than their counterparts in selective regions.
The Education Policy Institute has quantified the intake problem with brutal precision: just 2.5 per cent of grammar school pupils qualify for free school meals, compared with a national average of 13.2 per cent. Grammar schools educate a disproportionate share of affluent children while their neighbouring comprehensives absorb the majority of disadvantaged pupils – creating what researchers call a “pupil premium gap.”
A 2024 paper by Hasan Ahmad at the University of Huddersfield, published via SSRN, concluded that “while grammar schools may offer superior academic outcomes for select students, they often exacerbate socioeconomic divides.” And a major IZA Institute of Labor Economics study, using Office for National Statistics longitudinal data tracking 90,000 people over five decades, found “no support for the contention that the selective schooling system increased social mobility in England, whether considered in absolute or relative terms.”
The Tutoring Arms Race
Behind the policy debate sits an industry that has turned the 11-plus into a revenue stream. The UK private tutoring market reached an estimated $4.94 billion in 2024, according to Deep Market Insights, and is forecast to grow at a compound annual rate of 9.87 per cent through 2033. The 11-plus preparation segment alone is estimated to be worth over £200 million annually.
This is not a neutral development. The UCL Social Research Institute has found that candidates from families in the top 10 per cent of socioeconomic status are 50 per cent more likely to gain grammar school entry. The 11-plus tests verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, mathematics, and English – subjects that are not routinely taught in most state primary schools. Without private coaching, children are effectively sitting half the exam blind.
Dr Fiona McEvoy, chief pedagogue at Atom Home, has argued that tutoring is “necessary” because “when schools select on potential, not polish, coaching equalises access.” It is a revealing paradox: the mechanism designed to identify raw ability has spawned an industry dedicated to manufacturing it. Platforms like Atom Home, used by 31,000 families, deploy AI-driven mock tests mirroring the GL Assessment and CEM formats that dominate 78 per cent of 2025 entry exams. The coaching is not supplementing education; it is a parallel curriculum entirely detached from the national one.
The Public’s Contradiction
Polling by the centre-right think tank Onward, in partnership with J.L. Partners, reveals a public that is instinctively sympathetic to selection but deeply conflicted about its implications. Among 4,013 voters surveyed, 52 per cent agreed that “academically able children should have the opportunity to apply to a school better suited to their needs, even if children who do not get in do not do as well.” Only 31 per cent favoured the comprehensive alternative.
Yet when asked whether they would send their own child to a grammar if a local comprehensive had the same results, just 26 per cent said yes. And 69 per cent said that if no grammar existed locally, they would simply send their child to the comprehensive “like everyone else.” The grammar school, it seems, is most loved as an abstract principle – a symbol of fairness – rather than as a lived educational reality.
The political divide is sharp. Among 2019 Conservative voters, 46 per cent support building more grammars; among Labour voters, just 20 per cent. Yet even among Labour voters, 47 per cent said they would enter their child for the 11-plus if given the chance. The meritocratic impulse transcends party allegiance, even when the policy does not.
The Regional Lottery
England’s grammar schools are not evenly distributed. Kent has 38; Buckinghamshire has 13; Lincolnshire has 15. London claims seven of the top ten schools by examination results, a reflection of its hypercompetitive education culture and concentration of tutoring resources. The Henrietta Barnett School in Hampstead, where 96.9 per cent of GCSEs hit grades 9–7, rejects 94 per cent of applicants. Queen Elizabeth’s School in Barnet, founded in 1573, produces European Maths Olympiad gold medallists.
Beyond the capital, schools like Pate’s Grammar in Gloucestershire and Altrincham Grammar for Girls in Greater Manchester maintain formidable academic records. But rural grammars tell a different story. Schools in Lincolnshire and parts of Kent face persistent underfunding, with music departments sustained by parental donations. The boarding quirk – Colchester Royal Grammar and South Wilts Grammar offer state-subsidised boarding at roughly £12,000 per year versus Eton’s £46,296 – creates what advocates call “social mobility dormitories,” but these remain exceptions rather than models.
The Cultural Stakes
What makes grammar schools uniquely potent in British culture is their capacity to function simultaneously as evidence for opposing arguments. For advocates like Gary Hickey, headmaster of Haberdashers’ Adams, they are instruments of upward mobility that “can and do tackle social mobility” – particularly when paired with outreach programmes that increase local and disadvantaged intake. For critics, they are mechanisms by which the middle class hoards advantage under the guise of merit.
The Social Mobility Commission’s 2025 report on regional disparities underscored the geographic dimension: grammar school counties do not consistently outperform comprehensive regions in measures of social mobility. The places where mobility is highest – where children from low-income backgrounds are most likely to move up the earnings ladder – are not the places with the most grammars. They are the places with the strongest comprehensive schools and the most equitable funding.
What Comes Next
Reform UK’s grammar school proposal is not merely an education policy. It is a cultural wager – a bet that the British public’s affection for the meritocratic ideal outweighs its awareness of the evidence. With the next general election still potentially years away, the debate will sharpen. Comprehensive Future, the campaign group, has warned that “the debate about academic selection is far from settled” and that Reform’s leadership “consistently favour selection, stratification, and a reassertion of traditional academic hierarchies.”
The 163 grammar schools that currently exist occupy a peculiar position in British life: too few to reshape the national education system, too symbolically charged to ignore. They are the country’s most contested classrooms – places where the promise of meritocracy is tested, every September, against the reality of a society that has never quite decided whether equality of opportunity requires equality of provision.
In the end, the grammar school question is not really about grammar schools at all. It is about whether Britain believes its education system should sort children by ability at age eleven – and what it is prepared to pay, socially and financially, for that conviction.
Sources: The i Paper (March 2026); Onward/J.L. Partners polling (2022); Education Policy Institute; IZA Institute of Labor Economics; Lu et al, Educational Review (2023); University of Huddersfield/SSRN (2024); Deep Market Insights (2026); UCL Social Research Institute; Department for Education; House of Commons Library; Social Mobility Commission.
