According to the Guardian, Fallon, in whose Sevenoaks constituency in Kent England’s first new grammar school for 50 years was approved last year, spoke on Thursday after May had defended a return to more selective schools at a meeting of the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs.
“We have already got selection, haven’t we – it’s called ‘selection by house price’,” May said, according to those who attended, saying she wanted new selective schools to be inclusive grammars.
The school in Sevenoaks is technically an annexe to Weald of Kent girls’ grammar school in Sevenoaks, and was finally approved after a long legal battle over the existing ban on new grammar schools.
Fallon told BBC Radio 4’s Today program the government “needs to widen choice”, and said parents in his constituency now had the options of academies, free schools and grammar schools. “That’s the kind of choice I want to see in every part of the country,” he said. “[Everywhere] should have a choice, a proper choice of good schools. Not a choice that’s passing the 11-plus and then failing it and having to go off to a sink school of the kind that has let our children down so badly.”
Non-academic children should also have “proper alternatives that are equally outstanding in the kind of education they deliver”, Fallon said. “We are fortunate in Kent we have a grammar school system … and parents have a choice.”
A string of high-profile figures have warned about the implications of expanding selective schools since Wednesday. Speaking to the Guardian, Alan Milburn, the government’s social mobility tsar and former Labour cabinet minister, warned ending the ban on grammars risked creating an “us and them divide”.
Milburn said pupils at England’s remaining 163 selective state schools were four or five times more likely to have come from independent prep schools than poorer backgrounds.
“If [more of] that is what is being talked about, it will not provide a social mobility dividend, it will be a social mobility disaster,” he said.