by Our News Desk

THERESA MAY hinted yesterday that the government could stop using information on who is entitled to free school meals when identifying “struggling” children.

Ms May sought to defend her embattled plan to bring back grammar schools, claiming on the Andrew Marr Show that the return of the 11-plus was “not going back to that system of binary education.

“We’re not going back to the 1950s,” she insisted.

Education experts warn that the 11-plus can only test existing learning, rather than ability, and that segregating children based on their performance in such tests entrenches privilege — with the children of parents who can afford private tuition in verbal reasoning winning most places.

Comprehensive Future chair Melissa Benn has pointed out that just 3 per cent of grammar pupils receive free school meals, compared to 18 per cent at a typical state comprehensive school.

Ms May claims that her new selective schools will need to prove they are “genuinely reaching out” to poorer pupils — but when quizzed on whether that would mean setting targets for the number of children receiving free school meals, she burbled that “it could mean a variety of things” and talked about finding “other measures” to identify struggling children.

The Conservatives have previously sought to shift definitions of poverty away from income. Last year, former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith dropped the link between poverty definitions and median incomes while scrapping child poverty reduction targets, and redefined poverty with reference to whether a child’s parents were in work and what exam results they attained.

But Ms May’s plans will face resistance, with National Union of Teachers general secretary Kevin Courtney calling for a “social movement” to fight “the Tories’ three-pronged attack of further funding cuts, academisation and expansion of selection.”

He warned that the Centre for High Performance, which advises schools intending to become academies, had named three priorities for such institutions: “One: change headteachers. Two: change your marketing strategy. Three: remove ‘poor-quality’ students.”

Funding for education has hit its lowest real-terms level since the 1970s, a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed last month, while the NUT estimates that funding will be cut by another 10 per cent over the next year.

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