Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, has ruled out backing a return for grammar schools in Scotland, despite Theresa May pushing for more selective education in England.
The senior Tory made clear she would never support the policy for schools north of the border, before a speech at the Conservative conference by Justine Greening, the education secretary.
“It’s never been in any manifesto I’ve written and it won’t be in any manifesto that I write for Scotland as long as I’m leader of the Scottish Conservative party,” she said.
“It’s not the way in which we’ve been looking at academic policy. We’re going to continue looking at empowering individual schools and individual school-leavers.”
It came as former education secretary Nicky Morgan intensified her criticism of the government’s planned expansion of grammar schools.
The new selective education policy involving expanding and creating more grammars has been billed by Theresa May as a “radical expansion of good school places”.
But Morgan, who held the job of education secretary until July, renewed her attack on the case for creating new selective schools, saying it risked distracting from education reforms and could undermine progress in ones that are improving.
She told a fringe meeting at the Birmingham party conference that a Whitehall department “only has so much bandwidth in terms of delivering reform”, and said grammars were an unnecessary diversion.
“For me, I do worry that a return to more selection risks undermining the progress that we have seen over the course of the last decade in our schools, by throwing something else into the education debate rather than focusing on every school offering an excellent education,” she said.
In a sign that the government may be anxious about her leading a rebellion against the policy, she noted that two Tory whips were present in the room to hear her speak. Morgan has previously spoken out against the plan announced by May last month to allow new grammars to open in England, existing ones to expand and other schools to convert to select pupils by academic ability.
At least a dozen backbenchers have publicly expressed reservations about a widescale return to grammar schools. There is also unease within May’s cabinet about the plans. One cabinet minister told the Guardian he did not think the plan was necessary and doubted it would lead to more than minor expansion in a small number of areas.
At a later fringe event, Amber Rudd, the home secretary, gave a carefully worded answer when asked whether she liked grammar schools. “It is a great proposal within the context of what the prime minister says,” she said. “It is not a return to sheep and goats-type definition at 11. We now have a system whereby if you have a particular talent in music or arts you can at secondary school go in a certain direction but you are banned from having an academically selected proportion going to an academically selective school ... Within that context, I think it is the right thing to do.” She said her sister, who is a teacher, had expressed “mixed views, shall we say” on the proposal for new grammars.
There has been frustration in the Department for Education about the extent of focus on grammar schools, since the policy was announced by May as a radical shakeup of the system to help create a “great meritocracy”.
In her conference speech on Tuesday, Greening is expected to talk more about levelling up in the system to improve the education of a million children in schools that are not good or outstanding. A key plank of May’s wider policy was about making private schools and grammar schools do more to lift the quality of non-selective schools.
She is also thought to be keen to have a renewed emphasis on technical education to make sure the focus is not just on the most academically gifted children. The education secretary, who attended a comprehensive, has said previously in the House of Commons that the proposals for new grammars are only to be one part of a broad-based education system.
