And the new Education Secretary is....Damian Hinds

Good grief, I am literally etching the days on my metaphorical cell wall until the next election.

Haha! Probably!

Accord Coalition on Damian Hinds: accordcoalition.org.uk/2018/01/09/new-education-secretary-urged-to-press-ahead-with-inclusive-reforms/

presumably he had to be thought up very quickly. It's all very odd.

Other than having been to school, he has no credentials.

Also, I’m slightly pissed off that they replaced a comp-educated gay woman with a grammar educated white male who did PPE at Oxbridge.
tee hee.

More to the point they have created a very articulate, rather pissed off Back Bencher

I'm so glad you had started a thread on this noble. I couldn't find one yesterday and I thought you had let me down/ gone soft/ become apathetic...

No fear!

I don’t think TM has ever let common sense get in the way of anything.

It looks like she might be lining up the ducks to give it another go even if everyone else can see it’s a complete non-starter.

Do you think we’re going to see another attempt to push grammars through? FFS.

The parliamentary arithmetic is still the same though. It was the election result that stopped the legislation for new grammars not Justine Greening.
More likely they will have a go at stretching the existing legislation. I wonder if any grammar school will want the stress and hassle of setting up an "annexe" in this unstable political situation as any incoming Labour government would put a stop to it immediately. The attempt at an annexe in Maidenhead had fallen through even before the election and the planned one in Croydon was apparently never in the offing

schoolsweek.co.uk/confusion-over-grammar-school-expansion-plans/

So common sense would say No, however Theresa has a monomaniac's obsession on this issue so who knows?

Noble did you actually like Justine Greening her being a Tory or was she not as bad straight white Oxford educated Tory !

By the way my nephew was educated at St Ambrose and they did a great job turning out another potential 'Tory' Mp like Paul Maynard as well.

Only joking . However, we need more St Ambrose's not less in the education system.

noblegiraffe I think May is fixated with the "Grammar" buzz word. I suspect that is why Toby Young claims to have been a Grammar School boy despite the fact that the school was a comp. by the time he attended.

This just sums up Theresa May all over. Nothing wrong with a politicain having an overriding passion for say, social mobility - that's good. Instead she has her one fixation - grammar schools - and continues to pursue this even though she can't give us a good, evidence based reason for doing so. This is how she messed up the 2017 election (well, as far as she was concerned) by her blind stubborness and adherence to her own prejudices. I actually dislike her more than Thatcher.

Iprefer, many might agree but they are allowed and, for various historical reasons discussed in the other thread, they're not going anywhere. The best we could have hoped for in the short term was a more level playing field on admissions, though Theresa May is intent on dashing those hopes, and the Catholic Education Service has been lobbying hard.

I have absolutely no problem with faith schools especially as they tend to be the best schools

only because they are highly selective - any school can be good if it cherry-picks its pupils. I am against a child being excluded from a school down the road because of the religion their parents claim to be. Faith schools should not be allowed. At all. But that's another thread.

St Ambrose is one of those 'private in all but name' grammars so he wouldn't even be a return to the bollocks ideal past where grammars were a route out of poverty. And I'm a practising catholic too, but I don't think that any school should be allowed to discriminate on grounds of religion. Shutting the door to 'outsiders' is hardly inclusive and all about caring is it? Such separatism is hardly conducive to a coherent and happy society.

Sorry to see a pro faith school pro grammar schools MP put in charge. I want a good school for every area for all kids. Why should kids be denied the chance to go to a good school near home just because they have no faith or didnt do well in an exam on one day when they were 10 years old? And i say this as an ex grammar school pupil

*Justine

His voting record is very pro academies so that might potentially kick up a gear.

Voting record...
www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/24782/damian_hinds/east_hampshire/votes

I'm quite gutted, I'd taken quite a liking to Justin Greening, she actually seemed to be listening to teachers, first one in quite some time.

Unsurprisingly Damian Hinds is listed as one of these "Friends of Grammar Schools": conservativehome.blogs.com/gazette/2010/10/michael-gove-attends-graham-bradys-friends-of-grammar-schools-parliamentary-reception.html

This is symptommatic of everything that’s wrong with English education isn’t it?

We have an education secretary who seemed to be gaining the trust of school leaders, a change in Ofsted which meant a similar thing was happening there and then then the whole thing gets booted into the long grass because it doesn’t fit the PMs vision or appeal to the people she’s trying to keep on side.

It does make you want to bang your head against a wall repeatedly.

There is nothing wrong with Catholic schools. But if they want to receive the majority of their funding from the state then they should at least even up the admissions process. If they refuse to do that then they shouldn’t be allowed to open more schools.

And I say that as a practicing Catholic.