NOW that Parliament has voted in accordance with the 52 per cent of the electorate who voted to leave the European Union and also to deny itself a meaningful vote on the outcome of the negotiations, perhaps the spotlight of public scrutiny can now be focused on the wish of the Prime Minister to create many more grammar schools - in effect to bring back the 11+.

This is a proposal which flies in the face of some 50 years of educational development and is opposed by a great many people with first-hand experience in education including the House of Commons Select Committee on Education whose Chairman, Conservative MP Neil Carmichael, in a preface to the latest report of the committee, (13/2/2017) stated that ‘the government has yet to prove the case for opening a new wave of grammar schools’.

With the outcome of the vote to leave the European Union and the special circumstances of that vote, namely the implications of recalling ‘sovereignty’ to the British Parliament, MPs would do well to recall the words of Edmund Burke for Bristol in the 18th century who famously said that when he became an MP he was an MP for the United Kingdom and not, in effect, a delegate from his constituency.

We know that prior to the referendum vote last June a very clear majority of MPs supported staying in the European Union; on Monday they in effect took their ‘instructions’ from the wider electorate and voted to leave.

These were special circumstances, but on the matter of creating new grammar schools it is to be hoped they will read the evidence against such a proposal and refuse to back the view taken by the Prime Minister.

In addition of course is the small but important matter of there being no mandate in an election manifesto for such proposals.

GORDON CANN

Craigmoor Avenue, Bournemouth

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