The Observer’s Daniel Boffey, Dan Glaister and Richard Adams interview our Chief Executive, Lee Elliot Major, for two articles.

On a drizzly morning in Stroud on Saturday, anxious parents sat in their cars across from Marling school as 300 boys sat a two-paper entrance test. One of seven grammar schools in Gloucestershire, Marling offers 150 places for entry next September.

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And yet, some unlikely voices are asking for people to listen to what the prime minister is saying. “They obviously have thought about this a lot, and that came across in the speech,” said Dr Lee Elliot Major, chief executive of the Sutton Trust, which has produced the most recent research warning of the problems with grammar schools in entrenching inequality. “Often these debates are plagued by simplistic arguments that polarise the debate,” he said. “Like all educational arguments, there are nuances to it.”

Elliot Major said he welcomed the idea of keeping the age at which children are selected as flexible as possible. “One of the reservations in crude one-off tests is that, if a child has a poor day, one thing can rule your destiny,” he said. And it was right, he added, that May was focusing on how the disadvantaged could be given better access.

Read the full article here.

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A new wave of grammar schools will deliver a boost for the fee-paying sector as middle-class parents whose children fail the 11-plus look to dodge what they see as a second-rate state education, said Neil Roskilly, who represents headteachers of nearly 400 private schools. He said parents were already using them as “insurance” in case their children failed to be selected in areas where there were grammars.

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Lee Elliot Major, the Sutton Trust’s chief executive, said: “I think the challenge will be that all our research shows that gaps at 11 are already quite stark … I think you would have to have lower grades for people from poorer backgrounds. Universities do this and, we would say, it is good practice.

“When the children get into these universities or schools, they do just as well, the evidence would suggest. It is just whether the government is going to back those sort of quite radical measures. Because if you don’t do them properly, they will just end up being middle-class enclaves.”

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Read the full article here.