TES cites our chief executive Lee Major on the damaging effects of any decline in primary outreach.

The majority of grammars will be forced to abandon or curtail their work with disadvantaged primary school pupils if the government’s funding proposals go ahead, the Grammar School Heads’ Association (GSHA) has warned.

The organisation said selective schools would find it increasingly difficult to do outreach work aimed at encouraging primary school children to sit the 11-plus exam and helping them to pass the test.

This is despite plans – set out in a government Green Paper on expanding selection to boost social mobility – for grammars to take part in a range of outreach work to “raise aspirations, improve educational practice and promote wider access” in primary schools.

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Lee Elliot Major, chief executive of charity the Sutton Trust, said a decline in primary outreach work would be “highly damaging” to social mobility in a selective school system.

He said: “At the moment, selective state schools are highly socially exclusive. They can improve this, but primary outreach is a fundamental part of that.”

Mr Elliot Major added that this could prove to be a “dent” to the government’s grammar school expansion plans. “Unless you can enable grammar schools to be more diverse socially, you shouldn’t consider expanding them,” he said.

Sutton Trust evidence in 2013 showed that less than 3 per cent of entrants to grammar schools were entitled to free school meals.

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