The education secretary, Justine Greening, has denied that the government is ignoring the poorest families in Theresa May’s drive for a new wave of grammar schools, after setting out a focus on “ordinary working families” that excludes children on free school meals.

Greening will argue that many children from her newly defined grouping of ordinary working families are already attending the few remaining grammar schools in England, and that many more would benefit from expansion of the programme.

Greening defended the government’s plans against accusations that the poorest pupils would lose out from the new focus on ordinary working families.

Answering a question from the audience at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London, Greening gave an “absolute assurance” that disadvantaged children would not be overlooked.

She also rejected a suggestion that more grammar schools would lead to more secondary modern schools for those who weren’t selected. “This will be a new model of grammars that will work more effectively in their community,” she said.

Critics of extending grammar schools were “not listening to parents”, who had made clear they supported the expansion. “Many parents, from all backgrounds, believe in the chance to send their children to a grammar school,” she said. “We believe it must be parents and communities that have the final say on whether to have grammars in their area.”

The Department for Education said the final details would be contained in its white paper to be published “in due course”. That may mean a delay until after the local government elections in May.

Greening said she wanted selective education to benefit children from households with incomes of up to £33,000, but critics have said the government has chosen to focus on better-off families because its own data show how few of the poorest children are currently attending grammar schools.

Labour said Greening’s department had deliberately excluded the poorest families from her calculations to make access to grammar schools seem fairer to “ordinary working families”.

The government’s own analysis, published on Thursday, showed more than 50% of pupils at grammar schools were from families with above-average incomes and around a third were from families with below-average incomes that were not eligible for the pupil premium or free school meals. Fewer than one in 10 grammar school pupils came from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, compared with more than one in six at non-selective schools.

Lee Elliot Major, chief executive of the Sutton Trust, said it was clear that grammar schools were not serving the poorest third of poor children. “A child from a private prep school would be 10 times as likely as a child on free school meals to get into a grammar, so they are disproportionally serving those from the richest backgrounds at the top and not those from the poorest,” he said.

Asked if grammar schools had changed in recent years to draw in more pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, Major said: “I don’t think there’s much evidence of that, I have to say. If you look at today’s grammars, they are highly socially selective, and we would welcome the government’s focus on social mobility, but if they want grammars to be the engines of social mobility that is far from the case right now.”

Major said there was an “incredible amount of private tutoring” to get children into grammars, and that schools should consider accepting lower grades from pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds or even offering private tutoring.

On Thursday, Greening denied she was ignoring the poorest children and said she would set out in her speech how grammars should improve their admissions systems. “It’s not right to say we don’t want to see them opened up to disadvantaged children – actually, that’s a critical part of what we want to see changed,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“We know that when disadvantaged children do get into grammars, they do a great job in closing the attainment gap for those children and their better-off peers. That’s why we want to see the chance for local communities to have more grammars. For children just above disadvantaged, they are getting into grammars.”

The education secretary said rising house prices were part of the reason grammar schools accepted pupils from well-off families. “Over the years, we have seen a declining proportion of children from ordinary working families and disadvantaged backgrounds making it into grammars, and I think that is partly because of how the areas around these great schools, which are very popular, have changed. House prices have risen and priced families out of the market,” she said.

Greening defended the government’s focus on “ordinary working families” who did not qualify for free school meals. “These children also do less well [than] their better-off peers and we want to put them at the heart of our education policy,” she said.

The shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, said the government’s new definition of “ordinary working families” was a way of hiding the full picture. “In effect, they have not been able to find the evidence to back up their ideological policy, so they’ve created some themselves, they’ve cooked the books,” Rayner said.



“They are trying to fiddle the numbers – even in their own research they show 53% of the wealthier than average families are going into grammar schools, as opposed to 20% in the comprehensive system. So even [in] their own cooking of the books they cannot hide from the fact that grammar schools do not aid social mobility.”

Rayner said the spending on new grammar schools was at the expense of existing schools. “The way that children from an ordinary working-class background, like mine, get a good education is to make sure the investment in the teaching is there,” she said. “Schools are facing an 8% cut. We’ve never had it where headteachers are writing to parents, getting letters at home saying they’re going to have to cut teaching staff.”

The government’s own figures proved grammars were a “life raft for a tiny minority, if you are lucky enough to get the private tuition to get into those grammar schools while the rest of us rot”, Rayner added.

Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, also accused the government of “fiddling the figures” to back up its plans for grammar schools.

Farron said the announcement showed pupils of working families would lose out. “Rather than making every state school excellent, the government want to spend more cash on another ideological experiment,” he said. “This speech is the political equivalent of a rose-tinted view of the 1950s, where a few excel and millions of other young people are consigned to the scrapheap.”