Anyone listening to the pronouncements of government ministers lately will have heard three words: “ordinary working families”. These are the people Theresa May would have you believe her government is all about. I can see why she made it a slogan. It certainly sounds a lot better than “tax cuts for the rich, cutbacks for the rest”, or any other description of the Tories’ actual policies in government.

Of course, it left open the question of what exactly the prime minister means by “ordinary working families”. It seemed that ministers were struggling to make policy around an undefined soundbite.

So today the education secretary has released a new technical consultation on exactly that – defining who the “ordinary working families” actually are.

I would happily support any government effort to decide policy by starting with the evidence. But unfortunately this is yet another effort to decide the evidence by starting with the policy.

The government press release launching the consultation opened by declaring that 36% of pupils at grammar schools are from “ordinary working families”, compared with only 35% in nonselective schools. But you do not have to get very far into the small print to see that ministers have been as selective with their facts as they plan to be with their new schools.

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Because this headline figure excludes all families whom the government defines as “disadvantaged” – those with children on free school meals, or who qualify for the pupil premium, or even those who are looked after or adopted from care. That leaves nearly 1 million children whose parents are now being told by the government that they are not “ordinary working families”, even though hundreds of thousands of them are in work, albeit on low or unstable wages.

It is not hard to see why. The government’s own data, buried deep in its consultation papers, shows that fewer than one in 10 pupils at the existing grammar schools are “disadvantaged”, compared with more than one in six pupils at nonselective schools. On the other hand, more than half of the pupils at the remaining grammar schools come from those households that the government defines as “above median income”, compared with fewer than one in three at nonselective schools.

So it is no surprise that they have tried to invent some evidence to support their discredited and divisive plans to expand selective education.

The real facts, however, have never changed: there is no reason to believe that new grammar schools would provide any significant benefit for the overwhelming majority of children from working-class families.

This morning Justine Greening was embarrassingly unable to cite a single serious expert in support of the government’s policy. Instead, ministers have found it more convenient to avoid the overwhelming weight of evidence from organisations including the Sutton Trust, Institute for Fiscal Studies and Education Policy Institute.

That weight of evidence is why for generations there has been a cross-party consensus that the focus of education policy should be on improving standards in all schools and for all children.

And that is what the education secretary should keep in mind as she continues to develop her schools white paper. There are two approaches that are open to her.

The first is that of evidence-based policy-making. She can look at the successes we had in our education system under Labour, and the transformative impact the London Challenge had in some of our most disadvantaged communities, where we saw the attainment gap fall as record numbers of working-class children got the grades they needed and, if they wanted to, moved on to higher education.

This means investing in our schools, and giving teachers the resources they need to help every child fulfil their potential. That is why I have pushed the government to keep its promise to protect funding for every child, and have proposed alternatives such free school meals for all primary school pupils.

This is the only approach that I believe Greening can take if she wants to improve educational outcomes for all, not just for one group or another.

But the other approach is the path that the prime minister has pushed her down – the politically driven vanity project of new grammar schools, and the resulting slide into policy-based evidence-making.

Whether they are in an “ordinary working family” or not, our children deserve better.