Barry Sindall, chief executive of the Grammar School Heads Association, quoted from a 2008 Sutton Trust study which suggested that the social make-up of grammar schools was often more diverse than that of the top 100 comprehensives where entrance is decided on proximity to the school, pushing up house prices and excluding poorer families.
Kent County Council is considering setting up a "new" grammar school in Kent, the first for 50 years.
Two annexes to existing grammar schools in Kent will be set up on KCC land at the old Wildernesse School site in Sevenoaks.
They point out that the government will allow parental ballots to abolish grammar schools, but not to set them up.
Now Kent County Council has voted to press ahead with plans to set up a "satellite school" in Sevenoaks linked to existing grammar schools in Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells.
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Although the seperate boards of governors are responsible for the running of the three grammar schools, it is unlikely they would defy the wishes of the trustees who set up and own the schools.
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These living fossils are wildly popular (last autumn one Surrey grammar school had to call the police for crowd control when 1, 500 children turned up to sit its entrance exam for 126 places), but their freedom is being eroded.
West Kent's grammar schools are so competitive and so good that several fee-paying primary schools have sprung up to prepare pupils for the tests a phenomenon vanishingly rare elsewhere.
The women are of the era when the only serious career offering was a husband and children, and in the novel all of them marry, except for a grammar-school teacher who is unable to find the right man and another woman who ends up a bit of a floozy.
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Mr Sindall said that many grammar schools already offered "test familiarisation" sessions so that children from poorer families did not turn up at the entrance exam never having encountered those type of questions before.
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