Grammar schools damage educational standards in their communities, Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said yesterday in an attack on academic selection.

Two fifths of all secondary modern schools are underperforming while competing against grammar schools that cream off the highest achieving children. Mr Balls said that the system left secondary modern pupils feeling as if they were failures.

He announced that each struggling secondary modern could receive up to £1 million in extra funding to boost standards. Heads at schools with poor reputations would be able to use this to entice excellent teachers.

Mr Balls reopened a sensitive debate by saying: “Let me make it clear that I don’t like selection. We don’t support new grammar schools.”

Calls for the abolition of England’s 164 grammar schools are heard regularly from Labour backbenchers, who could be appeased by Mr Balls’s comments. But he stopped short yesterday of saying that grammar schools should be scrapped.

Last week he asked for the help of grammar schools in raising standards at the 638 schools where fewer than 30 per cent of pupils achieve five good GCSEs. At the launch of the National Challenge initiative, the minister said that grammar schools could merge with low-achieving secondary moderns or work closely with their neighbours.

In a speech to the National College for School Leadership’s annual conference, in Birmingham, Mr Balls said: “I accept that selection is a local decision for parents and local authorities. But I do not accept that children in secondary moderns should be left to fall behind.

“Overall, secondary moderns are around twice as likely to be below the 30 per cent benchmark than the average school. I’ve heard first-hand how some of the young people starting in these schools feel on day one that they have already failed.”

Wholly selective areas where schools are either grammars or secondary moderns include Kent, Lincolnshire, Buckinghamshire and Trafford. Partially selective areas include Birmingham, Lancashire, Wiltshire, North Yorkshire and Warwickshire.

Next month Mr Balls’s department will publish a secondary modern strategy, to improve performance. He said that secondary modern schools had six times more children from deprived backgrounds than their selective neighbours. But he denied that they were automatically destined for failure when assessed against grammars. Some secondary moderns achieved “really excellent results”.

John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “For far too long secondary moderns have been funded as the poor relation, and the injection of this additional funding will help to level the playing field in areas where the challenge is greatest.”

But Christine Blower, acting general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “The Government’s condemnation of 638 secondary schools is even more shocking and random than it first appeared. Only 11 per cent of schools in the sample were considered by Ofsted to need intervention.”

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