David Willetts has been forced to signal that he will do more to protect grammar schools less than a day after blaming them for holding back bright children from poorer families.

The Shadow Education Secretary’s claim that the 11-plus “entrenches advantage” caused a backlash yesterday as Tory activists, MPs and even front-benchers rallied to the defence of selective state-funded secondary schools.

But, while the Conservative leadership held firm in public, MPs were offered a key concession in private, The Times has learnt. Mr Willetts promised that he would consider a pledge to repeal laws that allow parents to vote to scrap existing grammar schools.

He offered the olive-branch at a stormy private meeting of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee at which MPs lined up to criticise his attack on selection. He faced hostile interventions from MPs on the right and left of the party.

A Shadow Cabinet colleague said later that a pledge to ditch the ballots would help to reassure the Conservative grass-roots that there were no plans to abolish the remaining grammar schools. However, the concession was not enough to calm the revolt.

One MP, handpicked by Mr Cameron to help to formulate policy on public services, said that Mr Willetts’s speech had made a “nonsense” of his policy review.

Nadine Dorries, who was asked by Mr Cameron to sit on the public service policy review group – one of six that will report over the coming months – said that the outright rejection of selection had preempted its conclusions on education.

“Why couldn’t David Willetts have waited to see what the policy group – on which a number of education experts sit – had to say? It seems to me to make a nonsense of the whole policy-making process.”

Ms Dorries, Tory MP for Mid Bedfordshire, also suggested that Mr Willetts had been “hung out to dry” by Mr Cameron’s aides. A spokesman for the Tory leader insisted, however, that Mr Willetts had been restating an existing policy position and had cleared the speech in advance.

Allies of Mr Cameron deny that Mr Willetts’s attack on the 11-plus was intended to be the Conservatives’ “Clause 4” and insist that they were surprised at its reception. Mr Cameron offered further reassurance to traditionalists when he declared: “I am Conservative. I believe in punishment, I believe in deterrents, I believe in the difference between right and wrong – I believe in setting clear boundaries.”

The Tory leader, speaking at the Police Federation annual conference in Blackpool, denied that he had ever called on anyone to “hug a hoodie”.

Referring to a speech on youth crime he made last year, he said: “It has been more misunderstood and more misrepresented than anything I have said. Those three words, those were three words I never said. So let me try again. Aggressive hoodies who threaten the rest of us must be punished. They need to know the difference between right and wrong and it is our job to tell them.”

Mr Cameron said that police should not be social workers but should be freed from form-filling. In return, he said, they should accept reforms to out-moded working practises.

He said that it was not the responsibility of the police to mend a broken society, but that of everyone from the Government downwards.

“We broke our society – all of us, as parents, as citizens, as members of society – we broke it and we have a shared responsibility, with Government, for fixing it,” he said.

“If we sit back and expect the police to do all the work, we will forever be managing the social problem of crime, rather than solving it.”

For and against

–– Supporters claim that grammar school pupils do substantially better than their peers in similar nonselective areas by the equivalent of raising 3.5 GCSEs from grade C to B

–– Critics say that grammar schools areas have worse results overall than fully comprehensive areas, lowering the proportion of pupils getting five good GCSEs by 2 to 3 percentage points.

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