The UK Independence Party are notoriously allergic to facts and expert opinion. So, let’s give UKIP a few facts on grammar schools. Firstly, grammar schools do not promote social mobility. They didn’t in the 1950s and they don’t now. The Institute of Education has shown that social division, as measured by wages, is greater in selective areas of England than in comprehensive areas. Simply put, grammar schools entrench social division.

Secondly, grammar schools do not give kids from poorer backgrounds access to a first-class education, because those kids simply don’t get into grammar schools in the first place. Only 2.6 per cent of free-school-meal pupils in England make it through the door of a grammar school. That’s compared with about 15 per cent in comprehensives. It was true in the 1950s and it’s true today.

Thirdly, there was no golden age of grammar school education that we could return to, even if we wanted. In 1959, the heyday of selective education, when grammar schools educated the brightest 20 per cent, nearly 40 per cent of grammar school pupils failed to get more than three O-levels. Only 0.3 per cent of working-class kids managed to get two A-levels—0.3 per cent. Any school in Wales turning out results like that would be put in special measures pretty quickly. There was no golden age. Grammar schools trampled on the life chances of poorer kids in the 1950s and they trample on them now. That’s why we don’t want them in Wales. But, as I said, UKIP don’t do facts, do they? So, let’s ask them a few questions instead.

The first question: who will decide which school in an area becomes the new grammar? On what criteria will that decision be based? Your motion makes it sound as if all those that want to can convert to a grammar school. ‘Give children the right to a grammar school’, you say. You do realise grammar schools work precisely by denying that right to the majority, don’t you?

The second question: when that decision is made, what will you say to all the governors, teachers, parents and pupils of all the other schools in the area in order to convince them that their school would be better off as a secondary modern? And don’t give us the snake oil about the enhanced status of technical and vocational education—a secondary modern is what they will be.

The third question: how does UKIP intend to shoehorn the Welsh-medium sector into this new system that they want to import from England? In many places, Welsh-medium schools are fewer and farther between. How far will UKIP expect kids to travel each day to access a Welsh-medium grammar? Will it be 20 miles, 50 miles, more? The truth is you haven’t given Welsh-medium education a single thought.

The fourth question: how do you propose to impose this imported system on local authorities who have tertiary systems? Are you proposing the sidelining of our FE colleges? How much is it going to cost to reverse those carefully planned reforms in those areas?

It’s depressing to stand here today and make counter arguments to a zombie schools policy that should have been long dead and buried by now. But if we have to fight for the future of our children to be protected from UKIP’s policies beyond the grave, then we will. Welsh Labour remains committed to a twenty-first century schools policy which is grounded in facts and evidence. We seek to learn from the best. The best-performing schools system in Britain is not found in the selective system of the county of Kent; you find it in Scotland, where there is not a single grammar school. Consistently, the best-performing system in Europe and the world is found in Finland—100 per cent comprehensive.

The policies that will lift our schools system are not to be found through time travelling to the past. They are with us now: promoting excellence through our consortia and through Schools Challenge Cymru, raising the expectations of teachers through the new deal, addressing the gap between the least well-off and the rest through the pupil deprivation grant and Flying Start. We demand and are working for a system that delivers greater rigour and better standards for all, not just a few, because every child deserves that. UKIP can say what they say in this motion only because of one thing: it’s because they believe this—that only some are deserving; only some schools, only some teachers, only some children, and for the rest a secondary modern will suffice. We have all seen how UKIP’s evidence-free rhetoric can damage the consensual work of decades. It’s time for everyone who cares about social cohesion and social justice to make a stand—reject this vacuous motion.