One can hardly blame them, really. Department for Education mandarins have had a bit of a shock in the past few weeks. They’ve been more than a little surprised, apparently, to discover what it’s like to have a true blue, died-in-the-wool Tory as their boss.

Damian Hinds’ politics must appear akin to Genghis Khan in comparison with those of Justine Greening, who resembled a Lib Dem rather more than anything else.

One of the many manifestations of this political shift will be the DfE becoming explicitly pro-selection, and at least some of its civil servants will be charged with helping existing grammar schools to expand on to new sites in different locations.

It was perhaps surprising how quickly the education policy community relaxed in the aftermath of last summer’s botched election, when it became clear that Theresa May’s education Green Paper - the one with explicit proposals for more new grammar schools - would have to be shelved.

Members of this unofficial anti-grammar campaign seemed to react to the result as if they had won - as if the election had solely been fought on the pros and cons of selection and the public had voted against. It wasn’t, and they didn’t: grammar schools barely got a mention. The death of the Green Paper was an incidental outcome of the Tories losing their majority, and no more.

As such, the issue is very much a live one. Downing Street still wants more grammar schools and so does the new education secretary.

“When it is possible for [grammar schools] to expand, physically, I want them to be able to expand,” Mr Hinds told The Sunday Times at the weekend. “There are capital sources available for most schools to be able to do that when they want to. I’m looking at how to also facilitate that for selective schools.”

‘Grammar schools are in the Tories’ genes’

The fact that the scale of this ambition is limited by parliamentary arithmetic to “annexes” of existing schools (the government doesn’t have enough MPs to win a vote reversing the legal ban on creating new grammars) muddies an important fact: selective state education has now returned squarely to the heart of Conservative Party policy.

The idea of grammar schools - and mourning their destruction at the imagined hand of the hated progressives in the 1960s and 70s - is in the very DNA of the Tory party. Although David Cameron and Michael Gove managed to stamp on it, they never killed it off.

Now, with the party in the hands of a clique of right-wing Brexiteers, it has returned to the fore. Those who never truly gave up on selective education are the Conservative establishment.

The election of 2017 was just a hiatus. The country is facing the likelihood of another general election within a year or two (depending on how Brexit plays out), and it will likely feature a binary choice between the two main parties. One of those parties will have grammar schools as a cornerstone of its education policies.

The war over selection is not over: it has only just begun.

Ed Dorrell is head of content at Tes. He tweets @Ed_Dorrell

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