PLANS to re-build two Kent grammar schools have come under fire from opposition Labour county councillors who claim Kent County Council has scrapped its original proposal to merge them.

Kent County Council’s Conservative administration recently announced it is to retain Clarendon House grammar school for girls and Chatham House School for boys in Thanet, saying it wanted to maintain single sex schooling for the area.

But Labour says the decision flies in the face of falling secondary pupil numbers across the county and claim KCC had been on the brink of merging the two – a move it has now abandoned because it did not want to undermine the county’s selective system.

Shadow Labour education spokesman Cllr Christine Angell accused KCC of safeguarding grammar schools ahead of the need to properly plan for declining pupil numbers. KCC has estimated that it needs to remove more than 8,000 spare places at secondary schools over the next decade.

Cllr Angell said: “Falling roles across Kent mean exactly that - across Kent. Where KCC Conservatives choose to ignore that for dogmatic and outmoded support for the policy of selection at 11, the public gets increasingly confused and cross.

"Initially, I understood there was to be a new Clarendon school built on the Chatham site, with pupils in the first few years sharing lessons, eventually to have the same head.

"Now we hear the two schools are to continue with the status quo. It is hardly a way to run a county council.”

Local Ramsgate Labour county councillor Elizabeth Green said KCC was ignoring the opportunity to re-organise all Thanet’s secondary schools using money from the government’s Building Schools for The Future initiative.

“KCC Tories are missing that opportunity in a short-sighted, dogmatic defence of selection at age 11. Kent Council had a proposal to merge these grammar schools and I believe this could well return in the near future as they had a strong desire to remove single sex schooling from Ramsgate.”

KCC says the two schools will be kept separate “for the foreseeable future” and it hoped the government would support its bid to re-build them.