Liz Truss is facing questions over her claim to be the first prime minister to have gone to a comprehensive after it emerged that Theresa May’s official government biography says she attended a comp.
Ms Truss told Conservative Party conference: “I stand here today as the first prime minister of our country to have gone to a comprehensive school.”
But Ms May’s biography on the gov.uk website says she “had a varied education spanning both the state and private sectors, and both grammar school and comprehensive school.”
In 2016 Kate Curtis, the head of Wheatley Park School in Holton, Oxfordshire, said of Mrs May that it was “great that somebody from a comprehensive school in rural Oxfordshire can travel so far in the world”, in an interview with Tes magazine.
The Tes also reported that when Mrs May first started at the school it was then Holton Park Girls’ Grammar School. But it became Wheatley Park Comprehensive School during her time there.
In her first speech to conference as prime minister, Ms Truss received a round of applause when she told Conservative Party members: “I stand here today as the first prime minister of our country to have gone to a comprehensive school.”She added: “That taught me two things: one is that we have huge talent across our country and two that we’re not making enough of it.
“This is a great country. I’m so proud of who we are and what we stand for, but I know that we can do better and I know that we must do better and that’s why I entered politics.
“I want to live in a country where hard work’s rewarded, where women can walk home safely at night and where our children have a better future.”
Ms Truss’s press secretary said: “My understanding is this is quite complicated and it changed halfway through and comps weren’t actually called comps until the 60s or something like that.
“I’m not going to do a pop quiz on former PMs’ schooling.”
Gordon Brown went to a state school in Kirkcaldy, Fife. But it is thought he was there before it became a comprehensive.
