New Education Secretary Justine Greening has said she is prepared to be "open minded" about allowing new grammar schools in England.
Ms Greening told the BBC the issue was "an important debate", but she would not "make some big sweeping policy pronouncement" at this stage.
Grammar schools are state secondaries that select their pupils by means of an examination at age 11.
There are currently about 163 in England - out of some 3,000 state secondaries - and a further 69 in Northern Ireland. But under a law created by Labour's Tony Blair in 1998, no new grammar schools are allowed to open in England.
Ms Greening told the Andrew Marr Show the education system had changed "dramatically" from being a "binary" choice between grammar and secondary modern schools.
She said: "The setting in which schools find themselves has actually changed quite dramatically, it's gone from really being a binary world in many respects to being an education world where there are many different schools now that have many different offers. So I think we need to be prepared to be open-minded."
