Education and Inspections Bill

I am delighted that my hon. Friend on the Front Bench confirms that we will try to do so. The other matter about which I want to speak is academic selection. Sadly, the Bill is even more timid in its approach to that than it is about school choice. Selection is a facet of education policy and debate that is more bogged down with outdated ideological baggage than any other. In raising educational standards, we should not let ideology determine policy. What matters is what works, and I want to talk about what works. In his excellent foreword to the White Paper, the Prime Minister made no criticism of grammar schools, but correctly identified low-achieving secondary moderns as the cause of the pressure that led to the spread of comprehensive education in many areas. My hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Robert Key) made the same point. I shall quote briefly from a book written in 1998 by Stephen Pollard and someone called Andrew Adonis. It stated:"““In 1965, the Labour-controlled House of Commons resolved that moving to a comprehensive system would preserve all that is valuable in grammar school education . . . and make it available to more children. Few would maintain that this has in fact been the case.””" Later in the book, the authors state:"““The comprehensive revolution tragically destroyed much of the excellent without improving the rest. Comprehensive schools have largely replaced selection by ability with selection by class and house price. Middle class children now go to middle class comprehensives. Far from bringing classes together, England’s schools—private and state—are now a force for rigorous segregation.””" Such thinking has clearly informed the White Paper, and I welcome it very much, although it is sadly lacking from the Bill.