Parliament The Sketch: Calculus, confusion and the question of elastic children

QUESTION: IF, as the Chancellor said in his budget statement recently, our children are 20 per cent of the population but 100 per cent of our future and if 10 per cent of our future is to benefit from new schemes to stretch intellectually able pupils, then what percentage of our population will have cause to be grateful for Mr Blunkett's announcement yesterday on Excellence in Education?

Examinees may not use a calculator, incidentally, given that mental arithmetic is part of the new numeracy strategy, and is to be restored from September. I can't answer my own question, incidentally, which would presumably mean that, were I at school, I would not be plucked from the class to be given extra lessons in calculus.

On the other hand I might be deemed to be so disadvantaged that I qualified for special needs teaching, or become so agitated by my failure that I was eventually chosen for one of the disruptive learning units that the government also proposes setting up.

Tory MPs looked a little baffled too yesterday, faced with the conundrum of how to attack the Government for spending more money on educating disadvantaged children.

As Mr Blunkett reminded MPs, the government had promised to modernise the comprehensive principle and yesterday he explained that this consisted of smuggling a miniaturised grammar school in through the back door of selected inner-city comprehensives.

Being a bit of a slow-streamer when it comes to education policy I couldn't immediately understand how this programme of turbo-boosting certain schools was to be carried out - it seemed to involve a complicated set of overlapping zones and frameworks that took me back to the dizzying enigmas of the Venn diagram. But one thing was clear - gifted pupils were to be stretched. Mr Blunkett said this quite a lot, confident that child-stretching was one of those projects that no one could decently oppose.

What was less transparent was how the elasticity of the child was to be established without testing. Obviously no one would want the wrong kind of child to be picked out and an unpleasant snapping incident to take place.

Tory MPs couldn't work out either how selection both would and would not be part of the system. Even Labour MPs seemed loyally confused, in truth. After David Willetts had asked for an assurance that bright children wouldn't be bused about to get their specialist treatment, and after Mr Blunkett had scornfully delivered it, Eddie O'Hara stood up, furrow on his brow, to ask how the one school in his area that taught Latin could supply it to every eager pupil in Knowsley. Dennis Skinner then conjugated the verb amo, to love - proving unruly elements could be returned to the mainstream with the help of sympathetic mentoring.

Mr Blunkett seemed cheered by this but then he was in celebratory mood anyway - he celebrated particular schools, he celebrated diversity, he celebrated the weekend schools set up by many black parents. He even "rejoiced" in a supportive inquiry from Michael Colvin, the Conservative member for Romsey. The only thing he execrated, in fact, was wealthy parents who lived in "leafy suburbs", the last phrase emerging with unexpected vigour in response to a question from John Wilkinson. It was as if the Minister had meant only to clear his throat but accidentally let rip a belch of Old Labour class hatred.

Julie Kirkbride, wearing a skirt that would have got her sent home by any self-respecting girls' school, responded with similar stridency - inviting him to support the principle of grammar school selection. Mr Blunkett wouldn't - he knows grammar schools have to be ground up very small if Labour MPs are to swallow them without choking.