Selection unlikely for majority of schools

The Prime Minister wants us to believe he is about to give academic selection its biggest boost since his party came to power in 1979. Details will be released in a consultation paper to be published next week.

Bring back grammar schools has been the cry of the Conservative right ever since Margaret Thatcher repented over closing so many.

In a speech last September John Major aimed to mark out Conservative education policies from those of Labour, which opposes the selection of pupils by ability, by promising the heads of grant-maintained schools much more freedom to pick their pupils and to maintain the "ethos" of their schools.

The Government circular which says schools should avoid interviewing pupils would be revised, he said, so that heads and governors of popular schools would have more say in deciding who they admitted.

Labour and the local authorities accused the Government of opening the door to social selection. "Maintaining a school's ethos," they said, was just another way of letting oversubscribed schools ensure that they confined their intake to nice middle-class pupils.

So is the return of the grammar school at hand? It is not. As the Department for Education and Employment said yesterday: "There is no question of selection returning to all schools."

Outside 1,100 grant-maintained schools, the Prime Minister's proposals will have little effect. The 23,000 or so schools which remain with local authorities will have only slightly more opportunity to select pupils than they do now.

Local authority schools are allowed by law to select 10 per cent of their pupils for special aptitude in sport, drama, music, technology or modern languages. Gillian Shephard, the Secretary of State for Education, said last November that there would be a small increase in these schools to 15 per cent.

But local authorities will remain firmly in control of the admissions policies of their schools. These will have no more opportunity than they do at present to select pupils whether by entrance exam or interview. As one Whitehall source said: "We are moving the goal posts slightly, not digging up the pitch."

Even for grant-maintained schools, the change will be comparatively small. They may be able to become selective without having to get the permission of the Secretary of State.

A number have already applied for and obtained that permission. The process is not difficult. Nor is the promise to make it easier for church and grant-maintained schools to interview would-be applicants likely to have much effect.

The circular barring interviews to determine academic ability which the Government intends to replace was introduced two years ago after education department officials discovered that schools were selecting pupils on a wide variety of unfathomable criteria.

As a circular, it had no statutory force. Schools such as the London Oratory, where Tony Blair, the Opposition leader, sends his son, carried on selecting pupils partly by interview as they had always done.

The department said: "Interviews already play a key role in many denominational and selective schools and there is evidence that some schools would like to make more use of them."

The present circular makes it clear that pupils should not be chosen by lot, but a court ruled that Lancashire County Council could use a lottery to settle admissions for one of its schools.

Most parents are less concerned about the return of grammar schools than about the difficulty of getting their children into the school of their choice. The new consultation paper will do nothing to change that.

Leading article, page 16