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Education and Skills Bill

The hon. Gentleman pre-empts my comments on new clauses 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22, and I shall come to that point in a few minutes. Regardless of the report that informed the Secretary of State's announcement a couple of months ago, this element of unfair admission practices should not have come as a surprise to his Department, not only because of the report that the Select Committee produced a couple of years ago but because of the research commissioned by the Department over the past six months. I refer in particular to the DCSF paper on secondary school admissions, which was commissioned by his Department and bears the departmental imprint. It was released in January 2008 and contained work undertaken by Sheffield Hallam university and by the National Centre for Social Research on behalf of the Department. That research identified some of the unfair practices that new clause 14 seeks to address. It also highlighted other concerns about the way in which the admissions system concentrates educational need in certain establishments but not in others. The findings in the report tally with other parts of the Select Committee's report, to which I will refer in a minute. It stated:"““Procedural non-compliance and covert selection on the part of schools is only a part of the reason for segregated intakes.””" It went on to look at some of the other driving forces behind segregated intakes, including the present aspects of selection in the education system. Some of those aspects have been grandfathered in our system for some time now through grammar schools, but there are other aspects of selection in the system, including selection that has been brought in by this Government since 1997 under the guise of the ability to select by aptitude. That is the issue that new clause 18 seeks to address.