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Education and Skills Bill

I am grateful to the Select Committee Chairman for assuring us that he is not going to roll over on any of these issues and that he will continue to adopt the robust position that he has on this and other issues. I would say to him that the Department's own research also seems to be catching up on this issue raised in the Select Committee report compiled by him and his colleagues back in 2004. As well as identifying that some existing unfair practices needed to be done away with, the report noted the quite significant increase in percentage terms in the use of the power to select by aptitude. Some hon. Members may be surprised to know that it is not only the schools defined as specialist schools that have the power to select by aptitude, as any maintained school that considers itself to have a specialism is able to select in that way. It is interesting to note the extent to which that power for secondary schools to select by aptitude has grown over the past few years. In 2000, only 1.3 per cent. of schools used that power, which had grown to 3 per cent. by 2001 and was up to 4 per cent. in 2006. As the number of specialist schools grows, of course, the power to select by aptitude grows with it. The Government say that they do not know how many schools exercise their freedom to select by aptitude, but it looks from the data as if the proportion of children within our schools system who are selected by aptitude is now larger than the number selected by ability through the grammar school system. The latest data for grammar schools show that about 4.7 per cent. of the school cohort are selected by ability. If selection by aptitude has continued to grow since 2006, we will be very close to that figure.