---

Education and Skills Bill

I shall not detain the House for long because it has heard my views on the subject on numerous occasions, but I shall continue to bang away at it until something is done. I fully support what the Government are attempting to do. The rules on admissions procedures are difficult to understand and lead to many anomalies and controversies in local areas. Schools are obviously trying to get around the existing set of rules in some cases and suffering as a consequence in others. The Government have acted correctly in trying to set out rules that will govern admissions procedures around the country. I have no problem if, in doing that, they followed recommendations of the Select Committee, as my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) said. All I ask is that that same fairness—the same set of criteria—be applied to the children of my constituency in South Thanet. South Thanet is in Kent, and in Kent the educational reforms of the past 50 years have effectively not happened. We still have exactly the same education system as we had in the 1960s when the then Labour Government started to legislate to create comprehensives. We have grammar schools on the one hand and secondary moderns on the other. The county council can call the secondary moderns high schools and non-selective schools to its heart's content, but they are, in effect, secondary modern schools. The situation has improved slightly in recent years as the result of the creation of academies that are genuinely determined to create a comprehensive ethos. One or two schools have tried to do that, but we cannot create a genuine comprehensive school in a selective area. The two do not work together. The simple fact of the matter is that most parents in my constituency believe that the grammar schools are better than the secondary moderns. I take a different view. The grammar schools in my constituency—there are four of them—are very good. I have no criticism of them as schools; I just do not believe that the children who attend them do as well as they would if they were to attend genuine comprehensive schools in a setting that can support their individual strengths and weaknesses and give them access to a wider curriculum. That is my personal view. I do not want to impose it on all the parents in my constituency. I genuinely believe that the Government are right to say that we should get rid of selection in a selective area only by holding a referendum; I just want to have the referendum. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor), who has tabled new clause 20, would I think argue—he will speak for himself in a moment if he manages to catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker—that the simple fact of the matter is that we are not going to get referendums to abolish selection, so it should be abolished, full stop. He does not want to put me, for the first time in my political career, into the Lobby to vote against my Government. I certainly do not want to have to do that, and I hope not to have to support his new clause. The thing that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State can say to me that will stop me doing that is that he recognises the problems of selective areas, will look at the rules that govern whether an area such as Kent can have a referendum, and will ensure that they are fair and that it is practical to have them. The rules as they stand would require me and people like me who share my views to get together a petition of more than 44,000 people, because the rules say that it is necessary to get a proportion of the entire county, covering all the feeder schools and the secondary schools. That is not based on a catchment area around a single school, as it is in some parts of the country. We would need to get 44,000 signatures on a petition. Each entry would have to include the name of the person signing the petition, the name of the child, the school that the child attends, the relationship of the person signing the petition to that child, that person's name and address, and the name and address of the child. All of that information has to be obtained for every one of the 44,000 people and all of it has to be provided in a vacuum, because the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Data Protection Act 1998 prevent people from getting access to the names of all the people who are entitled to sign the petition.