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Education and Skills Bill

My hon. Friend is right: that is exactly the position. Constituents of mine may be sitting at home now planning to start families and, for that reason, worrying about the state of their local schools, but they will have no vote. Others with young children who are not yet old enough to attend one of the feeder schools, but who will certainly attend one in the next few years, will not be able to sign the petition. It is impossible to know which of the 2 million people who live in Kent will be entitled to sign it. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that we need referendums to avoid selection, but he must give me a fair chance to go out and convince my constituents that they should sign a petition—and even after 44,000 signatures have been obtained, the referendum will still have to be organised. All I ask is for my right hon. Friend, if he does not want me to support new clause 18, to assure me that he will look at the rules and make it at least conceivable that referendums can be held in areas such as Kent, so that their schools can be brought within the family that will be created by new clause 14 and benefit from the excellent work that he has done in trying to improve admissions procedures. One issue that will remain in Kent if the 11-plus continues, either with or without a referendum, is the expression of preference. The county council and those who support grammar schools want pupils to make their choices when they know whether they have passed the 11-plus. That means that those who pass are given first choice of grammar school, while those who fail are given first choice of another school. It prevents the other schools—academies such as the wonderful Marlowe academy in Ramsgate, in which the Government have invested such huge amounts—from creating a genuinely comprehensive ethos, because there is no way of ensuring that the parents and children who are given first choice of that school are genuinely committed to comprehensive education. Some of us do believe in comprehensive education. I did not put my children through the selective system because I do not believe in it, and there are other parents like me out there. I should have thought that we should be given preference when it comes to selecting schools that genuinely want to adopt a comprehensive structure, but we are given no such preference, because the county council wants to fiddle the selection procedure so that those who want to attend grammar schools are effectively given two first choices. New clause 14 will give the adjudicator power to stop that, and to make clear rules giving people an opportunity to build genuine comprehensive schools in my area. I fully support what the Government are doing. I merely ask them to show some sympathy in the framing of the rules for the ballot on selection, and to offer my constituents a reasonable prospect that they will be free to choose how they want education to develop in Kent at some point in the future.