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Education and Skills Bill

I welcome the thrust of what the Government are trying to achieve in new clause 14. I have been a member of what was the Education and Skills Committee and is now the Select Committee on Children, Families and Schools for nearly all the past seven years, and I played a small part in the writing of the 2004 report on admissions, which has been mentioned a number of times. The report helped to prompt the Government to improve admission procedures, which they now intend to improve further to prevent them from being exploited for purposes of covert selection. Over the years, partly as a result of our current inquiry into diversity in schools, the Select Committee has received copious academic research evidence on the effects of overt and covert selection and the way in which it boosts some schools at the expense of the majority. I disagree with the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who seemed to suggest that we should ignore all evidence of the negative effects of selection of various kinds and pretend that it makes no real difference, because what matters above all else is the ethos of the school. There is, of course, the ethos of the sink school. The most famous, of which everyone has heard, is the Ridings school. Someone who knows Halifax extremely well is Alice Mahon, who was Member of Parliament for Halifax until she retired at the 2005 election. Writing in the Yorkshire Post in March, she pointed out that Halifax had eight secondary schools: two grammars that cream off the top 20, 30, or 40 per cent. of the ability range, two faith schools that select in a different way, and four ““ordinary schools”” to take the rest of the pupils. For whatever reason, over the years the Ridings fell to the bottom of the pecking order. Its ethos was that of the sink school. I know that that is not a term that we are encouraged to use nowadays, although it was in common usage when I started teaching in 1979, but that fact that it is frowned on does not alter the fact that such schools exist. There are schools that lose out badly because of the effects of both covert and overt selection. We see that on a county-wide basis in places such as Kent and Lincolnshire, where the grammar school system still reigns. Although new clause 14 is a step in the right direction, it does not go far enough, for two reasons. First, it leaves academies out of the equation. That is why I support new clause 18, which was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws), and why I tabled amendments (a) to (n) thereto, along with the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor). I simply cannot understand why academies should be free to use covert methods of selection, some of which the Secretary of State described a few weeks ago when he talked about the abuse of admissions procedures, while other schools in the state system are not.