The recent publication of the Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners marked a new stage in the Government’s ambitious and comprehensive programme to transform English education.    

The tone is set by Charles Clarke’s excellent foreword.  At last someone has written an introduction to a New Labour document with a minimum of anodyne platitude and and a maximum of hard analysis and strong policy.  And not a verbless sentence in sight. The dramatic expansion of childcare places; the new focus on excellence and enjoyment in primary schools; the radical initiatives for adult learners and the unprecedented emphasis on widening participation in our universities: these are policies that we should be shouting from the rooftops.   

But there is a hole in the centre of the document. A giant piece of the jigsaw is still missing. Exactly what are the implications of ‘Independent Specialist Schools’?  Exactly what are the ‘unnecessary external constraints’ that secondary schools  will be freed from?  

And how do we move forward to the brave new world of caring and sharing partnerships when secondary headteachers are incentivised to compete even more ruthlessly against each other? 

This debate is not just about specialist schools and academies. These are, in themselves, brilliant concepts. The specialist schools programme is helping to drive up standards year on year.  Let’s gloss over whether it’s the effect of the specialism or simply the rebranding, the morale boosting and the extra £500,000 per school.  But if it’s working, let it work.    

And purists might have preferred to see an evaluation of the first handful of academies before increasing their numbers tenfold.  However, where everything else has been tried and failed, perhaps things can only get better. 

But the real issue is not the name of our secondary schools but their admissions policy. And that’s why July’s report on Secondary School Admissions from the Education and Skills Select Committee is so important.    

In England today we have one of the most divisive systems of secondary education in the western world. In most of our major towns and cities, and many of our shire counties, our schools are disfigured by a deep seated educational apartheid.  

In England today allocation to secondary school determines educational success to a greater degree than in almost any other OECD country. Our current arrangements have led to a bare knuckle fight between middle class parents desperate to get their children into a good school. And a good school is, almost universally, defined as one that has fewer children on free school meals; fewer children with special needs; and fewer children for whom English is not the first language.  

This is the apartheid of parental choice.  Parental choice, Tory style, has delivered choice to parents with the confidence, the contacts, the knowledge and the resources to transport their children long distances to school. For the rest, there is the merely the opportunity to express a preference. And that usually means putting up with what’s left.  We are building a society, in Professor Sally Tomlinson’s immortal phrase, of ‘smug winners’ and ‘resentful losers’.  

How can we then be so surprised at the levels of social exclusion and the growing disaffection of large numbers of young people from the political process? Parental choice, Tory style, means that it’s the schools that choose the children, not the parents that choose the school. They do it explicitly by selecting for ability.  

They do it explicitly by testing for ‘aptitude’.  And they do it implicitly by a hundred subtle devices, ranging from the ticking of boxes for religious commitment to the preference given to siblings or the children of teachers and governors. The ingenuity of some headteachers and chairs of governors in keeping out of school the children they would simply prefer not to teach is unlimited.    

And this brings us back to the Five Year Strategy.  If the Government is serious about allowing all secondary schools to acquire Foundation status, this means they all become their own admissions authorities. Three thousand secondary schools each with the power to decide who to let through the door. Exactly what the Tories want.  

Quite apart from the chaos and the cost of administration, transport, appeals and adjudication (incredibly, the DfES doesn’t keep records of these costs, although they amount to hundreds of millions of pounds), there is the question of parental choice.  

How can we be serious about putting parental choice at the heart of school admissions if we are prepared to let every school determine its own admissions policy and explore ever more ingenious ways of keeping out those children who won’t help its position in  the league tables? 

Fortunately, there is now a chance to build a fairer admissions policy. The Five Year Strategy itself contains the seeds of something better if the Government has the guts to grasp the nettle.  LEA coordinated admission arrangements for all schools from 2005;  new networks of primary schools; smoother transitions for secondary transfer; frequent references to ‘fair admissions’;  all this is hugely positive.      

But it’s not enough to talk about ‘no return to selection’ when selection is already so entrenched.  The Government has to decide, and it has to decide in the next few weeks, if it wants to preside over a system of Independent Specialist Schools in which the strong simply get stronger on the back of their better buildings, bigger playing fields and better access to sponsors, while the weak gradually fall even further behind.   

If we are to avoid yet more  segregation, by social class and by ethnic group, greater autonomy for schools must be counterbalanced by  greater regulation of admissions  designed to maximise the choice of all parents---not just those who know how to jump through the hoops.  

Specialist Schools, Grammar Schools, Academies, High Schools, Conservatoires---call them what you will. What matters is that we build a system in which all schools have a balanced intake. And that means ending selection by ability and aptitude in all their devious forms.     

The Select Committee Report provides the missing piece of the jigsaw of the Five Year Strategy.  It throws down a challenge to the Government to tackle a running sore in our schools policy.  We must decide between Tory style parental choice in which all schools choose their children. Or real parental choice in which every child has an equal chance.  

In a Cabinet where so few members have a strong power base amongst the Party faithful, there is a unique opportunity for the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, and the Prime Minister, to complete the educational revolution started with Circular 10/65 and finally deliver a policy so dear to the heart of virtually every Labour Party member in the land.    

This article appeared in The Parliamentary Monitor in September 2004.