Schools Cannot Be Allowed to Choose Their Own Pupils

This is education week, as Tony Blair draws up the battle lines today. This is round two in the great public services debate that will shape the next election.

Last week, on health, the Conservatives were left to salvage the remains of their policy from underneath Labour's steamroller. The Tory plan to let rich patients take money out of the NHS to contribute towards private treatment was a quickly scribbled suicide note. A BBC poll yesterday delivered the coup de grace, finding that a great majority of the public are against.

Now here comes education, and Labour could roll right over Michael Howard's schools policy, too. Or it could if Tony Blair emphasises the broad red lines that should separate the two parties. There are misleading similarities. Both promise the ubiquitous "choice". Both promise to free schools from the supposedly dead hand of local authorities. Both will give headteachers unimagined freedoms. But there any similarity should end.

The Tories will encourage parents to take £5,500 out of state coffers to pay for private education. It will be less contentious than their NHS plan since it forbids its use on any school with fees higher than this. So, with private schools costing £9,000 a year and new ones needing capital to set up, few new schools would emerge to take up the offer.

One parent-pleasing Tory policy may be the promise to let headteachers throw out any disruptive child, relegating many to a sin bin.

But the great defining difference between the parties reopens that old fundamental rift: the Tories will give all schools complete control over whom they admit, selecting on any basis they wish. Popular schools can turn themselves into grammar schools by eliminating low-achievers. They can set entrance exams and grow to any size as cash follows the child.

In no time, a rigid pecking order of schools would be established. As the worst sink faster than the best rise, overall results would fall. Areas that still have grammar schools - Kent a noted example - have worse total results. Yet again, the Conservatives have judged the public mood wrongly: opinion polls on selection show most oppose a selective sheep-and-goats-at-11 system. Children would find themselves sitting an array of different tests, set up for failure as they apply for rafts of schools.

So secondary schools are the battleground and selection will be the defining issue. That makes the language Tony Blair uses today crucially important. It will indicate Labour's true intent. What lies behind its confusing plethora of types of school? Is it really an unspoken desire to let schools select, imagining it would stop the middle classes fleeing the inner city? Or is it genuinely about choice between different types of school, all with fair admissions systems? Unless that fairness is made a lot clearer than it is at present, Labour risks its education policy sounding like a covert version of the Tories'. Blair needs to clear the air today.

Today's big announcement is that every community school will be free to become a foundation school, controlling its own budget, appointing its own governors, free of local government control, organising its own admissions. Currently, community schools (ordinary comprehensives) are 70% of the total, all due to become specialist schools, some taking up two special-isms. Crucially, under the current system, most do not select and their admissions are reasonably fair. Only 10% of specialist schools do select for "aptitude". So when they all become foundations, will there be a better way to stop many of them emulating the schools currently free of local authorities and selecting by stealth?

At present the 30% of secondary schools that are free-floating include the many church schools, some existing foundation schools and the 12 new city academies, shortly to become 200. Research shows that half of these schools do select. According to Professor Anne West of the LSE, some ask primary schools for reports and some meet prospective parents. For church schools, religious observance itself screens out the most dysfunctional families, and home addresses speak volumes. All schools are supposed to obey a code of practice requiring that they take pupils on a "clear, fair and objective" criteria. But this code is not a strict set of rules; parents cannot make challenges under it. Although some schools select quite overtly, very few are ever brought to account for it. One example of how lax the law is: all schools should take looked-after children (children in care) as their top priority. Surveys show that virtually none obey that edict. Deselection of the riskiest children is common.

In the inner cities, astute parents only need slight hints to gather together in the same schools. Ability to screen out the worst sets up a huge advantage over neighbouring schools, which sink as they take in more than their fair share. Although officially the 200 city academies are destined for areas of educational failure, "bazookas" to shake up disaster zones with spectacular new buildings and new teachers, their desirability will make it easy for them to choose their pupils. In the US, charter schools - on which academies are based - keep a good class mix only where strict regulation of their intake is enforced.

So if every school is to be a foundation, will there be a better-regulated, fair admissions system? London - the worst hotspot for these tensions - used to have all children banded at age 11 so that every school received its fair share of each ability band. It worked. It may limit some parental choice, but it was by no means incompatible.

Tony Blair would no doubt shudder at something so rigid. But he should think again. There are times when each individual citizen, acting sensibly, strives to get the best for him or herself, but in the process produces a system worse for all. If Blair is worrying about the middle classes, consider this: any parent will rightly want a school where there are enough other middle-class children so that their own is not a freak. Fear of ending in a sink school causes flight. But if every school were guaranteed enough high-scoring 11-year-olds, there would be less panic, not more. This is not egalitarian dogma but good sense.

Labour has done well on education - but obsesses over structure and governance. Admissions systems matter more to most parents. If schools are allowed to cheat, even at the margins, it will end in dividing schools more sharply with more, not fewer, bad schools.

If Labour wants results to go up, most improvements will come from the lowest achievers. The top can't be squeezed much more. If turning a blind eye to admissions cheating means all the top children gather together while other schools sink, then results will go backwards. Choice is good, so long as it doesn't slide into schools choosing pupils. Labour has the high ground over the Tories on this, but only if the prime minister guarantees a fair admissions system for all children.