Parishpumpspin wrote: "Your support of a lottery is another manifestation of the simplistic nature of your points however if it worked then I would support it despite the alleged political price because, like removing selection, its more important to advocate measures that work and are consistant with our core principles than to hide behind perceved unpopularity."

No it's not. Advocating measures does worse than nothing if they're not politically feasible and cause us to lose elections. I understand your frustation, parishpumpspin, at the continuing injustice that is selective education in parts of this country. I think I'm right in saying that we all agree that, in an ideal world, there wouldn't be grammar schools, nor would there be "selective comprehensives", admission to which is based on ability to buy an expensive houses or work the system.

But, unfortunately, political reality dictates that we need to pick the battles that we can first. We need to walk before we can run. We need to keep raising standards of state education towards to meet those offered by the best private schools across the board and in all parts of the country. If that means tolerating selective education in a minority of English shires for a few more years, so be it. Unfortunately, the hard evidence that we have points to selective education having a strong popular majority in the areas in which it exists.

So much has been done in the past decade to improve education for the vast majority of children in this country, we can't just throw it away for the sake of an ideological battle that we're not going win (yet).

I'm not asking you to rethink your belief in social justice and in an equally excellent education for all. If more people had such strong beliefs as you, I think the world would be a better place.

What I'm asking you to do is to think again about the means by which this can be acheived. Either we play a long game, gradually making things better in all schools - comprehensive, grammer, Academy and [grimace] faith schools - thereby palpably improving the life chances of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children and empirically demonstrating that selective education is illogical.

Or we play a short game where we watch, with varying degrees of gratification and guilt, Newsnight interviews with frustrated and angry Buckinghamshire parents who can't quite afford private schools taking their kids down to the local comp for the first time halfway through their prepartion for Key Stage 3 exams, but then lose local and national elections and see the Tories come back in to reinstate the Grammars, slash education spending, cut back on Surestart and attempt to reverse the all the gains we've made.

Rome, nor Jerusalem, was built in a day.

[ Parent ]