MPs set to challenge school plans

Schools should stay under local authority control, the MPs say

Tony Blair is facing a challenge to his plans for self-governing "trust" schools from his own backbenchers.

Up to 30 Labour MPs will next week launch alternative plans to the government's Education White Paper.

The group fears allowing schools to set their own admission policies will discriminate against poorer children.

Education secretary Ruth Kelly has ruled out a return to academic selection and said safeguards would be in place to ensure fairness.

'Concern'

The Labour MPs, said to belong to the mainstream of the party, back many of the government proposals on education due to come before parliament early next year.

But they are against allowing schools to set their own admissions policies, letting them act more independently of local education authorities.

If Blair is not careful he will end up like Hitler in the last days of the Reich, moving around armies that don't exist Peter Kilfoyle, Labour MP Interview: Peter Kilfoyle

They are also angry that Mr Blair is expected to use the votes of Conservative MPs to get the proposals through parliament.

Former Labour minister Alan Whitehead said there was "very widespread concern" among the party's backbenchers over the proposed reforms, which he said were based on a failed US experiment with "charter schools".

He told BBC Radio 4's World at One: "It is an experiment that seems not to have worked in the US.

"Far from working, it has actually made the divide between better-off and worse-off kids in those schools more pronounced."

He added: "I think a lot of MPs would have difficulty in voting for the White Paper as it stands now. I am in the process, with a number of other people, of trying to look at ways in which the White Paper can be strengthened and I think that is the way forward.

"I think there is very widespread concern among very many people that, for all the good intentions suggested for this particular way forward, the end result would actually be a potentially much worse outcome."

Aggressive

Critics have claimed that anything up to 100 Labour MPs could vote against the White Paper proposals.

Mr Blair and his education ministers have been holding one-to-one talks with backbench MPs in the hope of heading off a possible rebellion on the scale of last month's defeat on anti-terrorism legislation.

Reading MP Martin Salter last week resigned his junior government role in protest at what he called the aggressive way the policy was being promoted to backbenchers.

Former education minister Peter Kilfoyle has also warned of a widespread rebellion on the issue, telling the BBC News website Mr Blair risked ending up "like Hitler in the last days of the Reich, moving around armies that don't exist".