Academies Bill [Lords]

I thank my hon. Friend for that helpful intervention. Yes, that is what I am saying, and I have seen it across the country. Perhaps such a view is unfashionable in this day and age, when everything is about selection and performance, but we are forgetting the ordinary children from ordinary families. Do they not have the right to be with ““the very bright child”” in a school that provides excellent educational facilities? Why cannot the poor child from Farnworth or from the Newbury estate in my constituency go to a school attended by children from Chorley New road, a posh part of the constituency? We need everybody to be together. Children from less well-off backgrounds, whose home lives might make it difficult for them to perform well academically, need to be in schools where they can get help and where everyone's standards are raised. I know that this is an old-fashioned way of thinking—perhaps it is not—and is not the conventional thinking now, but I find it surprising that everybody is sleepwalking into and justifying this system of selection.