Leader: Rewards for failure no cure for exclusion

Election fever is building and the Labour Party's chronic insecurity, despite a massive lead in the opinion polls, is producing some bizarre policies. In an apparent effort to please middle-class parents, who would rather not pay school fees but who fear "the bog standard comprehensive", they are offering what looks like two tiers of secondary schools in which 40 per cent of children are selected at 11 by parental motivation.

Long-term Labour supporters may be forgiven for feeling disappointed by this apparent abandonment of 60 per cent of young people. The knot is to be pulled tighter by rewarding those universities that have hitherto failed to recruit state-school pupils. They are to have extra money, while those that have succeeded in extending new opportunities to first-generation students are somehow denigrated as not really counting in the crusade to widen social inclusion.

Specialist secondary schools will no doubt make it easier for top-tier universities to fulfil government requirements to increase their state-school intake, but it will do little to broaden their social composition. Meanwhile, higher education should be given more credit for what it achieves already: by this autumn the government expects half of all students to be exempt from fees. The threshold will be family income of £20,000. Already many students are not from poorer families.