February 20, 2001 10:01: TONY Blair's plans to revolutionise secondary school education have been met with a mixture of puzzlement, cynicism and pleasure by the three main political parties.

The Conservatives were pleased by the ideas, Labour seem puzzled, while the Lib Dems said it was just an election ploy by the Prime Minister and the plans would probably never see the light of day.

Perhaps the group most disappointed by the plans was Bucks Parents for Comprehensive Education.

The group wants to see the end of the 11-plus and grammar schools in the county and had thought a Labour Government would be on their side. It has until the end of the summer to get the 18,000 plus signatures necessary on a petition to trigger a county-wide ballot calling for full comprehensive education to be introduced in Buckinghamshire. The county's 13 grammar schools are among about 160 remaining in the country as a whole.

One of its members, Malcolm Horne, was scathing about Mr Blair's plans to allow more schools to specialise in certain subjects and to select some of their pupils, to create more beacon schools and city academies, to let private companies run schools and to encourage schools backed by religious groups.

He said the Prime Minister had a massive ignorance of comprehensive education when he suggested that comprehensive schools could hold pupils back. They were there for all children, he said.

Mr Horne said: "The Prime Minister doesn't know and wouldn't know because he has never been to a state school or taught in a comprehensive school."

Mr Blair has said that schools will be selecting on the basis of a particular aptitude not general ability so that's not like grammar school selection. Mr Horne said it was wrong to select at 11 in principle.

But he said this difference of opinion should not give any comfort to Buckinghamshire County Council or the grammar school supporters, because that campaign would continue.

Cllr Mike Appleyard, county council Tory cabinet member for schools, is a strong supporter of grammar schools. He said that he could he could 'run' with the Blair plans.

Cllr Appleyard said they were things the council was doing anyway, like backing specialist schools and targeting money at schools that needed it most.

He said: "We are pleased that the Labour party has finally realised the importance of identifying where children's strengths are and educating to those strengths.

"They have come round to doing a number of things we have been doing for some years."

Michael Brand (Amersham east) the Lib Dem spokesman on education on the county council said Mr Blair's plans were designed to woo people who might be thinking of going back to the Conservatives at election time.

He didn't think they would come to anything after the election.

The Prime Minister should be concentrating on the quality, pay, and working conditions of teachers, rather than changing structures, he said.

Cllr Brand is a believer in the social value of educating children together and said : "If you create two lots of children at 11 you can't reunite them at the end of their education."

The leader of the Labour group on the county council, Trevor Fowler, (Oakridge and Tinkers Wood) said neither he nor other local Labour people knew much about Mr Blair's plans and wanted more information.

He said something needed to be done to improve the state of many of the country's secondary schools.

But he strongly criticised the plan to encourage schools specialising in one form of religion or another.

"Look at what happened in Northern Ireland," he said, adding that Muslims and Hindus would demand similar support and how could they be denied.

"Before you know where you are you have children divided up."

Neither did he like the idea of private profit-making companies coming in to run schools.

He would not condemn the Prime Minister as having ditched the comprehensive system, saying that comprehensive schools did not all have to be identical.

But Cllr Fowler added: "I am really struggling to understand it all."

By.Margaret Smith