A committee of MPs has slammed the government's policy on school admissions.

A report from the Commons education select committee said the current policy was driven by "fashion and expediency rather than intellectual rigour".

The MPs said that ministers had failed to deliver on David Blunkett's 1995 pledge to the Labour conference: "Read my lips - no more selection, either by examination or by interview, under a Labour government."

Attacking the gap between rhetoric and action, the cross-party committee said that the number of grammar school pupils has risen since 1997.

And they noted that government-backed specialist schools will be able to select up to 10 per cent of their intake by "aptitude" in key areas.

Ministers had failed to show how it was possible to assess for aptitude but not ability, said the report.

"A government that permits the continuing expansion of selection, by ability or by aptitude, can only be understood to approve of both the practice of selection and its outcomes," said the report.

"If that is the position of the present government it should be publicly stated.

"We believe it is time for ministers to engage in an informed debate about the role of selection in secondary education and its impact across the education system as a whole.

"The government needs to explain how it reconciles its insistence that there will be no return to selection with its willingness to retain and increase selection where it already exists.

"Without an honest and robust engagement with this issue the government's policy on selection will continue to appear ad hoc and without principle."

Report reaction

Responding to the findings, NUT general secretary Steve Sinnott said the MPs were "right to be concerned about the possibility of selection by stealth".

"It is the government’s obsession with so-called choice that has rendered toothless the code of practice on admissions," he said.

"Local authorities and schools are asked the impossible when schools are encouraged to define themselves by designation rather than their ability to work together.

"The range of schools proposed by the government will benefit those who can fight their way through a mass of varying admissions schemes yet leave those most in need of support to flounder."

And Chris Keates, acting general secretary of the NASUWT teachers' union, said the current admissions system was "stacked against parents and pupils from low socio-economic backgrounds".

"It lacks clarity and is frustrating, non-inclusive and inequitable," she said.

"The committee is entirely justified in asking the government to explain the contradiction between its aim of creating a fair and equal education system for all, with the continued development of an elitist system."