I doubt whether creating schools with no community accountability, unclear admissions standards, potentially selective admissions codes, and a plethora of governance and financial management challenges , is going to serve the children of anywhere. There are many questions and few answers about how schools can simply take on the additional responsibilities currently provided centrally by local authorities. We are probably talking about corporate sponsorship and donors such as Harris who are already prevalent in Southwark in the long term as any school will have to provide its own financial support for a very long time indeed.

This is not the time to start expensive and uncertain politically driven experiments with education. We cannot afford it. Change for changes sake is expensive . A new quango has already been set by the ConDems at considerable cost with no certain outcome. Labour had a lot of weaknesses, and I really couldn't stand Ed Balls, and I;m not a fan of excessive testing, but from what I can see there have been a lot of positive outcomes from the work and spending plans of the last Labour government and many schools have really been turned around. The vast majority of state primaries today provide an excellent education which is why so many are rated as excellent by Ofsted. I really therefore resent the ConDem pillage of these schools and their attempts to siphon them off . I do not therefore see the need to fully revise the system in order to change what is working well overall.

I don't know how old the consultation referred to by Michael was but if true then its clearly factually incorrect , but that does not mean an entire new school is automatically justified and that school should be outside the system.

This government is proposing and fast tracking many changes within the education system that I as a parent do not feel are appropriate or beneficial to my childrens future. It is time that parents awoke fast to these changes and decided whether these are reasonable or not and if not, to take action before its too late. There seems to be a pretence at consultation but the schools can decide themselves who is to be consulted. Schools are there for the community, not just current pupils, and to have this sort of consultation system is a farce.

A school which fails to address and support the varied needs of pupils and which may even have to resort to cherry picking children to the detriment of those with more complex needs, will not serve our children and effectively will cancel out any alleged benefit from the Montessori system.