As for moving away from recruitment based on exam grades, it was Milburn's government of manic quantifiers that made a religion of grades – a boon to selective academies, pushy parents and private tutors.
There is also a non-selective academy with a "grammar stream" in Sevenoaks.
Options in a paper expected to be published on Monday will include: forcing new selective schools to take a minimum proportion of pupils from lower income households requiring them to establish a new non-selective free school, or a primary feeder school in an area with a high density of lower income households requiring them to sponsor an existing underperforming, non-selective academy school.
'What do you want to earn money at?' Though 83, Shirley Conran is far too savvy to ask anything as old-fashioned as, 'What do you want to be when you grown up?' The bestselling novelist and self-proclaimed Superwoman-turned-maths education campaigner is sitting in the middle of a circle of 13- and 14-year-olds at Langley Park School for Girls, a non-selective academy in Bromley, south-east London.
As head teacher of Rugby High School, Charlotte Martens has decided to join forces with a nearby non-selective academy to form one organisation running both schools.
In a special Commons debate, Mr Johnson, a former pupil of Dartford Boys Grammar School, said: "In Dartford we have first rate non-selective academies, one of which is the most over-subscribed school in Kent.
There is too much choice – state, private, selective, religious, academy, home-schooling, wolves – and they all come loaded with political and social baggage.
Non-selective Wellington academy, 40 miles away on the edge of Salisbury plain, is also housed in an impressive building, but has a diverse intake, including many children of families living in army barracks nearby.
Her son, aged 18, was invited by Sir William Borlase's Grammar School, a selective state-funded academy school in Buckinghamshire, on a week-long politics trip to Washington DC and New York for £1,800.
Flixton Girls Schooll is a non-selective sports specialist academy school, for girls aged 11 16.
