TONY Blair signed the death warrant for comprehensives with his announcement that "bog standard" state schools are to be axed. As an ex-comprehensive school pupil I believe that you cannot show that the brightest children do best in selective schools.

By getting rid of comprehensive schools, the government has to face all the misery which they will cause to the children rejected and made to feel failures.

Everyone is too polite to say "secondary modern" these days, but that is what the schools are which take the children who fail to get into grammars -- schools whose pupils have been branded as failures and know it.

Talk to any head in one of these schools and they will tell you that their first and hardest task is to restore pupils' self esteem, to show them that they can succeed.

Do we have to put three quarters of our children through that in order to give the best to the best? No. The most able pupils do just as well in comprehensives as in grammar schools. In fact, overall standards go down in areas which still have grammar schools. If we axed Britain's 161 grammars, in those areas there would be an overnight leap in standards.

Comprehensives aren't "bog standard." Each is different, treating each pupil as an individual and getting the very best out of every pupil.

Others that have buckled under enormous pressures need help from the government, not sneers for a cheap headline as we approach a general election. When you select, you reject the poor. In comprehensives, nearly one in five children is poor enough to get free school meals. In grammar schools, it's just over one in 50.

The real reason people want to be rid of comprehensives is that they want their children segregated from poor children whose life chances are so much less. They feel confident that they are middle class enough to make sure their own children rank among the successes. Some poorer person's child will be the failure.

Of course, selective schools get good exam results. If you pick those pupils you think are going to do the best, you're bound to do well at exam time. It tells you nothing at all about their teaching.

The grammar schools which fail to get really brilliant results (and there are many) are the schools which really need investigating.

Comprehensives should be strengthened and supported as the bedrock of an education system that does the best for all our children.

ROGER LIVESEY, Briery Hey, Clayton Brook, Chorley.