AMID a mixed report today on East Lancashire secondary schools' performances in the national education league tables - with half better than average and the rest less so - one thing stands out clearly: that selection works.

That may seem overly obvious when our top trio in the tables - and ranking among the best 200 schools in the country - are Blackburn's eminent private school, Westholme, and the region's remaining grammar schools, Clitheroe Royal and Bacup and Rawtenstall, all of which attract the most able pupils.

But if it is to be expected that schools which can pick bright and motivated pupils will do best in gaining the higher-grade GCSE results, the stimulating effect in other schools of such winnowing, even on a lesser scale, now appears in the tables as a device for improvement.

For we find across the country that the 400 specialist schools which the government have chosen as a model for modernising comprehensive education have improved their results at twice the rate of other state schools.

These are the ones that have developed out of the technology colleges started by the Conservatives and which are allowed to select some ten per cent of their pupils by aptitude and, now under Labour, have to share facilities with neighbouring schools. Indeed, we see the improving effect that this brings to the whole school in the major improvement in the results at Blackburn's Queen's Park High.

Last year it was named as the worst school in the area, but since gaining technology college status it has improved the number of its pupils gaining top GCSE grades by 10 per cent .

That is also the rate of improvement that these schools have attained nationwide over the past five years, against the five per cent of other comprehensives.

Surely, this influence is something that deserves recognition and encouragement rather than the teaching unions' complaints about a new elite of 'semi-grammar' schools being created.

And if the few remaining fully-selective grammar schools are setting the standard for all and the government's partial employment of their methods is producing improvements in other schools, what - other than blinkered ideology- is the case for doing away with selection altogether?

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