IT WAS with an admonitory tone that Blackburn with Darwen Council's director of education, Mark Pattison, refuted this newspaper's imputations that behind the policy of admissions of pupils to Pleckgate High School lay an element of social engineering.

Amid anger among parents living in the vicinity who had made Pleckgate their first choice on finding their children had been allocated to more-distant schools, we spoke of parental choice losing out to education officials' determination to fill places behind desks at all costs and of middle class children being directed to working class schools.

Nothing of the sort, said Mr Pattison. And he suggested that if we checked the facts we would find that the policy on admissions operated by the now-independent education authority was the same as when the town's schools were run by the county council - and that, basically, the children given preference were those with a brother or sister already at the school their parents had chosen, whether they had special medical, social or welfare needs and, last in order of priority, how near or far away from the school they lived. Thus, the ones not being admitted to the schools their parents had picked were victims only of the law of supply and demand. And, contrary to the "misinformation" put out by the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, there was "no question whatsoever of any form of social engineering in the process."

Yet, if there is misinformation being put out, it is, surely, coming from the education authority - as indicated by the facts that we have ascertained, as Mr Pattison would have us do.

For if there has been no change in policy from the previous year and from that of the previous regime, some quite remarkable differences have nonetheless occurred.

We see that from the two closest primary schools - Lammack and St James' - the 37 admitted to Pleckgate this year are 29 fewer - a fall of more than 40 per cent - than pupils from there last year and that all but eight of them already have brothers or sisters there, leaving only eight who are "new" pupils.

It is peculiar that the law of supply and demand alone can have worked such a contrast in a single year. But it is even more odd that, by contrast, from the two primary schools at least twice as far from Pleckgate - Daisyfield and St Stephen's - the total of 65 admitted to the high school is coincidentally 29 greater than the year before and that 49 are "new" pupils against just 16 who are siblings.

How strange! Yet, it hardly appears so when the facts and figures bear out our suspicion that in all this we see the manipulative pink paws of the socialist levellers who see little wrong on messing with the lives, safety and convenience of children and families in order to impose their own ideals on the community.

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