IT MAY seem odd that while the government is enabling the demise of grammar schools, it now plans to bring creaming off of the brightest pupils to the state comprehensives with "master classes" in their best subjects in specialist schools.

But while this scheme is aimed initially at the inner-city schools, as part of a three-year programme to improve them, it could provide a template for the future that draws in half-and-half fashion from the best aspects of the grammars and the comprehensives. For while comprehensive education has ended the branding of the majority of schoolchildren as failures at the age of 11 and continues to give all an equal start, the ethic of the grammars in targeting elite pupils can hardly be condemned for giving the best opportunity to those who deserve it.

And while some teachers' leaders are now seeing the fuse lit for the abandonment of comprehensive education as the dreaded word "selection" is woven all through this "master classes" scheme, if it is looked on simply as an extension of the streaming that already exists in the comprehensives, then it is hard to understand why it should be opposed.

Certainly, the parents of brighter children living in the inner cities will welcome the opportunity for them to have specialist tuition in their own locality while at the same time the waning attractiveness of inner-city schools is tackled. And though education has been beset by frequent change, there can be no harm in questioning the fundamentals of the comprehensives' exclusion of selection - when it already allows forms of it in the system and, above all, when more than a generation on, its promise of improved standards and opportunity for all has still to be delivered.

This scheme at least deserves evaluation, rather than dogmatic opposition, by teachers.

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