EVERY secondary headteacher in England will get the chance to hear in detail the Government’s plans for a “post-comprehensive” school system.

Ministers are to embark on a series of meet-the-profession roadshows this autumn as they seek to spell out their policies, which focus on the expansion of specialist secondaries and creation of so-called “advanced specialists”. All secondary heads will be invited.

Education secretary Estelle Morris told The TES this week that teachers often proved far more supportive of Labour’s plans for schools when the Government had a chance to sell its vision to them directly.

Ministers are proposing anew structure for secondary schooling: a five-rung “ladder” of secondaries in 0which the best specialist chools would help those lower down to improve.

But this came under fire in Blackpool. Kate Griffin, president of the Secondary Heads Association, told a fringe meeting that the Government was creating a new hierarchy of schools.

She warned that city academies, new state-funded independent schools designed to transform standards in the inner-cities with the help of millions of pounds of government and private cash, could damage surrounding secondaries.

She said: “Some schools are anxious that, having done tremendously well to make improvements, they now find that the school next door is getting a massive capital injection.”

But Ms Morris said in her conference speech, that the academies were a new model for schools in areas where everything else had failed.

Responding to her speech, Eamonn O’Kane, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said: “One can seriously ask whether the principle of comprehensive education and the principle of equality will be preserved.

“There is a danger that a hierarchy of schools will be created and a danger that could lead to some schools becoming selective.”