Jayne Dowle: High-flying academies are fine, but what about the schools left behind?

The closest school for her 11-year-old daughter was a brand spanking new academy, run by an educational trust. It has a fantastic computer suite, excellent sports facilities and a band of enthusiastic teachers.

It also, as my cousin pointed out, has most of the same unruly pupils who attended when it was a failing comprehensive in danger of being closed down by the local authority.

She finally succeeded in getting her daughter, a talented dancer, into a comprehensive with performing arts status.

My cousin is no snob. She is an ordinary mum, a single parent who works in a shop. The ideals of the academy, with its strict uniform and on-site police officer, are high. But she was terrified of her daughter being lost in a vast school, surrounded by kids who didn't want to learn, in an area notorious for gang culture and bullying.

I don't suppose Michael Gove, the new Education Secretary, will ever meet my cousin. But he should. Because there are thousands of parents like her who don't want to be part of his radical proposals for our education system.

They just want a decent school for their children, part of a system that they recognise and understand, and for some overall body to be accountable if there is a problem. To be honest, they are frightened of change. And his proposals go beyond change; they constitute revolution.

On the face of it, yes, Gove's vision for academies and "free schools" sounds like a decent idea. Let independent specialist educational organisations come in and run our schools, and even give parents the opportunity to set up their own. If the education system is in such a mess, then surely it makes sense to give someone else have a go at organising it.

I mean, we parents complain enough about the failure of the Government and local authorities to run schools effectively now, don't we? But at least we know what we are dealing with. And we know that if we have a complaint, there are certain established routes to take to get it sorted.

To me, this idea smacks of offloading a problem that should be the new Government's to sort out, but, in theory, you can see the logic behind it.

However, in practice, offering every school in the country the chance to become an academy can only lead to a fractured system – not even a system – with no overall standards, no yardsticks by which schools

can be measured against each other.

Schools will even be able to set their own curriculum, so imagine the chaos that could cause, and the knock-on effect on higher education.

Under the original New Labour idea, academies were created out of troubled comprehensives. Under the Conservative proposals, academies may well be fast-tracked from high-performing schools in affluent areas, and, in effect, operate as quasi-grammar schools.

It is said that these schools will not be able to choose their pupils on ability, but may be able to select up to 10 per cent on "aptitude". Well, I'd like to see how that one is going to be interpreted by individual schools with no requirement to satisfy a national standard. Even the public school system has a consistent entry requirement, the Common Entrance exam.

It is inevitable that financial resources, and the best teachers, will be sucked away to the best-performing academies, leaving the rest of the system to do, well, what?

Out of all the major flaws with Gove's proposal, this is the most worrying.

I have heard little about what will happen to the schools which may decide not to become academies, or those which no education provider is interested in taking over. Will they be left to fester, and all their children denied the chance of a decent education because resources are going elsewhere?

And this is just the academies versus comprehensives part of the debate. What worries me even more is the prospect of "free schools", set up by parents, as well as charities and voluntary groups, funded by the Government, but without the requirement to report to the local authority.

It absolutely stands to reason that if these proliferate, they will be in predominantly nice middle-class areas, with nice middle-class parents who have plenty of time, energy and intellect to devote to creating tailor-made schools for their nice middle-class children.

There are thousands of schools where parents simply do not have the wherewithal to take them over. If this happens, you might as well rip up the last century of extending educational opportunities to all. Privileged children will prosper, and the rest will be shoved to the back of the queue.

And one big question remains. If this experiment goes wrong, and all these independent academy and free schools fall into trouble, how will the Government wrest back control?

The Bill and White Paper is due in July. I ask all MPs to think carefully, to ask question after question, and to do everything in their power to prevent our children from being sacrificed on the altar of experimentation.