ATTEMPTS by opponents of grammar schools to abolish the 11-plus have cost the taxpayer more than £1.7million. And the costs are rising every year.

The money is squandered because schools are being forced to update a list of the names of those parents who would be entitled to vote in a referendum about grammar school selection.

It only takes ten people to call for a ballot for the costly and immensely bureaucratic first stage of the process to be triggered.

Yet no use is being made of this data. No vote has been cast in any parental ballot on selection since 1999. And it is extremely unlikely that a ballot will ever be held under the current legislative framework.

By the end of the year, The Kent Messenger Group calculates the amount spent on collecting and validating lists of parents will be close to £2million.

The KM Group can reveal that in the last two years, some £360,000 of public money has been paid to schools in Kent and Medway for collating this information. Now we are calling for the law to be changed to stop this waste of taxpayers’ money.

Public disclosure of these figures for the first time follows pressure from the Kent Messenger, which has, for the first time, forced the Government to disclose details of the specific payments made to schools.

The figures should embarrass politicians. Their disclosure comes at a time when the need to obtain the maximum value for every pound of public money has shot up the political agenda.

Nowhere is value for money more important or desirable than education, especially in Kent where classroom standards in some areas are not what they should be.

This is why The Kent Messenger is taking the unusual step of calling on the education secretary, Charles Clarke, to scrap the legislation, which both pro and anti-selection groups publicly accept will never be used for the purpose for which it was intended.

In a letter to the Secretary of State we argue the law is fatally flawed. Unless it is scrapped or amended, large sums of public money will continue to be poured down the drain.

The law allows just ten people – who may not even be parents in the area - to sign a letter to the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) to trigger the ballot process.

Schools must then draw up a list of everyone who would, in theory, be entitled to vote in a ballot. These lists have to be drawn up because they are used by the ERS to determine how many parents would then have to sign a petition calling for a vote on selection – the second and key part of the process.

They consist of the names of all parents and guardians of every child under the age of 17 in every single school in both Kent and Medway. But as it stands, the law says these lists are only valid for the year in which the petition process is triggered.

So, the process can be started all over again every 12 months – putting schools through the same rigmarole and costing the taxpayer even more money.

Schools are paid money to reflect the administration costs involved, with larger schools receiving more money.

The same figures released by the Department for Education show that in total since 2000, £1.4million has been paid to schools in those selective education authorities where the process has been started. Administrative costs bring the overall total to £1.7million since 2000.

These costs rose significantly in the last two years as anti-selection campaigners triggered the process not just in Kent and Medway but in all fifteen education authorities where a fifth of the school population are taught in grammars.

The Department for Education disclosed specific details of the payments to schools after we made a formal request for the information using the Government's Code of Practice on Open Government.

We can also reveal that since 2000, administering the process has cost the taxpayer £360,000 - the total sum paid to the Electoral Reform Society for checking and validating these lists. This is yet more public money being wasted on a meaningless exercise in collecting data.