As I do not have any children, I have no personal axe to grind about Bradford Council's schools review with the proposed closure of 70 schools, the amalgamation of others, and the construction of three new ones.

But, I'll come clean straight away, I do not trust it. Nor do I wholly believe the educational explanation offered in support of it. Comprehensive schools may offer a wide choice of subjects, but I've yet to meet a parent who believed biggest was best. The ones I know move house to avoid sending their offspring to vast urban conglomerates of uncertain track record and tradition.

When you start messing about with schools, merging one with another for example, or drafting in vast numbers of pupils from one area to another, it is possible to calculate the material cost - though I'm not convinced the education department has even done that - but not the effect on less-tangible things such as a school's way of doing things, the atmosphere of the place, that indefinable something which makes one school distinct from another.

The people of Bradford have little evidence for believing that the authority responsible for various costly scandals, from Bradmet to the farcical Superdome, has suddenly developed the logistical ability akin to Moses or Eisenhower's D-Day planners.

I dare say there are people who work for Bradford Council, who know far better than you or I, just how ill-prepared the organisation is to cope with the movement of thousands of pupils and teachers, not to mention the drastic physical restructuring of scores of large buildings which are going to need more of everything, from toilets to dinner plates. Will their voices be heard?

It will be argued that Leeds changed to a two-tier system without any evident trouble. But didn't Leeds' schools have a 30 per cent surplus capacity as well as falling rolls?

We are told, on one hand, that Bradford's rolls are falling, while council documents like A Fair Deal for Bradford forecast a population increase of nearly 40,000 by 2011 - the vast majority of them Black and Asian and, therefore, young.

This suggests that Bradford may need more schools, not fewer. Instead it is likely to end up with much bigger schools.

The system is being rationalised not to produce better teaching and learning, but to eradicate the economic problem of maintaining old school buildings and thereby generate hoped-for extra millions of income.

But what evidence is there for accepting the optimistic estimates produced by the education department? Is this vast operation, with all those buildings, really likely to cost not much more than £130m - £70m less than the proposed Superdome?

Parents have already complained that the recent referendum was a manipulative exercise (with the special section of Ilkley voters being included as supporters of the two-tier principle). In any case only 23,000 out of 74,000 actually voted. Hardly a sound base for proposing to turn the education system upside down, especially weeks away from district council elections.

Though temperamentally sceptical of change, I am not opposed to reform. My argument boils down to this: Bradford Council hasn't got the talent and ability where it counts to organise and successfully complete an operation on this scale.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.