NORTHERN Ireland Minister for Education Caitriona Ruane has sharply criticised plans by 31 grammar schools to set their own entrance exams.
They want to replace the 11-plus transfer test, due for abolition after this year, in defiance of her policy of scrapping the principle of academic selection.
She said the moves by "elitist" schools to establish a new organisation which will set the tests was "a very bad route to go down".
The Association for Quality Education (AQE), representing the schools, said the move was in response to what they see as the delay by the department in detailing a replacement mechanism for the 11-plus transfer test.
AQE chairman Sir Kenneth Bloomfield said: "Individual schools determined to preserve some measure of judgment in matching pupils to the challenge of their ethos and curriculum have been obliged to consider a fallback position."
Ms Ruane countered, saying last night there was no need for entrance exams and adding that the moves by the 31 schools were "ill thought out and ill conceived".
She suggested they were not representative of the 229 schools across Northern Ireland. Her detailed proposals for transfer from primary level would be announced before the end of the school year, she promised.
The principal of one of the 31 schools, Jack Magill from Foyle and Londonderry College, told the BBC: "What the schools of the AQE are arguing for is the freedom to use academic selection as part of their criteria for entry. It doesn't mean to say that everybody has got to do the same thing. It's not an exit test for every child in primary school. This is an entrance test for parents who want children to go to a particular school and that would be one item on our list of criteria for admission."
Ms Ruane believes the current system is socially unjust and has failed pupils insofar as 12,000, or nearly half the school population, leave at age 16 without formal qualification in English or maths.
Earlier this week the minister was critical of a grammar school in the Catholic-maintained sector when it suggested setting its own entrance criteria. Ms Ruane warned Lumen Christi school in Derry her department would not finance either the exam or any court cases flowing from it. She repeated that warning to the other 31 schools again last night.
The Irish National Teachers Organisation also said the preservation of entrance exams would lead to a two-tier schools system with excellence at the top end and poorer provision for everyone else.
"Even the name of the group, the Association for Quality Education, seeks to imply that children will only get a quality education in their schools," said spokesman Brendan Harron.