The following piece of mine is in today's Daily Mail:

No one can deny that our state education system today is shamefully bad, with one in five school leavers functionally illiterate and able pupils left to fester in sink schools.

One small area, however, manages to do well. Very well.

98.5 per cent of grammar school pupils get five good GCSEs at A to C grades, compared with the overall rate of 58 per cent.

So what's the marvellous notion that David Cameron's Conservatives have come up with?

Ditch any remaining attachment to the one proven, successful type of state school that's left.

In a speech, David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, announced that although a David Cameron government would not close down the 164 remaining grammar schools, they would ignore them in their plans.

In other words, when it comes to selecting pupils by ability, nothing separates the Conservatives from the most extreme Left-Wingers of the Labour Party.

What a travesty.

Grammar schools are not some pie in the sky idea.

For decades, they provided educational opportunities and a standard of unparalleled excellence to poor children who were not lucky enough to have had parents who could afford to buy the privilege of a private education.

Among the pupils who took advantage of that opportunity was one David Willetts - a grammar school boy himself, but who now wants to deny any other child the same chance.

Mr Willetts has all sorts of nuanced explanations for his dumping of grammar schools.

He says that there are too many middle class pupils in grammar schools and not enough pupils from poor backgrounds - basing this assertion on the fact that fewer pupils qualify for free school meals in grammars than in an average state school.

Yet if you look instead at the best-performing 200 comprehensives, just 5.3 per cent of pupils get free meals, compared with the national average of 14.3 per cent.

So, using Mr Willetts' warped logic, should the Tories therefore associate themselves only with sink comprehensives?

Clearly, his argument is a nonsense.

For the first two-thirds of the 20th century, education was the great engine of social mobility in this country.

As state education improved, so did the chance of escaping from an upbringing of poverty.

The reason for that improvement was grammar schools which changed Britain from a stuffy country based on class to a country where ability was rewarded.

Take entrance to Oxford and Cambridge universities, which for almost their entire existence had been bastions of privilege.

Thanks to the grammars successfully educating children from less-privileged backgrounds, state school pupils made up 62 per cent of Oxbridge entrants in 1969 - dwarfing the number from private schools.

Today, as a result of our mania for comprehensives, the figure has fallen back to 55 per cent.

The truth is that with the demise of the grammar school, the final third of the 20th century saw a catastrophic decline in standards, causing a similar reduction in social mobility.

Today, once more, where you are born on the social scale determines where you will end up.

The tragedy is that none of this was inevitable.

Other countries have systems which do give opportunity to all.

But they were not afflicted by the disease which took hold of the British establishment in the 1960s, which viewed education not as the passing on of knowledge and the skills required to think, but as a social experiment.

As Tony Crosland, Education Secretary in the 1960s wrote, education is a "serious alternative to nationalisation in promoting a more just and efficient society".

As Mr Willetts' lamentable speech shows all too clearly, the Establishment remains overwhelmingly infected by the disease.

And it is a downward spiral into which Mr Cameron is plunging his party.

A poll last year found that 70 per cent of parents would like to see more grammar schools established.

But forget what ordinary people want.

The Conservative leader's every action is based on gaining the acceptance of the chattering classes - the Islington dinner party set who run the BBC and the Left-liberal media who despise grammar schools.

Not that we should be surprised to see a Conservative betray the country on education.

The party's record has been shameful for decades.

It was a Conservative education minister, Sir Edward Boyle, who began the dismantling of grammar schools in the 1950s.

Have a guess under which Education Secretary more grammar schools closed than any other?

Tony Crosland or Shirley Williams?

No. The answer is Margaret Thatcher, who did not lift a finger to stop a single grammar school from closing in Edward Heath's 1970-1974 government.

The formal ditching of grammar schools by the Conservatives was a disgrace.

But it was, unfortunately, all too predictable.

This was just sent to me. If I knew its origins, I'd link to it, but it's too good not to put up:

For the unaware, there is a slight difference between private schools and comprehensives in Britain. The Department of Education has realised this and has revised the secondary Maths Exam papers accordingly.

Attached are the most recent maths exam papers for your reference.

MATHS TEST FOR COMPREHENSIVES

Name _____________________________
Nickname__________________________
Gang Name________________________

1. Simon has 0.5 kilos of cocaine. If he sells an 8 ball to Matt for 300 quid and 90 grams to Ollie
for 90 quid, what is the street value of the rest of his hold?

2. Damon pimps 3 bitches. If the price is GBP40 a ride, how many jobs per day must each bitch perform to support Damon's GBP500 a day coke habit?

3. Crackster wants to cut the kilo of cocaine he bought for 7,000 quid to make a 20% profit. How many grams of Strychnine will he need?

4. Trev got 6 years for murder. He also got GBP350,000 for the hit. If his common law wife
spends GBP33,100 per month, how much money will be left when he gets out?
Extra Credit Bonus: How much more time will Trev get for killing the slapper that spent his
money?

5. If an average can of spray paint covers 22 square metres and the average letter is 1 square metre, how many letters can be sprayed with eight fluid ounce cans of spray paint with 20% extra paint free ?

6. Liam steals Jordan's skateboard. As Liam skates away at a speed of 35mph, Jordan loads his brother's Armalite. If it takes Jordan 20 seconds to load the gun, how far will Liam have travelled when he gets whacked?

MATHS TEST FOR PRIVATE SCHOOLS

1. Harry smashes up the old man's car, causing x amount of damage and killing 3 people. The old man asks his local Chief Constable to intervene in the court system, then forges his insurance claim and receives a payment of y. The difference between x and y is three times the life insurance settlement for the three dead people. What kind of car is Harry driving now?

2. Fiona's personal shopper decides to substitute generic and own-brand products for the designer goods favoured by her employer. In the course of a month she saves the price of a return ticket to Fiji and Fiona doesn't even notice the difference. Is she thick or what?

3. Tristram fancies the arse off a certain number of debutants, but he only has enough Rohypnol left to render 33.3% unconscious. If he has 14 tablets of Rohypnol, how is he ever going to shag the other two thirds?

4. If Verity throws up 4 times a day for a week she can fit into a size 8 Versace. If she only throws up 3 times a day for two weeks, she has to make do with a size 10 Dolce & Gabbana. How much does liposuction cost?

5. Henry is unsure about his sexuality. Three days a week he fancies women. On the other days he fancies men, ducks and vacuum cleaners. However he only has access to the Hoover every third week. When will he stand for parliament?

(2)

Yesterday's Sunday Times had a very good piece on the thorny issue of university entrants - do we send too many students to universities?

It's well worth reading. But I do think there's another factor now which slightly weakens the argument of those - such as myself - who would once have argued that too many students went to university. In a day when fees and living expenses were paid by the taxpayer, there was every reason to question if it was a sensible use of tax money to fund degree courses in knitting or beer making, or to fund the knitting or beer drinking habits of the students who went on them.

But things are different now. Yes, student loans are on preferential terms. But students today do have to live - financially - with the consequences of their actions. Their time at university is not a three year party at some one else's expense. So whilst it is perfectly sensible to point out to potential students themselves that they might not be best suited to going to university, the public policy case is less important. The market decides. If people want to pay for a three year course in whatever, then fine. It's their time, it's their money, and it's the university's profit. So let them get on with it. Or not.

(1)

If someone can point to a single instance of Ruth Kelly criticising the existence of private schools - in public or in private - then I will accept that she has done anything wrong. But she hasn't. As education secretary, she helped further the co-operation between state and independent schools. Not enough, I say, but she in no way condemned anyone for sending their children to private schools or said they are in any way wrong.

So please explain what she has done wrong, in putting the interests of her child first?

UPDATE: Great minds think alike.

PS If parents had vouchers to spend where they wished, this would not be an issue.

(4)

This piece of mine is in today's Times:

My nephew came to stay with me just before Christmas. His brother didn’t. I doubt that you have much interest in my nephews’ holiday activities. But you should. Because the decision to let Alex stay with me but to leave Harry at home is based on exactly the same thought process as Labour’s approach to public service reform.

When I asked Alex if he’d like to come to London, his brother asked: “Why can’t I?” Harry has a habit of asking awkward questions. This was one of them, because my decision was entirely arbitrary. On any logical grounds, I should have invited Harry to come, too. But I didn’t. So I couldn’t give any rational response as to why it was OK for Alex to come, but not for Harry.

To understand why it matters that Harry stayed at home, you need also to know what it is about the entry into the EU on Monday of Bulgaria and Romania that is problematic. It’s the same problem as when, on January 1, 2004, eight other new member states joined the EU: the people who gained access to the British labour market are too good. They either work too hard, or they are too skilled.

447,000 workers from that first new batch of member states applied to register under the Workers Registration Scheme in the first two years since their accession. Including the self-employed, the total working in Britain has been well over 600,000. And that excludes the illegal workers. Economically, this is good news. Jobs can be done better and cheaper thanks to this new pool of labour. But there is a downside: many British manual workers can’t compete with them.

The mistake that is usually made is to concentrate on the immediate cause of this problem: the rights of those workers to come here. The real cause of the problem, however, is nothing new and has nothing to with the EU. The real cause is our failure to manage the basic task of educating children properly.

After nearly ten years in office, Tony Blair’s pledge to make “education, education and education” his top three priorities is the dog that barked but didn’t bite. There has certainly been some improvement in standards. But when ministers celebrate the improved statistics, it’s akin to a football team that regularly gets a 3-0 hammering taking comfort from losing 3-1. The most recent Department for Education and Skills study, in 2003, found that 16 per cent of the adult population would fail to pass an English GCSE and 29 per cent of adults could not calculate the area of a floor, even with a calculator, pen and paper.

Instead of the necessary wholesale reforms, tackling the fundamental flaws in school structures and teacher training, the Government has introduced a piecemeal variety of initiatives and schemes. Last week we learnt of the latest, a £65 million plan to give 800,000 of the most able pupils an “e-credit”. The pupils will be allocated about £80 in credits, which their schools can use to buy extra lessons from companies, independent schools, universities or other academic bodies. It is a thoroughly sensible idea, which no one committed to excellence could oppose. So, naturally, it has been opposed by a number of Labour MPs and teachers.

But for all the plan’s merit, it is symbolic of the Government’s failure. By proposing such a scheme, the Government shows that it understands the benefits of competition and a variety of teaching options. Instead of acting on that understanding, however, it restricts it to the most gifted. And it refuses even to contemplate any wider extension of the voucher principle.

Why not? For the same reason that I said Alex could come but Harry couldn’t. To use the perennial phrase of parents explaining their illogical decisions: because I say so.

There’s a perfect example of a “because I say so” dismissal of a logical extension in a speech made by Alan Milburn, the former health secretary, in November. Intriguingly, he argued that: “To break the cycle of educational disadvantage we need to give parents in the most disadvantaged areas more than preference. They should have choice...The evidence suggests both that choice programmes (abroad) helped raise standards across all schools and that the most disadvantaged pupils benefited most.”

All good stuff. And to bring about that choice, he proposed a weighted voucher: “I believe that parents with children in those schools where performance has not crossed these thresholds (of success) for two or more years should be given a new right to choose an alternative school. They would be given an education credit weighted to be worth perhaps 150 per cent of the cost of educating the child in their current school. This would give a positive incentive to the alternative school to take them and to expand their intake numbers.”

Even better stuff. Mr Milburn clearly grasps the need for choice, and how the market empowers the most disadvantaged and raises standards. But then he shows how the only word that really counts in the phrase “new Labour” is “Labour”: “The credit...could be used in any state school.” At a stroke, Mr Milburn circumscribes the impact of his proposed voucher by limiting its application to state schools. And he offers no explanation why other schools should not be able to compete for the pupils’ custom.

Even when Labour sees the benefits of competition, it rules it out in any but the most limited form, for no reason beyond ideology. The same holds in health. Patients are to be given a choice of provider for treatment. But the choice will be from a limited list and there will be no wider application of the acknowledged benefits of competition. Why not? Harry may be only 7, but he’ll be able to give you the reason. Because I say so.

UPDATE: Mea culpa. I should have written:

It’s the same problem as when, on May 1, 2004, eight former communist member states joined the EU... Apologies for such a howler.

(2)

Someone called Mike Rush (Deputy Head of Stockwell Park High School) has just said this on the Today programme:

In education we talk about giving children skills for life. I can't really think of a better skill than swimming.

Hmmm. Let me think. Reading? Writing? Arithmetic? Even cooking?

UPDATE: I'm not anti-swimming! It just struck me as an odd thing to say, especially from a Deputy Head. As for the fact that, as one commenter puts it, "You wouldn't have been able to read, write, count or cook away from the Titanic"; I love the idea that schooling should be based on the idea of preparing for possible life saving skills, however remote their liklihood. I wonder how many people living in inner London will ever need to swim for their life. Somewhere around one or two a year, perhaps? Next lesson: ejecting out of fighter planes under attack from an invading air force. You never know when you might need to.

(4)

This piece of mine appears in today's Times:

I'm fed up with the way that politicians ignore the obvious. Why won’t those dunderheads use common sense? Take crime. I don’t know the precise facts, but I know what’s common sense: many hardened criminals are brought up in families of other hardened criminals. Their bad habits are passed down through the generations. So abolish the family and the problem is dealt with.

Bring on the common sense revolution. Since so many patients acquire MRSA in hospital, the solution is equally obvious: abolish hospitals.

Then there’s that Muslim school — Jameah Islamiyah, in East Sussex. You know, the one whose grounds the police are now crawling all over, after arresting 14 people last week. Well, it’s obvious. If it wasn’t for faith schools, the extremists wouldn’t have a captive audience and there’d be no British Muslim suicide bombers. Abolish faith schools.

More often than not, two other words would better replace “common sense”: non and sequitur.

The regularly deployed arguments against Muslim faith schools are a perfect example. The schools are, apparently, a breeding ground for extremism and, indeed, for terrorism. Does the fact that no Jewish school has produced a Jewish terrorist not point to a flaw in that argument?

Since when has the religion of one’s maths teacher been a cause of terrorism? What matters is not religion, but the content of the teaching and the school’s atmosphere. If there is extremism in a particular school, the problem lies not with the school being Muslim, but with its governance.

When bad chemistry teaching is discovered in a secular school, it does not lead to calls for the abolition of chemistry teaching. It leads to action being taken to make sure that chemistry is properly taught in the school where it hasn’t been.

It is legitimate — albeit wrong — to argue that all schools should be secular, that no parents should have the right to educate their children in a manner fitting their religion and that, in state schools, pupils should be bussed to schools to create a social mix.

It is, however, wholly illegitimate to extrapolate from the existence of a Muslim school that may be breeding extremism the idea that all faith schools are a threat to the cohesion of society. That is not merely a non sequitur, it is also stupidity.

Astonishing. A piece by Sir Simon Jenkins which is almost entirely correct. And, what's more, on education:

There is no good reason for not charging students the full cost of their higher education, subject to a test of means. That cost is now between £9,000 and £15,000 a year.

Back in 1975, I passed the 11-plus exam. Normally, this would have meant going to St Nicholas’ the fine local grammar school. However, the ruling political dogma held that education was primarily about social engineering, and that learning was an almost irrelevant afterthought.

As a result, just months after passing the exam, the local education authority abolished St Nicholas’, and merged it with two other schools to become the giant Northwood Comprehensive.

So my mother and father sacrificed my family’s annual holidays and made do with a second hand car, so they could afford to send me to a private school.

I got a good education, but thousands of other bright children were denied that chance because their local grammar was closed down, and their parents simply could not afford the fees to send them privately.

Once one of the country’s finest assets, all but a tiny number – around 160 – of grammar schools were swept away as comprehensives, beloved by the country’s opinion formers in the 1960s and still by today’s educationalists, took over.

It is no wonder that yesterday’s report by the Sutton Trust, and educational charity, showed that media professions are more dominated than ever by the products of private schools. The same goes for all professional jobs in today’s Britain.

The bitter truth is that far from creating greater equality in schooling, the abolition of most grammars served only to widen this educational apartheid.

Indeed, there is less social mobility than there has been since the 1950s.

The Sutton Trust looked at the education of 100 leading media opinion-formers. Fifty four per cent had been to private schools, compared with 49 per cent 20 years ago. Of the rest, thirty-three per cent had been to grammar schools. Just 14 per cent came from comprehensive schools – which educate 90 per cent of all pupils.

An earlier study showed a similar story in the legal profession. Almost 70 per cent of barristers from the leading chambers were educated at private schools.

So entrenched is this dominance that it feels almost pre-ordained. But it is wholly man-made – or rather, made by the egalitarian educational reforms of the 1960s.

In the late 1960s, state grammar schools and non-state direct grant schools (privately run schools where the state bought a large number of places for pupils) easily outclassed the traditional private school in academic merit.

The proportion of private-school-educated undergraduates at Oxford, for instance, was on a steady downward path after the Second World War.

In 1946, 57 per cent of female students were from private schools. So successful were grammar schools, however, at giving educational opportunities to children who had previously never been stretched, that by 1967 the proportion had fallen to 39 per cent.

Private schools were, then, often for dunces whose parents simply bought them access to the cachet of the school’s name.

The bright grammar-school pupil, given a leg up from poverty and unprecedented access to education and opportunity, often fared far better. The country was as close as it has ever been to being a true meritocracy.

But the triumph of the ideologues who pushed for the abolition of grammar schools, meant that by the end of the next decade, we had taken a huge leap backwards. In 1971, 35 per cent of state schools were comprehensive. By 1981 that figure had risen to over 90 per cent.

The impact was immediate. The proportion of privately educated Oxford undergraduates shot up, and has continued to do so ever since. Today state school pupils comprise barely more than half of Oxford entrants.

Grammar schools either went comprehensive and lost their academic success, or jumped ship and became private schools.

This had a knock-on effect on private schools. Faced with new local competition from ex-grammar schools which charged far less, lacking the social cachet, the private schools had to up the ante, and refocused themselves on providing an even better education.

The publication of league tables in the 1990s made the difference between the state and private sector all too stark. The early tables, for instance, showed that 80 per cent of 15-year-olds at private schools achieved five or more grade A-C passes at GCSE. State schools managed that for just 43 per cent of pupils.

It is the ultimate irony. The dogmatists who pushed through the comprehensive revolution claimed to be concerned above all with opportunity and equality. But the only opportunity they expanded was that of private schools to take ever greater numbers of pupils, and the only equality they managed was to level pupils’ achievement down.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this national tragedy is the hypocrisy which governs the debate. The very people who refuse to countenance the return of grammar schools are, more often than not, those who have benefited from them.

The media – not least the BBC – portrays those who call for the return of grammar schools as backward looking fuddy-duddies.

Yet the BBC’s own staffing shows how much it has benefited from grammar schooling. Of the 31 leading BBC employees examined in the report, just one – a behind the scenes producer - was educated at a comprehensive.

All the familiar names were either educated privately, such as Jeremy Paxman and Kirsty Walk, or at a selective school, such as Fiona Bruce, Huw Edwards and Nick Robinson.

Politicians are even worse in their hypocrisy. Seven of today’s Cabinet went to a grammar school and just five come from comprehensive schools. The rest were either privately educated or educated in Scotland, where traditional teaching methods still held sway.

Even amongst the comprehensive children, only two - John Prescott and Jacqui Smith – went to what one might call a ‘normal’ comprehensive. Yet these are the very people who refuse to allow others to have access to the same quality of education which they were given.

Labour is often blamed for the ruin of our education system, but it was a Conservative Education Secretary who closed more grammar schools than either Tony Crosland or Shirley Williams.

Her name? Margaret Thatcher. And her party is little better today. One of David Cameron’s first statements as leader was to say “absolutely clearly, the Conservative party that I am leading does not want to go back to the 11-plus, does not want to go back to the grammar school system.".

Mr Cameron’s remark typifies the Alice In Wonderland state of our education debate. The evidence shows clearly that we once had a thriving, wonderfully successful string of state schools –which were responsible for giving opportunities to many of our leading national figures.

Yet mention of that system is now forbidden. Politicians and the chattering classes rule out any return to selection as somehow beyond the pale.

What is truly beyond the pale – and little short of immoral – is, rather, the dogmatic refusal to give today’s children the same opportunities that so benefited today’s opinion formers.

(20)

Nick Cohen, with whom I rarely now find much of importance on which to disagree, is spot on today in his Evening Standard column when he writes:

The English are famed for their hypocrisy, and there is no greater humbug in modern public debate than the assertion that ‘we abolished state selection’ when we abolished the grammar schools. We abolished selection by ability, certainly, but replaced it with selection by money.

Lord Adonis knows this. Before Tony Blair came to power, he co-authored a powerful book called A Class Act, which said Labour had done the rich an enormous favour in the Sixties by keeping the private schools and taking out the competition from the grammars.

I would say that. I was the co-author of said book.

(6)

The Grauniad's sub is such a tease. I got all excited when I read this headline:

A potential killer blow to the comprehensive ideal

Has the Prime Minister finally lived up to his rhetoric and decided to introduce some worthwhile school reforms?

Far chance. It's just another bleat by two Guardianista types about the barely worth bothering with Education Bill.

(8)

This is the same story, based on the same figures:

Academies among worse schools in England

Rebecca Smithers
Thursday March 30, 2006

More than half the government's flagship city academies are today listed among the worst schools in the country in new league tables, despite some year-on-year improvement in their pupils' performance in the core subjects in national tests.

Academies help pupils to raise their game in exams

By Tony Halpin, Education Editor

STANDARDS in city academies are rising faster than in any other type of secondary school, according to a study published today.

(BTW, the Guardian's sub must have been educated at one of them, since he or she does not know the difference between worse and worst.)

Gordon Brown wants to stop state school pupils being the poor relation of the education system. Therefore he pledged to give them similar amounts of money to that which is invested per child in private schools.

He announced: “In the coming five years investment in schools will rise from £5.6 billion today to reach £8 billions a year - a 50% rise”.

But as usual, there are lies, damned lies and statistics.

It is vital to put this extra money in its proper perspective. There is a dangerous parallel to the billions of pounds that New Labour has ploughed into the NHS – an amount which dwarfs the new sums being given to schools.

The truth is that much of this NHS investment has, in effect, been poured down the drain - spent on bureaucracy and salaries rather than directly on patient care.

Similarly, it is well recognised that education spending does not all go directly to schools, but is wasted by the system – the vast, endemic and unnecessary bureaucracies of the Department for Education and Skills in Whitehall, and the Local Education Authorities across the country.

To bolster his argument, Mr Brown claimed that private schools spend £8000 per pupil, per year, compared to £5000 spent on each child in the state sector.

In effect, he was saying, the reason they outperform state schools is because they have more money.

But nothing is ever as it seems with this government’s figures, and the apparent £3000 difference is a false alibi for the state sector’s failure.

For start, the evidence shows that a pound spent in a typical private school delivers more education than a pound spent in the state sector. Simply put, private schools are more efficiently run, are more effective, and deliver better value for money.

For example, one recent study showed that in a random four week period, the DfES announced 14 different initiatives and spending pledges.

Money was being sprayed around on projects – but with no regard to the wishes of, schools themselves. Indeed, the running costs of the litany of educational quangos soar further with every passing year. In 2000, Ofsted (the school standards inspection agency) cost £86m. By 2004, its cost had more than doubled to £197m.

The same spiral of spending applies to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which which was set up in 1988 with an annual budget of around £10m, but now costs nearly £60m a year.

The worst waste, however, is elsewhere. Mr Brown trumpeted the fact that he plans to raise direct payments to schools, for headmasters to spend as they see fit, from £98,000 per annum to £190,000.

That is all well and good. It is quite right that money should go direct to schools rather than the bureaucrats. But the sums involved are nothing like enough.

A third of the entire education budget is spent not by schools, but by the DfES and LEAs, supposedly on their behalf.

Meanwhile, in private schools the money from fees goes straight to the school to spend as the governors think best.

The real problem is not money. It is the state system's bureaucracy — the officials of the Department and 150 LEAs, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the Teacher Training Agency, and hosts of other central initiatives, panels, and review bodies.

If matching the private sector was the real aim, a first step would be to give state schools the same freedom to manage their affairs as independent schools.

But, as last week’s Education Bill vote showed, that is something Labour MPs will not stomach.

(This has been slightly edited from a version posted earlier.)

How thrilling! Just a few weeks after the Prime Minister’s lament in Blackpool that “every time I’ve ever introduced a reform in government, I wish in retrospect I had gone further”, we are about to see the first fruit of the newly emboldened Blairite agenda.

When the Education White Paper is published next week, we are promised that it will be full of radical reforms. The focus, we are told, will be on school independence and parental choice. As the Prime Minister put it last week: “By the end of the third term I want every school that wants to be, to be able to be an independent non-fee-paying state school with the freedom to innovate and develop in the way it wants and the way the parents at the school want . . . ”

It all sounds wonderful. And the various ideas that have been carefully leaked are certainly an improvement on the current state of play. Schools will be able to join together as education “brands”, with the best heads encouraged to take over whole groups. Local education authorities will have many of their powers removed, allowing successful schools to expand and to set their own curriculum, and new schools to emerge where parents want them. And if they are unhappy with the standards of their children’s school, parents will be able to lobby for new management.

But bold as some of the ideas seem, the best they will do is get us back to square one. Take the idea of “independent state schools”, about which Mr Blair enthused last week. There’s nothing new there: we had them until he became Prime Minister and abolished them. They were called grant-maintained schools — schools that were free from LEA control and funded directly by Whitehall. In eight years in power, Labour’s bold third term reform is to arrive back where it started out.

The most eye-catching proposal among the White Paper leaks is a plan to entice genuinely independent schools — private schools, in other words — into the state sector. Again, it sounds terrific. How radical and free thinking of Labour to want not to stamp on private schools, as in the past, but to utilise what they offer pupils.

Well, yes. But how typical to get things back to front. If the Prime Minister’s analysis — that the state sector needs to learn from and copy the independent sector — is correct (and it is) then the sensible response is not to nationalise those private schools that want to be bought out, but to make an independent sector education available to all. Instead of taking independent schools into the state sector, the sensible policy would be to take state-funded pupils into independent schools.

The Government’s expected proposal won’t even get things back to square one, because it won’t match the scheme that for decades did what was needed — until the last Labour Government abolished it. Direct-grant schools were entirely self-governing and independent, but took pupils funded by the state.

As the authors of a book about social mobility put it in 1997: “The direct-grant scheme succeeded . . . in opening up many of the best independent schools to ability rather than wealth. It is a sad irony that in destroying the direct-grant schools on the altar of equal opportunity, the 1974-79 Labour Government succeeded only in denying opportunity to many poor children and increasing the number of fee-paying parents (because the schools chose to remain independent rather than be nationalised)”.

The authors were spot-on. Of course they were; I was one of them. But the identity of the other is far more important: Andrew Adonis, now Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister.

Before his appointment in June, Andrew Adonis was the Prime Minister’s key education adviser inside No 10. As such, he was the force behind the Government’s education policy. But for all his skill in battling Whitehall, he and Mr Blair were barely able to move reform into first gear, let alone the fifth gear that was needed.

His appointment as Schools Minister in June was designed to fight that battle from behind enemy lines, within the Education Department. But the lesson from the forthcoming White Paper is plus ça change.

There is no doubt that, left to his own devices, Lord Adonis would reintroduce direct-grant schools. His words in our book were explicit about their merit. But for all the bold words from the Prime Minister, the reality of his political strength — or rather weakness — was exposed when Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, was able to veto Lord Adonis’s appointment as a Minister of State and consign him to a junior role as a Parliamentary Under Secretary. She won that battle, and it seems she has won this one, too.

There is an even bigger problem with the White Paper. As always, the Government’s rhetoric far outstrips its actions. In Blackpool, Mr Blair hit the nail on the head: “There’s a great myth here, which is that we don’t have a market . . . now. We do. It’s called private schools . . . But it’s only open to the well-off . . . I want decent hardworking families to have the same power.”

So it’s clear that he understands what needs to be done: all parents, not just the wealthy, need to be given the power of the purse string. But the logic of the Prime Minister’s words points inexorably to the boldest reform of all: vouchers. By handing real power over to parents, vouchers destroy the influence of the bureaucrats, the teaching unions and the education establishment that have had such a pernicious impact on British state education.

But will we get vouchers from Labour? Even to pose that question is to give the answer. So much for going further.

It’s mid-August, and that means it’s time for the annual A-levels ritual.

The routine is always the same. Publication of the results – this year, as always, a record high - is met with a chorus of condemnation that standards are clearly slipping. And then an education minister takes to the airwaves and protests that pupils are simply being taught better, and instead of carping we should all take pride.

Yesterday the job fell to Lord Adonis, formerly Tony Blair’s key education adviser and, since May, a minister at the Department for Education.

Sticking to the usual script, he argued that we should all “have full
confidence that standards are being maintained." Indeed, he added:
“Teaching and leadership in schools are significantly improving, so we should expect exam results to improve too. It would be a major cause for concern if they didn't."

Lord Adonis is caught in a bind. He, of all people, knows how bad standards have been in the state sector. He has spent most of Labour’s period in office wrestling with the vested interests of the local education authorities and teaching unions - and within the Department itself – to
bring about change. Specialist schools, city academies and special
arrangements for gifted pupils all emanated from his desk in Downing Street.

As Tony Blair contemplates his legacy, the Prime Minister knows that progress towards real education reform – putting parents in the driving seat and offering them a genuine choice of good state funded schools – is still not fast enough. And so he decided to take matters into his own hands, and moved his former Education advisor out of his back seat and directly into a ministerial job at the department.

Lord Adonis’ problem however, is that whatever he might say in defence of A-level standards, he knows that there are far more fundamental problems which need to be tackled. I am in a better position than most to know this - since he and I wrote a book about them.

It was published in 1997, the year Labour took office. Remember Tony Blair’s election motto, ‘education, education and education’? Our book’s argument – the analysis which underpinned that campaign slogan - was that education is the great engine of social mobility. But instead of promoting meritocracy, it was doing the reverse.

For the first two thirds of the twentieth century, the high standards of grammar schools acted as a unique spring board, opening up all sorts of areas which had previously been the preserve of the elites, from an Oxbridge degree to a career in the professions.

Andrew (as he was then) and I argued, however, that the final third of the century was very different. From the 1960s, Britain became a less socially mobile society.

Where on the social ladder a person was born predicted, with depressing accuracy, where they would end up. The reason? The decline in state education, with coincided with – and was in large part caused by – the shift from selective to comprehensive education. That was itself a product of the view which took hold amongst politicians and educationalists that education was mainly a mechanism for social engineering rather than imparting knowledge.

This was made worse by the flight of the middle classes from state to private schooling. Every year, this educational apartheid was worsened as a new batch of entrants deserted the state sector.

Instead of debating the proper interpretation of today’s A-level results – a fruitless task which usually bores everyone senseless - it’s much more important to go look instead at these underlying problems.

Our analysis – that state education was holding back, rather than promoting, meritocracy - provided the foundations for most of Labour’s education policies and Andrew carried these beliefs with him into Number 10. The Prime Minister was an early and enthusiastic convert to this way of thinking.

But its implications go a long way further than Tony Blair has been prepared to go. Take A-levels themselves. The real crisis has nothing to do with an objective assessment of the standard of the exams. It is about something far more basic –what it is we want from our education system.

A-levels were designed to separate out those students who would be most suited by university, at a time when only ten per cent or so of school leavers went on to higher education. They did that job well.

Today, however, the consensus holds – and this is true across the political spectrum – that it is a good thing in itself for as many school leavers as possible to go to university. Mr Blair has said that he will not be happy until half make it there.

But that means that A-levels have now to do a very different job. Instead of identifying the most academically gifted, they must act as a broad badge of basic academic competence. And so they have become useless at separating the best from the mediocre.

Instead of providing an extra training for the cream of the crop, university education it has now become just another part of the average education.

That is not meritocracy. If social mobility was to be the driving force behind policy, it would mean ensuring that university places were open to the most intellectually gifted, regardless of upbringing. What has happened, however, has been effectively the same thing which happened to secondary schooling in the 1960s - the comprehensivisation of universities.

Instead of reforming secondary education so that every pupil had an education which allowed them to achieve their best, and then to compete on equal terms for a place at university, governments have merely demanded additional places and (under the Conservatives) abolished the distinction between polytechnics and universities, just as they did with grammars and secondary moderns.

My old friend Lord Adonis now faces the classic dilemma of the thinker turned politician. Thinkers are unconstrained by base political
considerations. They can say it as it is. In our book, we pointed out that the pass was sold by the abolition of selective education - though this may not be somethig Lord Adonis would wish to highligh as a Labour minister today.

New Labour knows this, but cannot bring itself to admit it. That’s why it talks about the need for ‘specialist’ schools, but shies away from the word ‘selective’. And it’s why it talks approvingly about specialisation based on pupils’ ‘aptitude’ but condemns it by ‘ability’? I defy anyone to point out a real difference between the words, which serve – deliberately - only to obscure the real issues.

Real reform requires Lord Adonis – and Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary - to ignore the political risks of speaking the truth, and to fundamentally recast a system which remains recognisably the inheritance of the 1960s.

I've always thought most political labels are meaningless. Long before Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, I could never understand why believing in markets as the most efficient means of allocating resources, and thus promoting prosperity, should be regarded as right wing. The same applied to vouchers, which are intended to give the power of the purse string - and thus control - to those without wealth. And after 9/11, I could not understand why the Left should, overwhelmingly, believe that the promotion of democracy and human rights was somehow right-wing, and caving in to Islamofascism as left wing?

Today's piece by Nick Cohen on education exemplifies the nonsense of such labels. There's much that I disagree with him about, but on the two most important and interlinked issues of our time - the battle to defend Western civilisation and to promote freedom and the importance of education - we are as one. Yet somehow he is dismissed by supposedly 'centrist' writers and politicians as a leftie agitator (and I am castigated as being on the right).

I don't see how anyone can seriously disagree with a word of his piece today:

All the efforts by New Labour to redistribute wealth, all the Sure Start schemes and working families' tax credits, have merely slowed the process, while the great expansion of the universities has left the gap between working- and middle-class participation in higher education wider than ever.

Economists produce thousands of papers on the reasons why. The education system has to be high among them, unless you believe education doesn't matter. The liberal-left never has believed that since the Enlightenment, although I do hear rather a lot of liberals dismissing education today.

Their denial is an excuse for a failure of idealism which has left education as the largest cause of hypocrisy and mystification for my class and my generation. In public we deplore elitism. In practice everyone knows that the grammar schools, which at least selected by ability, have been replaced with private and comprehensive schools which select by parental wealth. If you are rich and have a bright child, he will go private and although he will have to pass exams, he won't face competition from children whose parents can't afford the fees. If you are rich and have a dunce, you select by house price and move into the catchment area of a good school or get your nanny to drive your child to a good school in another borough or lie to vicars and send your child to a good church school. Again, you know your child won't face competition from brighter children whose parents can't afford to buy houses in the right area or don't have the knowledge to play the system. The result is that in the inner cities we don't have comprehensives but a universal system of secondary moderns.

The refusal to be honest about money makes serious debate impossible. The children of the rich stay rich. The children of graduates graduate. The children of the working and lower-middle classes sink into financial and cultural impoverishment. Yet most of the time when education is discussed the speakers refuse to admit that, uniquely in Europe, Britain has private schools with higher intellectual standards than their state rivals.

If they did, conventional political certainties would evaporate. Before he left the education department, Charles Clarke (Highgate School and Kings College, Cambridge) wanted to force successful schools to take disruptive pupils, even though the teaching would inevitably suffer. It sounded like a tough socialist measure which promised equality of misery. Yet Clarke couldn't force the private schools to take excluded pupils, so you could look at him another way and say here was a public school boy stopping the best state schools competing with his alma mater. Clarke didn't mean that, anymore than another public school Labour minister, Tony Crosland (Highgate School, and Trinity College, Oxford) meant to give the private schools their greatest boost ever when he began the civil war in state education with the promise to 'destroy every fucking grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland'. None the less, both Crosland and Clarke were the objective friends of the children of the wealthy because they handicapped the competition.

It is precicely because educational opportunities which are currently the preserve of the better off should be based not on wealth but merit that the grammar schools debate is so important. And it is those who believe in selection by ability, rather than the cheque book, who are the real progressives.

(My book on this is available here.)

Brian Mickelthwait has saved me the trouble of summarising an excellent Newsnight film by Prof James Tooley on private schools in Lagos slums, aswell as the discussion afterwards with a caricature member of the educationalist establishment, Prof Keith Lewin:

Tooley has been roaming the world in recent years, finding cheap, successful, private schools, which are everywhere outperforming the shoddy state provided schools. Nigeria is no different.

It is one thing to see white blokes in suits saying at some pro free market conference that the private sector is better than the public sector. Watching Nigerian parents explaining the same thing, to a BBC news camera, is something else again.

So why, Tooley is asking, is everyone in denial? There is no global crisis in education. The private sector is supplying higher standards at a fraction of the cost.

Now we are in white blokes discussing it all mode, and Professor Keith Lewin of Sussex University is explaining that what Tooley has spent the last decade scrutinising with his own eyes is all a figment of his, Tooley's, imagination.

...Tooley's report showed an incandescently eloquent private sector teacher in action. And he also showed a state school teacher in a state school classroom, a classroom filled with state school pupils who were busy trying teaching one another, while he, the state school teacher, was fast asleep at his desk.

Lewin says that this is all a tragedy, because he sees state failure. The state is, or should be, the educator of last resort. Market success is important to Lewin only because as far as he is concerned market success equals state failure, and state failure is bad bad bad. Lewin refers to "his colleagues in Africa", who agree with him and do not agree with Tooley.

Those, I would guess, would be the state education bureaucrats who, time and time again, do not even realise that there is a thriving educational private sector in their own country, pretty much right under their noses. The government bureaucrats whom Lewin (I suspect) spends most of his African research time communing with, have little idea about this ferment of private education. Insofar as they do know of it, they do not want to know of it, because it makes them feel irrelevant. This is because they are irrelevant. And if they are irrelevant then so is the living that Professor Keith Lewin of Sussex University makes helping to prepare all this state bureaucrats for their careers in state education.

Lovely line in A A Gill's restaurant review yesterday in the Sunday Times:

[I]f schools can comprehensively teach children to adore Bernard Mathews' extrusions, why can't they teach them to read?

The only appropriate reaction to a Labour announcement on education is to grimace, tear one's hair out, and then lock oneself in a darkened room. How is one supposed to take seriously a Government which claims to be committed to high educational standards but which comes up with the title "Schools forward not back" for its "mini manifesto"?

If only the problem were simply grammar. The illiteracy of Labour's campaign title is, however, symptomatic of a deeper problem. Last week's launch by Tony Blair of its education policies for a putative third term was a typical example of how the Government, to use an American phrase, talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk.

Mr Blair's aspirations were, as so often, spot on: "A good education system, developing the talents of every pupil, is one built around parent preferences". He spoke, quite rightly, of the importance of "parent power". Indeed, in her first three months as Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly seems to have used the words "parents", "choice" and "diversity" in almost every sentence she has uttered. The Government really does talk the talk, appearing committed to genuine parental choice and happy to break the education establishment's taboos.

But when it comes to walking the walk, the Government has two broken legs. Mr Blair's "big idea" was for every pupil to have "tailored support to tackle their weaknesses and develop strengths", through "small group tuition" – which might even be one-to-one.

With this, the Prime Minister manages both to miss the point completely and to fail to follow the logic of his own words. The basic problem in state schools is not that pupils are taught together in classes which are too large. It is what they are taught, how, and by whom.

Take literacy. Last year, just 56 per cent of 11-year-old boys and 71 per cent of girls in England reached the proper standard for their age in writing. Almost 1.2 million children have failed to meet the required levels since the launch of the National Literacy Strategy in 1998.

The reason is straightforward. All the evidence – not some, but all – shows that the best method for teaching children to read is "structured phonics" (when individual letters are matched to sounds, which are then read together in words), but it was dumped by teacher training colleges in the 1960s. The "new literacy" (more accurately, the new illiteracy) held that traditional learning methods cemented the existing social order. Mass literacy co-existed with, and therefore caused, an objectionable social order. The answer, according to so-called progressives, was to adopt "spontaneous" teaching methods.

Although the National Literacy Strategy includes phonics, it is part of a compromise between the evidence and the educational establishment, and does not come close to doing the job of teaching children to read properly.

"Small group tuition" will mean simply that teachers will push the same flawed methods on smaller groups at a time. The answer is to change what is taught, not the numbers taught it together. But even if Mr Blair had tackled that fundamental problem, he ignores the logic of his position. If children are best stretched alongside two or three others of similar ability, they are even better placed where the entire school is of similar ability; grammar schools, in other words.

Alas, for all the changes that Mr Blair has made to Labour's rhetoric, the idea of selective schools remains a taboo. And so he is reduced to mouthing fine words, but implementing policies which do nothing to tackle the fundamental problems with education.

I am in shock. I do not know where to turn, or what to do. Everything which I hold dear is now in flux.

I have read Sir Simon Jenkins' column today and...agree with every word, every dot, and every comma:

FOR GOODNESS’ sake, Oxford, stop complaining. Behave like a grown-up university and go independent. Repeat your 17th-century freedom of spirit. Look to the best, to Harvard, Yale and Princeton, and do what they do. No more of this moaning and drooling and tugging at Treasury apron strings. Opt for excellence and let the Devil take the hindmost.

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Almost everyone involved in schools - teachers, parents, even children themselves – says the same thing: that the single biggest obstacle to learning is disruptive pupils. An otherwise well behaved and eager-to-learn class can be ruined by just one such boy or girl.

Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, has decided to do something about this.

Not, as you might think, to tell schools that they are to be given sufficient powers to remove such pupils. And not to help ensure that as many schools as possible are free from such negative influences.

Of course not. To do that would be to make the terrible mistake of thinking that schools are primarily about teaching and that the job of government is to provide schools with the best possible platform for educating children.

Instead of doing that, the Education Secretary has decided that schools should focus on something far more important than mere teaching: social engineering.

Yesterday, Mr Clarke demanded that schools which do not have their “fair share” of disruptive pupils – at least three or four per school – must seek out such children and then bring them into the classroom. He wants to share those pupils around every school, so that those which do not suffer at the moment become equally disrupted.

It is egalitarian social engineering run riot.

Take grammar schools. Instead of rejoicing that there are schools which are able to educate their pupils to the highest level, free of problems, the Education Secretary’s response is to insist that they are even more guilty of being trouble-free than other schools and so must admit known troublemakers, even if they do not come close to the academic standards required of well-behaved pupils.

Mr Clarke’s argument is almost beyond parody. It is akin to saying that if you live in a neighbourhood which is relatively free from crime, while others are plagued by it, you are unjustifiably privileged and must ensure that you, too, are burgled. It’s only fair.

We have been here before. When Labour took office in 1997, its Social Exclusion Unit proposed that, far from helping schools to remove disruptive pupils, it should be made more difficult. It set a target for the reduction in the number of school exclusions. Within a matter of weeks of the new arrangements taking effect, David Blunkett, the then Education Secretary, was bombarded with complaints from teachers pointing out that their job was being made impossible, so damaging was the impact of these pupils on schools. Mr Blunkett reversed the policy and eased the rules on exclusions.

It is scarcely believable that Mr Clarke can propose to make the situation far worse, by forcing schools to accept disruptive pupils, and yet also claim to be on the side of the parent. It is difficult to imagine what could possibly show more contempt for parents – and for the overwhelming majority of pupils who are well-behaved and want to get on with their education – than his insistence that their desire for classrooms free of thugs should count for nothing.

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Two must reads on the dreadful Tomlinson Report:

Melanie Phillips and Reform.

(3)

Excellent piece by Nick Cohen, who points out the utter stupidity of the Left's determination to destroy selection in the 1960s and 1970s.

As he puts it:

The second half of the twentieth century saw a revolution in the private sector which turned independent schools from nurseries of Empire into centres of academic excellence. Their cause was helped immeasurably by the Labour Party which began the destruction of the competition. In the 1960s, when most dons really were establishment types, two thirds of children going to Oxbridge came from state schools. The grammar schools were abolished, and the direct grant schools went private and by the 1990s the proportion of state school pupils at Oxbridge stood at 50 per cent.

The fall is just one sign among many that social mobility in supposedly classless and anti-elitist Britain is grinding to a halt. However tough the entrance exams and however many scholarships they offer, the academic achievements of the best public schools can't disguise the fact that many brilliant pupils can't think of applying because their parents can't afford the fees. As a result, Britain has become a strange island. No other country in Europe would sit back while its private schools raced ahead. They would find a way to make sure their best schools were open to all talented children.

George Walden, the former Tory education minister, asks Labour supporters who think the abolition of the grammar schools was an egalitarian triumph a good question: why do you think the Conservative Party never reintroduced selection? In its 18 years in power it pressed ahead with previously unthinkable policies. It allowed unemployment to rise to 3,000,000, privatised swathes of the economy, cut the taxes of the rich and crippled the unions. It attacked every part of the post-war social democratic settlement but never reversed the abolition of grammar schools because it suited the wealthy to a tee.

...Put bluntly, if the wealthy were to devise a system which perpetuated inequality, the system they would come up with would be a fair copy of the British education system which talks the language of anti-elitism while ensuring that the children of the elite prosper.

At the risk of dreadful self-publicity (risk is the wrong word; certainty, more like it) you can read a more detailed exposition of this argument in my book, A Class Act - if you can get hold of it, that is.

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I have been away for a few days, and only just seen this superb column by Terence Kealey, Vice Chancellor of Buckingham University. The gist of it is this:

[T]he Prime Minister granted Buckingham a unique privilege. Our students are to be offered most of the help offered to those at other universities (£3,000 a year low-interest loans as well as other grants and loans of up to £2,700 a year).

But other universities will be limited to fees of only £3,000 a year (so they will remain cash-strapped) whereas we will charge full fees, so our students will continue to enjoy our excellent student-staff ratio of 10:1 and our traditional small group teaching, while still being helped by the Student Loan Company.

Mr Blair has effectively, therefore, introduced vouchers into British higher education, and that is more explosive than the Higher Education Act (which, after all, raised only the existing ceiling on fees) because of where it leads: with only one more reform by the Government, most of the Russell Group of leading British universities will be freed to go independent on the Ivy League model.

That reform, moreover, could be achieved without legislation. Currently, government support for research is divided between two sets of bodies: the Higher Education Funding Councils (which also fund teaching) and the research councils (which fund only research).

...But if the Government transferred the HEFC research funds to the research councils, not only would research improve but the universities would also depend on HEFC only for teaching support. And since that support is mean, and since it restricts the universities to charging only £3,000 top-up fees, the Russell Group would be better off leaving HEFC and charging full fees like Buckingham.

And because, thanks to the Buckingham precedent, universities independent of HEFC will still be free to apply for research council funding, the Russell Group's research would not be damaged should they go independent. They would be like the Ivy League, whose teaching is independent but whose research is largely state funded.

Do read the whole column. It's scintillating (and it's not often one gets to write that and mean it).

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Remember the direct grant schools? As a group of self-governing, state-funded schools, that took bright pupils from state primary schools, they were once a beacon of excellence. The direct grant schools opened up some of the country’s best schools to pupils with ability rather than wealth.

Their story is a parable for our times. On the altar of equal opportunity, the 1974-79 Labour Government abandoned the scheme. Like almost all acts of social engineering, its actions made worse the very problem it was seeking to overcome. Poor pupils who once had access to excellent private schools were thereafter denied hope. And those schools that once bridged the private-state school gulf were driven into becoming fully private, their doors closed to the poor.

Cut to 30 years later. For direct grant, read Oxbridge. Same story, different actors. This time round, the story goes thus. The Government has decreed that Oxford must recruit 77 per cent of its undergraduates from state schools, regardless of the relative abilities of applicants. If it does not meet the arbitrary “benchmark”, the university will be fined.

Labour’s methods are not merely crass, in expecting Oxford to act as a remedial centre for state pupils, but grotesquely counter-productive. As a direct consequence of its policies, fewer, not more, state school pupils will be able to benefit from an Oxford education.

In the context of funding constraints which, with every passing term, drag Oxford further down the international league of excellence, Oxford has no choice but to remove itself altogether from the Government’s clutches and to follow the direct grant schools into the private sector. Even Lord Butler of Brockwell, high priest of the wisdom of the State as a former Cabinet secretary, and now Master of University College, has spoken of the need for such a move “sooner rather than later”.

As a private institution, it will be free to set its own fees at a realistic level and it will be able to decide for itself who it admits. But unlike such private universities as Harvard, whose £20 billion of endowments allow it to offer scholarships to all who merit them, regardless of their wealth, a pauperised Oxford will simply not have the means. A triumph, yet again, for the most pervasive rule in public policy: the law of unintended consequences.

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Martin Stephen, the new high master of St Pauls, made a bit of a splash earlier this week when he called for politics to be taken out of education. Power, he argues, should be taken away from ministers and handed to a commission made up of employers, universities, parents and teachers. "The essentially and unavoidably short-term outlook of politicians can no longer justify their taking decisions on education...Government has five or at most ten years to plan and execute its policy, less time than a single child spends in the system...Successive governments have redesigned and redesigned our education system so that it bears a resemblance to a wound operated on so often that all that is left is scar tissue...Every parent and child in the UK should have the chance to attend an impendent school regardless of the race, colour, creed, social or economic standing of their parents. In a world where the mixed economy is the norm, it is madness for government not to buy places in our schools."

I have a lot of time for Dr Stephen, one of the most thoughtful teachers in the country who, along with Anthony Seldon, is willing to say things which are unpopular with his private sector colleagues. And much of his analysis is spot-on. But although his remarks are not as bad as some, they are a variation on a recurring and superficially seductive theme in public policy debates: if only those grubby politicos weren’t involved. Leave things to 'the experts'.

Seductive it may be. But it’s also nonsense.

Who was it that got us into this mess? It was experts who abolished grammar schools for their presumed comprehensive paradise. It is experts who have devalued the exam system. It's experts who train teachers so abysmally.

Experts landed us with a police force which is now so warped in its outlook of its responsibilities that it's no longer a force but a service. It is experts who defend the NHS.

The truth of the matter is that experts are almost always insiders who defend the status quo on which they built their careers. The only experts who should count are those who use services: consumers. Tesco doesn’t employ experts to plan what supply should be. Its plans are based on what demand is.

Yes, politicians interfere and politicians are, at the very least, complicit in many of our worst public policy failures. But in many - most? - instances, those failures are the the result of a bandwagon started by experts.

Dr Stephen is quite right to stress the demands of employers. But experts - whther they be employers, academics or educationalists - shouldn't plan the schools system. No one should. It should respond to the demands of parents.

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Pity the poor student who, in receipt of three A grades at A-level, is then told that the standard required for such an achievement is lower than ever before. Candidates can do no more than sit the exams for which they are entered, and criticism of the debasement of A-levels should never be confused with criticism of the students who take them.

But pity still more the student who, in receipt of two Es, then disappears for three years to university. In all likelihood, the student will be ill-suited to the demands of a university course, as the ever increasing number of drop-outs shows. As for those who do survive the course, they are often able to do so thanks only to the remedial classes which universities have had to set up to cope with the sub-standard skills possessed by first year undergraduates.

Most analyses of the problem with A-levels get this the wrong way round. It is not the decline in the standard required to achieve a given grade which has caused problems at universities. It is the change in university admissions which has caused problems with A-levels. Twenty years ago, their purpose was to sort out those who could derive benefit from university from those who could not. Thus the A-level failure rate of around 30 per cent was not a problem; it was the very point of A-levels.

Today, however, the government has determined that over half of school leavers should go to university. When almost everyone who wants to is allowed to, there is simply no point in having an exam which fails people. And so the A-level has changed fundamentally in purpose. It is no longer selective but now, rather, intended to give creddentials to as many candidates as possible. Thus it is today almost impossible to fail A-levels.

The real ‘dumbing down’ is not with A-levels but, rather, in universities – and all the more worrying for that. The very idea of higher education is now in trouble, with universities metamorphosing into an expected third tier of schooling, after primary and secondary education. Instead of educating a minority of academic achievers, they are being shaped into a post-school version of the comprehensive, available to everyone.

Universities are thus becoming another example of the prevalent culture of self-expression and personal fulfilment. Those students who have nothing worthwhile to gain from university are being told that, to be complete, they need a degree. This devalues both them and the universities. There is nothing lesser or incomplete about leaving education after school. University should, by definition, only be appropriate for a minority. But that definition is now changing and, with it, the proper notion of a university education.

That is just one reason why the reveived wisdom that A-levels should be scrapped in favour of a continental style Baccalaureate simply misses the point. Just because an idea comes from continent does not, of itself, make it worth adopting. In the same way as barely a word can be found against the adoption of the Baccalaureate today, so it was with the Exchange Rate Mechanism in the late 1980s. And we all remember how successful that was. The problem is not with A-levels. It is with the purpose to which they are put.

University admission policy demonstrates the most important rule in public policy: the law of unintended consequences. Exams now only serve a useful function if they can be passed by almost anyone. Spreading university education wider has not, as was intended by well meaning but naïve politicians and educationalists, broadened access to high quality education but turns out to have necessitated a lowering of standards universally.

Faced with this national disaster, there are two options. One is simply to accept it – to bow to political lie that nothing is wrong and that everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The other is to realise the damage which this Weimar grade inflation is doing and to take control of the currency. There are two steps which are urgently required.

The first can be taken immediately. The current mess is the result in large measure of interference in a perfectly satisfactory system by politicians who have imposed their egalitarian agenda. Exams should be left to teachers, universities and employers (who, it must be remembered, need guidance as to the calibre of those who do not go to university). Exams should be taken out of the hands of politicians and placed in the hands of an educational equivalent of an independent central bank. Such a proposal could be adopted swiftly.

The second is more fundamental. We need to realise that universities are not appropriate for the majority of school leavers and that the drive to change their character is at the heart of all these problems. Until this most pernicious idea is defeated then we are fated to repeat the annual summer A-level angst.

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Excellent article by Ferdinand Mount on schools. As he concludes:

The financial difference between the costs of the two sectors is narrowing. The average cost per pupil at a state secondary school is more than £5,000 a year. The cost at a private day school averages something over £7,000. If we gave every pupil a ticket or voucher of, say, £5,000 a year, parents could choose between schools of whatever type they fancied.

But I fear the time is not ripe for such daring. A scheme of precisely this type was included in Forster’s Education Act of 1870. So you cannot really expect us to have got around to implementing it yet.

I think he's being too pessimistic. I've been banging on about vouchers for a decade. When I started, arguing from the left perspective that nothing could be more 'empowering' than giving those parents who cannot afford to choose where and how their children are educated the means to do so, I was dismissed as a lunatic. Now the accusation is that I am wrong, or that the figures don't add up.

That is a fundamental change in the political terms of trade. When the argument noves to one of number crunching and mechanics, it's a clear indication that the ground has shfted. Vouchers are coming.

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I've only just seen Prof Tim Brighouse's latest bright idea - that former private school pupils should pay a levy (that's what he calls it - I'd call it a fine) of up to £2,100 a year in addition to the proposed student top-up fee of £3,000.

The Prof famously won a libel action against John Patten, who called him a nutter. So I won't indulge in name calling. What I will say, though, is that his plan is nuts - even if a court found he isn't.

Such a fine would be a perfect example of the most pervasive law of public policy – the law of unintended consequences. The idea is designed to cut back on the share of places taken by private school pupils.

Think it through for a second and you'll see that the exact opposite is the most likely consequence. If private school pupils came with a dowry of higher fees than state school pupils, cash-starved universities would have a greater incentive to take them than they do now. Duh.

It just demonstrates that the mindset which hates success and wants to penalise opportunity is still alive and kicking on the left, and is as barking as ever.

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Brian Micklethwait links to a fascinating New York Times piece about the burgeoning private schools in India.

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If you want to retain your sanity, don’t try to get your head around the mess which constitutes the current rules over selection in state schools.

As the case brought by Wandsworth Council on behalf of Ernest Bevin School demonstrates, the issue does not merely retain all the emotive and political strength it has ever had; it also has a direct impact on how schools themselves behave.

The fundamental problem is that the government is unwilling to face up to the logic of its flagship policy – specialist schools. By definition, these schools require their pupils to be selected. But for most Labour members, a commitment to comprehensive education – and thus against selection - remains at the very core of what it means to be left wing.

All the current confusion and problems stem, in the end, from that divide. A series of contradictory policies and inconsistent approaches have all been caused by the Prime Minister being unable to be explicit one way or another about selection.

Take the idea of selection itself. All Labour politicians say the same thing: selection based on ability is wrong. That’s why they set up the Office the Schools Adjudicator, to rule on cases when selection in one school might appear to be ‘damaging’ to a nearby school.

And it’s why they passed legislation allowing local referenda on the closure of the few remaining grammar schools.

But it’s not that simple. Selection by ability is, they argue, wrong. Selection on the basis of aptitude, however, is at the very root of Labour’s policies for turning round education and getting away from “bog-standard comprehensives”, as Alastair Campbell famously called them. The idea of specialist schools, which forms the basis of Labour’s plans, depends entirely on selection – but selection by aptitude rather than ability.

You might well be puzzled by this bizarre attempt to create a difference where none exists. The truth, of course, is that there is no difference between selection by aptitude and selection by ability. But the real meaning of words, and logic in policy, are not remotely the most important issues here. What matters above all is politics. And the divide between ability and aptitude has only one purpose: allowing the Prime Minister to tell his fellow Labour members that he is indeed against selection by ability, but then letting him tell the rest of us that he has radical plans for the school system.

The problem is that words matter, and political fudges have an impact in the real world, as Ernest Bevin School has discovered. How bizarre it must seem to them as they see a government trumpeting its specialist schools policy, which depend on selection, but are then told that they are wrong to select some of their own pupils. They, like many other schools and parents, are caught up in the government’s Byzantine and misguided attempts to have it both ways on selection.

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Excellent piece in The Times on the education voucher scheme in Milwaukee.

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(This piece appears in the September issue of the Fabian Review.)

Let me begin with a challenge. I will give a quite astonishingly large sum of money to anyone who can satisfactorily explain the difference between selection by aptitude (good) and selection by ability (bad).

It’s a safe challenge for me to make. Since I first wrote about selection, and the attitude of the Left, in 1995 (when I was working for the Fabian Society), and first made the challenge, not one person has come even close to an explanation.

The reason is simple: there is no genuine difference. The two words are interchangeable and have no meaning beyond avoiding an idea – selection by ability – which antagonises the majority of the education establishment which has so ruined our schools over the past fifty years, and the Left, which is so ignorant of its own history that it despises a concept which it once saw as the engine of social progress.

There’s a similar piece of sophistry in the distinction between selection and specialisation. In order to specialise, they select. Today, specialist schools are allowed to select up to ten percent of their pupils. But they’re not selective schools. Oh no.

The greater the number of specialist schools – the government is committed to expanding their numbers - the easier it becomes to allow them to select more of their pupils – there are, quite simply, more schools to go round, catering for more types of pupil.

Clearly, both Downing Street and the DfES are now convinced that the only way to improve standards is to allow schools to specialise, to choose pupils who will most benefit from specialisation, and to teach a curriculum appropriate to that specialisation. Just as clearly, and a lot more importantly, parents and children - the only people who really matter, and the only people who should be able to decide these issues – support the idea.

So the real debate ought to have moved on to a realistic discussion of how best we can structure a selective or specialist - if you must - schools system. Instead, we are stuck in a pointless debate about the very idea of specialisation.

When the 1944 Education Act was passed, enshrining state-supported grammar schools, it was socialist thinkers who led the clamour. It was the likes of Tawney and the Webbs who argued that the most socially just and effective way of educating children – especially the poor – was by giving them all the same opportunity to benefit from schools which focused on academic stretching.

The real basis of opposition to selection is, of course, social engineering: the belief that only by forcing all children, irrespective of their individual abilities – aptitudes, if we must – to be educated together can we build a truly equal society. As Crosland put it in 1956: education should be seen “as a serious alternative to nationalisation in promoting a more just and efficient society.”

It hasn’t worked. And we all know it. The difference is that some are prepared to say so, whilst others come up with specious arguments to deflect criticism of their own personal response to this failure. ‘You know how much we believe in comprehensives, but there’s no way we’re sending little Jonny to that dump round the corner’; in other words, ‘It’s fine for the rest of the riff-raff, but not for our kids’. Or ‘Amanda is such a clever child but she just isn’t stretched at the moment, so we’re paying her to have extra tuition’; in other words, ‘We’ve got money, and we’re going to spend it how we like, thank you very much’.

We have selection now. But it is based on the cheque book: if you can afford to send your child to a private school, to pay for extra lessons, or to move into the catchment area of a decent state school, then you are fine. If however you are one of the majority, you take what you are given.

There are two left-wing responses to this: one is to argue for the abolition of private and grammar schools (which is at least consistent: the left has a history of destroying some of the best schools).

The other response is to obfuscate. Labour is against selection by ability, but in favour if by aptitude.

Rare is the left-winger who argues that equitable response is to say that the choice of a fully academic education (or another form of specialisation) which is available now only to a wealthy minority, or those lucky enough to live in areas which still have grammar schools, should be available to everyone. That means the state should fund a system which offered a multiplicity of schools – grammar schools, yes, but many other types of specialisms, too. Whatever parents, rather than politicians and bureaucrats, want, in other words.

In America, the most passionate advocates of specialist, selective schools are on the left: the poverty lobby and ethnic minority groups. They recognise the need for schools which can lift pupils out of the ghetto. So, too, does the left in Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Germany amd France.

But not here. Look at our respetive education records, and tell me which has got it right.

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Eton, Winchester and a host of other top public schools have, it seems, been naughty boys. As Saturday’s Times revealed, they have been caught exchanging e-mails behind the bike shed and talking to each other outside class about their fee increases. They are set for a pretty severe detention.

At first glance they seem guilty as charged — guilty, that is, of acting in what the Competition Act calls a “concerted practice” to fix their fees between them. But stop for a second and think what this actually means. They are charities; not some greedy corporation filching public money to buy yachts in Monaco for board members. Their co-operation was designed to see what level of fees the market could bear — fees which would be ploughed straight back into their pupils’ education.

The state sector education establishment must, nonetheless, be loving it. How it loathes those schools which — how dare they? — actually do what parents ask them to do: teach children properly and successfully.

So we can expect a series of attacks on private schools from the likes of Roy Hattersley and his fellow educational vandals, who betray their hatred and envy of others’ success with their every waking thought. How typical of the mindset which has ruined state education for decades. Instead of trying to emulate the success of the public schools, they simply want to destroy it.

There is, however, a way to replicate that success while acting against price fixing. We can open education to the market, making it impossible to rig, and give all parents the same ability to choose how and where their children are educated as those who can now afford to pay fees. If all parents were given a voucher, equivalent to the amount spent on each pupil in state schools, the educational landscape would be transformed. Children at the mercy of failing, sink schools would be given a way out and the chance of a decent education. Schools who treat parents as annoying encumbrances of their pupils would be forced to respect their wishes. Standards would rise across the board, as has been found in Sweden, which has introduced vouchers.

You read that right: Sweden. The most egalitarian people on Earth understand what British opponents of school choice do not: choice benefits, above all, the poor. Swedish councils are obliged to give a voucher representing 75 per cent of the average cost per student in municipal schools to any parent who wants one. The parents can spend that money in any school of their choice. Denmark and the Netherlands have similar arrangements.

Where would you rather have your child educated: at any number of sink schools in Britain, or in Stockholm, Copenhagen or Amsterdam, where standards are in a different league? Schools accepting vouchers will not be like Eton and Winchester, they will be much like any other decent school across the globe — getting on with teaching, the main job in hand. And they will give everyone the opportunity now available only to those with money.

As Milton Friedman put it recently: “What happens now is that those who are well-off have the choice to school their children wherever they’d like and they can afford to pay twice — once through taxes and once through tuition. Most of the population is not in that position. The vouchers would allow the lower classes to have nearly the same opportunity as the upper classes. So it would tend to reduce the difference between the rich and the poor. The only reason it has been argued the other way is ... well, I don’t know. I don’t see how it could be argued the other way ... What is the argument?”

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Two separate stories in the papers today are of course directly related: the examiner who fesses up to lowering the maths exam pass level so more kids get the qualification; and the 40% drop-out rate from some universities.

Of course the pass rate is being lowered – the only point of exams now is getting 50% of pupils into university (as I analyse here). And of course they then drop out, when they realise that even at doss universities they can’t cope.

That’s why it’s such a fraud trying to push participation rates up. No one wins.

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