‘We should have been bolder’

27 January 2007

The battle to reform state schools has been a bloody one for Tony Blair, on a battleground which his party regards as sacred. From the offset, Lord Adonis has been his chief adviser. Ten years ago he was a journalist writing about education in robust terms. He denounced the ‘comprehensive school revolution, which destroyed many excellent schools without improving the rest’. He deplored the end of grammar schools, a move ‘carried out in the name of equality but which served to reinforce class divisions’.

It’s the kind of stuff which is too hardcore for a Conservative manifesto these days. Yet its author tells me he still believes every word. ‘I have not changed my mind in ten years,’ he says. ‘If I could redo the 1960s and 1970s education policy, I’d do it very differently. But I think the debate has moved on from the abolition of the grammar schools. Nobody sensible, including today’s Conservatives, David Cameron or David Willetts, wants to turn the clock back.’

It is the first of many warm remarks about the Tories. City Academies are, of course, a modernised version of City Technology Colleges developed under the last Conservative government — state-funded schools, but with private sponsorship and running independent of state control. And it has become the template on which Labour is now building.

I tease Lord Adonis that the Labour flagship school which he has chosen has a plaque to John Major, its political father. He shrugs. His criticism of the Major government is that it failed to keep up momentum, and lost the courage of its convictions. ‘The Conservatives set up a pilot form of governance for City Academies but just managed to open 15,’ he says. ‘I will have 90 open by next year. I have 200 almost signed up, and that’s why we made the commitment before Christmas to have 400 signed up by 2010.’ And each will come with a private sponsor offering £2 million.

If he speaks in the first person — what he, rather than Labour achieved, it is with good reason. Since he started working for 10 Downing Street in the spring of 1998 it has been a personal battle — with the enemies tending to reside in Labour back benches. His move from No. 10 to government, via a House of Lords appointment, was deeply controversial. Yet he believes the City Academies have answered his critics themselves.