‘We should have been bolder’

24 January 2007

‘Until two or three years ago I was having impassioned arguments about ideology with people. I very rarely have those now,’ he says. He maps out a three-pronged consensus: that education spending must rise, reform must continue and there must be no return to selection by ability. ‘The Conservatives have accepted that too. They’re not for bringing back grammar schools either. Put all this together and we have established a new consensus.’

This brings us to the crux of his argument: that the City Academy agenda is one for all the parties — but it will perish unless it is pursued with utter determination. ‘The issue ahead — both for Gordon when he’s Prime Minister and also because at some stage in the future there will be a Conservative government — isn’t about the broad principles of education policy,’ he says. ‘It is about the actual energy and implementation drive of delivering it.’

It is always striking when a Labour minister admits that there will one day be a Tory administration. But Lord Adonis knows that he is unlikely to outlive the Blair era and appears to be offering his blueprint as much to the Tories as to the Chancellor. He main point is a warning: not to rely on the civil service to transform education.

‘You simply cannot take the view as a minister that being committed to something means that it will happen,’ he says. ‘There is no such thing as “autopilot” on reform. Autopilot means it stops. The civil service is a great vehicle but it does not motivate itself. Its job is to work to ministerial direction. Where those directions are not there, the thing shudders to a halt.’ And his enemy is by no means defeated. ‘The forces that don’t want change are deeply embedded in the system,’ he says.