Politics

Cameron has a good case: shame he’s got diverted by the grammar schools row

26 May 2007

Mr Blair has failed to deliver his promises on education because of a fundamental mistake he made in 1975: the year in which he joined the Labour party. He has delivered bold speeches promising to make all state schools independent. Nice idea, Mr Blair: shame about your party. Labour, denied the commanding heights of the economy and union power, regard LEAs as among the last bastions of socialist egalitarianism. This is why his last education bill, establishing trust schools, was perforated with concessions, and even then needed Tory support to be passed.

In Mr Blair’s system, new schools can only open once they have a found a sponsor willing to part with £2 million in areas that fit ‘deprivation criteria’. Academies usually replace failed schools, thus adding nothing to the number of schools. Negotiations often take two years. And if the organisers want to open a second school, they must start this whole process from the beginning — and run the dispiriting gauntlet of the LEAs yet again

Mr Willetts is proposing to correct each of these defects. There would be no sponsorship criteria, new schools could open wherever there is a demand, and multiple school licences would be granted. Mr Cameron said on Monday he would ensure the ‘LEAs cannot strangle new schools at birth’. Mr Willetts envisages a large number of smaller, boutique schools rather than a new Grange Hill with a cast of hundreds in every neighbourhood.

The Conservatives’ arguments against building more grammar schools are, in private, a good deal saner than those they advance in public. Even if Mr Cameron’s government backed grammars, it is pointed out, the LEAs would defy him — just as they have defied Mr Blair. And what would Milton Friedman make of a system where schools choose pupils, rather than the other way around? Choice, Mr Cameron believes, is a more powerful tool for social mobility than academic selection.