If there was a coalition to keep the poor down in Britain, Fiona Millar would be its chairman. If a wicked emperor were to seize Britain and want to make sure the rich held all the best jobs, he’d set up a system where there was a direct link between wealth and quality of education. He’d smile with evil content at what Chris Cook has revealed as the ‘graph of doom’ which shows such a relationship in British state schools.
So we have designed a system of near-perfect unfairness. And yet, the people who are supposedly against inequality ignore this problem completely – and instead focus their ire on those reforming these state schools.
For reasons that I have never been able to work out, Fiona Millar has become the queen of the status quo in British state education – that is to say, a system which makes sure the poorest kids get the worse schools. She was on the radio today again, making out that Britain’s problem is that our private schools are the best in the world. She said how well Finland did to ‘get rid of their private schools’ (that’s untrue) and reluctantly conceded it would be tough to abolish them in Britain. But she had nothing to say about the state system.
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