The Tories plan a radically different education system, with new schools

James Forsyth reviews the week in Politics

It is not often that David Cameron lavishes praise on a Labour achievement. But that’s exactly what he was doing on Monday morning at Walworth Academy as he lauded the school for having almost doubled the number of pupils getting good GCSE results.

As one of Tony Blair’s academies, Walworth is a rare Labour success, a state-funded institution free from local education authority control. Yet Labour has turned its back on the academies, leaving Cameron and the Tories free to swoop in and claim them as their own.

A Tory government would see the academy model become the norm. Schools would be state-funded and free but left to run themselves. This is a welcome development. Academies are one of the few good things to happen to state education in this country since the abolition of the grammar schools. If Labour were still the party that believes that ‘what matters is what works’, it would be racing to open as many academies as possible. But it is not. In education, in what many in the party fear is a glimpse of where Labour is headed under the leadership of the schools secretary Ed Balls, it is returning to being the party of producer socialism.

If the Tories win the next election, they will aim to pass a short bill before the summer recess that will allow hundreds more schools to become academies. Outstanding schools will be able to take academy status for the start of the new school year in September, while failing schools will be taken over and turned into academies. The bill will also allow some private schools to give up charging fees and enter the state sector as academies. The Tories hope that this will begin to change the nature of the state system, pulling power away from the education bureaucrats.