Educating Rachel

The teeny-weeny Bush Theatre is grappling with the monster of the free schools debate. In Little Platoons by Steve Waters the issues are laid out rather simplistically, naively even, which is perhaps just as well with undereducated dimwits from London comps, like me, in the audience. The pivotal character is a disaffected music teacher, Rachel, who rabidly opposes the free school movement until she’s offered the headship of a zingy new academy whereupon, hey presto, her scepticism morphs into passionate support.

Waters claims to be moderating the discussion as a disinterested umpire but his impartiality is, shall we say, only partial. He represents the pro-comp camp through the figure of Martin, an embittered left-wing headbanger who boasts that he has a doctorate in ‘public housing’. (Cue sniggers of contempt from arty west London crowd.) Nasty little Martin chucks his wife and shoves off to Oxfordshire to get his son into a leafy grammar and occasionally pops back to Shepherd’s Bush to undermine any improvements to the comp he dumped. Clearly, we’re invited to revile this fatuous bundle of self-regarding truculence (well played by Richard Henders, looking not unlike an ill-shaven John Bercow), and we’re encouraged to cheer on Nick, the caustic, super-brainy maverick who wants to slice through the cant and set up an education system that’s capable of educating people.

Significantly, it’s Nick who articulates the best arguments of his soft-left opponents. Their principled view is that ‘money’, or financial Darwinism, must be kept separate from education at all costs even if it means wrecking the system. By giving this speech to Nick, rather than to Martin, Waters seems to be hinting that the pro-comp camp, who are highly educated, are also too dim to analyse their own ideology and are thus condemned to remain its captives.