Look back in anger

Let us take the man at his word. ‘We should start saying what we do mean,’ Tony Blair told his party in 1994. New Labour should promise only what it was sure it could deliver. And at the heart of those promises was education, education, education. ‘I would like,’ he said six months before his election, ‘to be able to look back and recognise that in the late 1990s my Labour government began the process of establishing the creative, vibrant, successful education service our country desperately needs.’ Now, as his premiership draws to its close, and as the Blair government sinks deeper into the quagmire of Iraq and cash-for-honours, it is time to hold this audit of practical policy.

What is not in dispute is that the education budget has indeed been increased by 52 per cent. But to what end? The Spectator’s analysis of ten years’ worth of statistics shows that the value for money has been poor. Such improvements as have been achieved in the nation’s schools have not been enough to prevent Britain slipping behind other countries. Schools in the poorest areas have fallen even further into the trough of hopelessness. Meanwhile, the rush to private schools has accelerated with parents who can afford the soaring school fees, and many who can’t, taking flight from state failure (one of New Labour’s first acts in office was to deprive children from less affluent backgrounds of the opportunity to go to private school by abolishing the Assisted Places Scheme). A study by the OECD last year showed that the only country with a wider exam attainment gap between its state and private sectors is Turkey. Just this week we learned from Ofsted that the number of failing schools in England rose by 17 per cent last term. The increase among primaries was 25 per cent.