Take note, Fiona Millar – you can’t close the class divide by closing private schools

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