The Tories have one real success in government – and they’re scared to talk about it

The most significant achievement of this coalition, the only thing they really have any right to crow about, and possibly all that posterity will ever remember them for with anything approaching gratitude, will not be the ‘long-term economic plan’ they never cease to talk up, but the school reforms that the Conservatives seem almost to want to deny as the general election approaches.

This reticence is a mistake. With many voters grown so cynical about mainstream politics that they’re ready to throw in their lot with any passing populist chancer, here is a rare success story that needs shouting from the rooftops. It’s a story about how a cabinet minister took a principled stand against vested interests, delivered in government what he’d promised in opposition, and made a dramatic and sustained difference to a generation of young people, giving them the chance to become the authors of their own life stories.

It is easy to forget how horribly bad so many schools were before Michael Gove became education secretary and it can be surprising — given the relentless badmouthing he had to endure from the teaching profession — how much better those same schools became before Gove was bundled out of his job in last year’s reshuffle.

This week the Commons Education Committee published a report on academies and free schools, two of the government’s flagship policies. The scale and pace of change has been astonishing. Actually it was Labour that invented academies (schools that are independent of local authorities and funded directly by government) back in 2002, and at the initiative of Lord -Adonis just over 200 of them were established in England by the last general election. Now there are 4,344, including around two thirds of all secondary schools.