Twigg must regain Labour's education inititiative

It is good news that Stephen Twigg, an unashamed fan of academies, has been appointed by Ed Miliband as his new shadow education secretary. Andy Burnham never really regained the initiative having started badly, although his focus on vocational education was one of a number of ways he recognised the coalition's weaknesses. But by allowing academies to be stolen by the Tories as their great initiative, he left his successor with a lot of ground to make up. Twigg must now be bold and ensure that Labour education policy has real credibility with parents, heads and teachers. He needs to be ready to outflank education secretary Michael Gove in areas such as rewards for schools that successfully overcome poverty - with a pupil premium that has real teeth - and to give a real sense of mission to academies and free schools. Whilst not disputing the need for rigorous academic qualifications, he should champion a technical baccalaureate as an alternative to the EBacc for some, but equally make clear where the Tories are simply following Labour successes on issues like floor targets and academies. Above all, he must regain the mantle of standards and diversity for Labour, making clear that a future Labour government would be on the side of today's parents and pupils, and not those seeking to turn the Labour policy clock back twenty years. It's good also to see Liz Kendall and Rachel Reeves getting much deserved promotions.

Here's the proof: Labour DID improve social mobility

One of the more persistent myths perpetrated by the government and its media friends is that, for all its good intentions in education, the Labour government achieved little beyond building some shiny new schools and paying teachers better. Anyone who has visited schools before and after the Labour years knows this to be palpable nonsense. And there has been lots of data to show it to be so: from the primary school improvements, particularly from 1996-2001 and the huge reductions in schools below floor targets at GCSE.

But evidence of the benefits to poorer children on a national scale has been more elusive: the achievements of academies, the turnaround of London schools, the outsourcing of local authority education functions or the vast improvements in literacy and numeracy in boroughs like Tower Hamlets are all treated as beside the point, or the result of dodgy vocational qualifications (even though the results excluding these qualifications have shown substantial improvements and were published in the education statistics).

So, we should be grateful to the Financial Times, and its education editor Chris Cook, for a rarity in journalism today: an analysis informed by the facts. Cook and the FT have looke solely at the sort of subjects that Michael Gove thinks children should learn - sciences, modern languages, maths, English, history and geography - and concluded that

Between 2006 and 2010, after stripping out the effects of grade inflation, the bottom of the distribution shifted upwards: the gap closed by one sixth of a grade in every one of these GCSE subjects.

This is a remarkably important finding, as such gaps may narrow quickly in individual schools, but can take a lot to shift systemically. Less surprisingly, perhaps, the FT finds that

If vocational subjects are included, the fall is more pronounced. On that measure, the expected gap between two children from neighbourhoods ten deprivation percentiles apart closed from 2.8 to only 1.8 percentiles.

Equally fascinating is the extent to which Islington has narrowed the gap far faster than neighbouring Camden, a change the FT attributes to the borough's outsourced Cambridge Education, but which surely owes much too to the impact of London Challenge and the new academies in the area.

But despite the rhetoric, the truth is that coalition ministers know that Labour's key policies were working. That's why they have expanded sponsor-led academies and taken key aspects of the London Challenge - especially the National Leaders of Education - and increased them. Still, it is good to have the evidence.

Ed's confident performance: but will his rhetoric make good policy?

One thing can be said about Ed Miliband's speech at the Labour conference this afternoon. He has shown thar he is capable of delivering a speech confidently, even if the power companies cut live TV coverage for a few minutes, and that included a decent self-deprecating joke or two. He gave some strong messages on fiscal responsibility, echoing Ed Balls, towards the start of his speech, where were necessary and will need repetition.There was also the making of a strong populist argument in the speech  This is that he is on the side of the ordinary hard-working person or the more productive businessperson. He will cut through the elites that have let people so badly down over the last few years, not least the bankers.

In one sense, this theme has the potential to resonate in these tough times. The 'producers or predators' line comes across well in the bulletins. People do feel let down by the powers that be, and it makes sense to put himself against the vested interests at the moment. There is a strong theme too in focusing on those who work on moderate incomes and this a theme that the coalition too often fails to recognise: talk of narrowing gaps often focuses just on the very poorest, yet it is important that those on relatively low and modest working incomes don't feel that work doesn't pay. Narrowing gaps must be about more than those who are helped off welfare: in government, Labour delivered more for the deciles just above the lowest group in areas like education, and those are the people who will decide most whether the party is in government again. Talking to them is good politics.

The danger is that without the detail, the ambitions fail to connect with delivery. Certainly, he makes a strong case for social mobility: but more will be needed than cut-price fees where the loan repayment levels remain the same. Equally, the talk of differential business tax rates need more clarity - frontbenchers challenged to defend it on TV can tell him that - as does the proposal to give hard workers preference with social housing.However, after this speech, Ed Miliband has moved out of the shadows of the last Labour government, but he will need to guard against the instincts of some in the party whose interest is more in a quiet life of Tory-bashing than the inconvenience of winning three elections. Today allowed Ed Miliband to set out his vision: now he must put flesh on the bones, all the while ensuring that his argument maintains the hard edge that could provide the makings of a winning manifesto.

Ed's challenge: to re-engage with the South

Ed Miliband put in a surprisingly confident performance on the Andrew Marr show yesterday. And Ed Balls has said some of the right things in his Shadow Chancellor's speech to the Liverpool conference today. But, it is hard to feel yet that Dave and Sam should be pre-booking the removals van for 2015. By tomorrow afternoon, Ed Miliband should at least ensure that they think they may have to do so. And starting from where Labour is now, it's a pretty tall order.

The mediocre local election results have been followed by modest poll leads since May. At least they are poll leads for Labour, but the image of its key figures is dismal, and people judge a future government on its key personnel as much as on its policies. There are precious few of those too: of course, there is some wisdom in holding fire on policy detail so early in the parliament. The planned cut in the fees cap to £6000 did, at least, generate some headlines, though it may become a millstone around the leadership's neck come the manifesto - inflation may well have lifted it to nearer £7000 by 2015, for a start. The bigger problem is that we have had too little indication yet of Labour's direction of travel under Miliband beyond a wish to ease life for the ill-defined 'squeezed middle'.

Often in politics you have to apologise for something that you didn't do, or believe you didn't do, but which the electorate believes you did, if you are to win their trust to move to the next stage. Ed Miliband has been happy to do this on policies with which he disagreed. But the most important issue relates to Labour and the economy. The party makes a good case that the essentials were in good shape until the economic crisis, but voters still believe that it didn't do enough in the good times to prepare for a rainy day. That is the charge to which Labour must respond effectively. Ed Balls is right that the Government needs to boost growth, though his targeted proposed cut in VAT for home improvements seems more considered than his proposed reversing the latest coalition VAT rise. But his more important message was that Labour would have tough fiscal rules governed by the coalition's Office for Budget Responsibility, and would not reverse coalition cuts. That is a good step in the right direction, but it is unlikely to be enough to cut through the unforgiving attitude of ex-Labour voters who distrust the party on the economy.

Ed Miliband needs to go the extra step on the economy tomorrow. But he also needs to give a sense of what Labour's priorities will be in 2015. The problem with too much of what is being said and done at the moment is that it is backward-looking and retrospective: either trying to refight the issues of Labour in government, or even to respond to internal lobbyists who regretted the unfortunate interlude when the party held power. And best not to mention the anti-immigrant protectionism of Blue Labour. Miliband's front bench has plenty of able people on it of whom we have seen far too little, and the recent Progress Purple Book at least offered some good ideas. But Miliband has also failed to set a clear stamp on the direction of policy and his endless policy reviews need a better steer than they have been given to date if they are not to prove a big embarrassment.

In one sense, tomorrow's speech is a big opportunity. It is a chance to tell ordinary voters that there is a lot more to Ed Miliband than his odd relationship with his brother. Few voters have yet got beyond that in their understanding of him. But it is also a big danger, that it becomes a missed opportunity to define Labour in terms that will regain support among the 'squeezed middle classes' of Southern England and the Midlands: the people of the London and Birmingham suburbs, the coastal towns from Kent to Cornwall, the new towns like Reading, Swindon and Slough across to the West and in Bristol and its environs. If Ed doesn't speak to them tomorrow, his party is simply speaking to itself.

Clegg's summer school pupil premium raid another reduction in school freedoms

When I heard news that Nick Clegg has borrowed David Blunkett's 1997 summer school idea to give himself something to say in his conference speech, I wondered where the money was coming from. After all, the coalition has been busy axing Labour agencies and initiatives to disguise its cuts to the general school budget and to pay for the much-vaunted pupil premium. And a principle of the premium has been that it is up to heads, not central or national government, to decide how to spend it.

Now don't get me wrong. Summer schools are not a bad idea, though their impact in the late nineties was not as strong over time as we hoped. I have also long seen a role for earmarked spending when you want to focus on a particular programme or goal. Blunkett used the Standards Fund both to direct a degree of spending on key programmes and to lever in additional resources. A big weakness in the pupil premium has been its lack of leverage or conditionality. But this has not -until now - been the view of the coalition.

So, the summer schools will take £50m from the £1.25 bn pupil premium pot for next year. They will do it by penalising schools that don't set up summer schools, which is the same as earmarking the funds. That may not be a huge amount - £50 from each pupil on free school meals, perhaps - but a principle has been broken. As ministers want something else new to announce, the pupil premium pot can again be raided in the same way, especially as its value increases year-on-year (all paid for by cuts in other school funding). At the same time, the funding consultation - lauded by Clegg in his recent education speech where he hailed resurgent local authorities - proposes to continue to allow local authorities a significant say over the distribution of school resources, moving away from a national funding formula.

With an increasing straitjacket also being imposed on the curriculum through measures like the English Baccalaureate, is it any wonder that a growing number of school and academy leaders are wondering whether all the coalition rhetoric about greater freedom for schools is increasingly feeling like so much hot air?

This post also appears at Public Finance and has been highlighted by Polly Curtis on her Guardian Reality Check blog.

Why Michael D is more likely than Martin McG to become Irish president

When the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, announced yesterday that he would take a few weeks off helping to run the North to run for the Irish Presidency, the media became rather excited. But it is unlikely that the Sinn Fein politician and former IRA commander will reach Aras an Uachtarain, the seat of the Irish president. Indeed, the real contest in Ireland is between two equally fascinating figures, whose prominence tells us more about the Republic today than Sinn Fein's canny bid to shore up its support south of the border.
For weeks, the Irish presidential contest has been taking the form of a national soap opera. First, there was the withdrawal of Senator David Norris, the Joycean scholar and gay rights campaigner, who was leading the race. He left after it emerged that he had defended a former partner in Israel who had been convicted of sex with a 15 year-old boy. What really killed his campaign was less the allegation than the resignation of campaign team members who felt betrayed as they hadn't been told about the story in advance. Norris is back in the running after popular feeling called for his return: hence an appearance on the Late Late Show, Ireland's long-running chat show, om Friday night. One Sunday paper has a straw poll this morning suggesting his lead has been regained.

While Norris was out of the running, the top spot was occupied by no less remarkable a figure, the Labour candidate, Michael D Higgins (pictured), a former culture minister, a poet and a prominent left-winger in the party, who in many ways projects as professorial a persona as Norris. Higgins was the minister who made Ireland safe and attractive for international film crews. Today's Sunday Independent poll, the scientific part conducted before the weekend announcements and Norris's reappearance, still has him as the clear frontrunner.

All this has left the two other main parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, in the part of also-rans. Fine Gael, at least, has a candidate in Gay Mitchell, a popular Dublin Dail deputy, but he has been running a distant second to Higgins until this weekend. Fianna Fail, the once-mighty party of DeValera, was humiliated in the general election earlier this year, and now has just 10pc of the vote. The party leader, Michael Martin, already facing humiliation in a by-election for what was the party's only Dublin seat, has wanted to sit the presidential poll out but has been defied by some in his surviving rump of a parliamentary party. Now there are suggestions that Fianna Fail parliamentarians should nominate Norris - he needs such nominations to stand - which would at least give the fairly traditionalist party a wholly different outlook. The social entrepreneur and head of the Irish special olympics, Mary Davis, an independent who has gained enough support to run, is the only woman definitely running this time.

In the past weeks, there have also been walk-on parts from Gay Byrne, the hugely self-regarding father of Irish television, who decided against running after a gratifyingly self-indulgent few days of speculation, and the right-wing Christian activist and Eurovision star, Dana Rosemary Scallon. There was a time when the Irish presidency was a retirement number for politicians, including DeValera, but more typically supremely boring figures like the late Patrick Hillery or Cearbhall O'Dalaigh. Mary Robinson's election in 1990 on a liberal feminist ticket changed all that, and her successor Mary McAleese helped solidify the sense of an office that was of national importance, albeit without much real power. McAleese's welcome for the Queen this year illustrated the proud dignity that she and Robinson brought to the office.

It is into this that Sinn Fein has sought to thrust Martin McGuinness, a man whose party officially boycotted the royal visit (aside from a brave mayor in Cashel), though he now generously tells us he would meet anyone if he were President. Few expect McGuinness to win, although the contest is, as we have seen, hugely volatile. But what it could achieve is a record Sinn Fein vote in the Republic, building on the 9.9% of the vote won in February. So, of course, Sinn Fein could take 15% with a McGuinness candidacy in a contest that is far more about personalities than it is about politics. However, support seems unlikely to go beyond that. Voters in the Republic are not always convinced of the credentials of their Northern brothers and sisters: when Fine Gael ran Austin Currie, a respected SDLP civil rights campaigner, in 1990, he was humiliated. And while Sinn Fein voters happily support IRA figures with strong Northern constituencies, especially in border areas, much of the party's support in cities like Dublin has owed more to their candidates' pavement politics than their Provo paramilitary past. The latter is also a turn-off to many middle ground voters, who may be happy to see McGuinness playing a prominent role in Stormont as the price for an end to the Troubles, but have no wish to see him having equal prominence in the south.

So, Sinn Fein may successfully shore up its vote and get a bit of extra publicity. But, at what price? To McGuinesss's credit, he has established an excellent working relationship with Peter Robinson, the DUP first minister at Stormont. While a caretaker Sinn Fein minister can act as locum as McGuinness canvasses in the South, the ripples from any controversies in that campaign can only destabilise their working partnership, and that is not good for the Northern power-sharing executive. It is inconceivable that there will not be considerable attention paid to McGuinness's IRA role and to any deaths associated with his time in its leadership. With sectarian tensions rising again over the summer, the last thing Northern Ireland needs is another opportunity to rake over the past in this way.

In the end, Higgins or Norris looks likely to become president. And their ability to do so will tell us as much about Ireland today as the decision of McGuinness to run for the Aras.

This post has been highlighted by Slugger O'Toole and Alex Massie on his Spectator blog.

Three Days in May

To see a very fine performance by Warren Clarke as Churchill in Ben Brown's play Three Days in May, at the Theatre Royal Bath, last night. Clarke well captured the mix of wiles and passion that saw Churchill get his way at a crucial stage in World War II. The days in question, 26-28 May 1940, were on the eve of Dunkirk, as Belgium had surrendered and France was close to doing so. Churchill had four others in his war cabinet: for the Tories, remarkably, both Neville Chamberlain, still party leader, and the foreign secretary Lord Halifax, both noted appeasers, with Clem Attlee and Arthur Greenwood for Labour. The real drama is between Churchill and Halifax - ably portrayed by Jeremy Clyde - over the latter's support for a French attempt to use Mussolini as a mediator to sue for peace with Hitler. In the end, a lot of the drama hinges on how Chamberlain reacts to the competing arguments, scarred as he is by Munich. This is a splendid production by Alan Strachan, and a fascinating reminder of the debates that still took place in the Tory party nine months after the outbreak of the Second World War.

A pointless cull of MPs

What, exactly, is the point of the coalition's cull of MPs? It is said that it will bring more equity to representation, as it takes a few thousand fewer people to elect a Labour MP than a Conservative MP. Ofr course, that takes no account of lower levels of registration in the inner city constituencies where the differences are greatest. But let's leave that be for a moment. Achieving greater equity - something that is already the job of the Boundary Commission - doesn't require a reduction in the number of MPs by 50 at the same time. This is apparently happening to save £12 million. And at what price? Constituencies that bear some relationship to geography and council boundaries are to be shredded in favour of ludicrous agglomorations of wards pushed together to achieve the optimum size dictated by the coalition. In my home constituency of North East Somerset, we would now become Keynsham and Kingswood. The only small mercy is that Jacob Rees-Mogg would no longer be my MP. But that doesn't mean it makes sense. I used to chair Mitcham and Morden CLP in London: it is to be replaced by a new Mitcham constituency that will include a Lambeth ward for no good reason other than mathematical necessity.

But it is not really Cameron's fault that this whole farce came to pass. It is that of the Liberal Democrats, who were too naive to tie the cull of MPs to the passing of the Alternative Vote in a referendum. This left Cameron free to dump on Clegg from a huge height on AV while continuing with his constituency cull. The irony of the whole exercise is that it looks like it will not deliver the gains in seat advantage that the Tories hoped to achieve through their gerrymeander. Instead it may create as many aggrieved seatless Tory MPs as Labour ones. So, there are few winners - and any 'savings' are bound initially to be eaten up along with the cost of the time-wasting involved in a lengthy appeals process and subsequent internal party battles between MPs whose constituencies have been significantly changed.

Whoever thought this would win back public confidence in politics and politicians? Give them a seat on the Lib Dem committee for approving £2m donations from passing fraudsters.

The Syndicate

To see a great performance by Ian McKellan at the Theatre Royal Bath, where he is playing Don Antonio in the Chichester production of The Syndicate. Eduardo de Filipo's play is set in and around Naples in 1960, where the Don is in his twilight years and playing a cross between Solomon and Robin Hood to the locals and their problems. With a strong cast of twenty, including Michael Pennington as the loyal Doctor Fabio and Cherie Lunghi as the godfather's wife Donna Armida, the whole production has a lot going for it, helped by a splendid set. But, despite the great performances - and some nice comic touches as the Don hoodwinks the local loan shark - the whole play feels like a lot less than the sum of its players. A stronger first part is followed by a gradually weakening storyline and a mightily clumsy final act that leaves one simply puzzled, and asking what it was all about? The capacity audience at Bath lapped up the strong performances but were left none the wiser about its import.

How novel are the Free Schools?

This month's opening of 24 free schools has had the media in a permanent state of excitement. And, on the face of it, the DFE has pulled off an impressive feat in seeing so many of the Conservatives' flagships opening so soon after the general election. After all, earlier this year, it seemed like just eight would be ready. However, a closer analysis of the new schools suggests all is not quite what it seems.

17 of the 24 are small primary schools, so comparisons with the early (secondary) academies that replaced failing schools are unworthy and facile, not least as the groundwork for the free schools had already been laid, as we shall see.

In many cases, new primaries would have been needed to respond to demographic changes. And it is good that these will be academies, but they would have been needed anyway.

Of those 24, there are ten that could be described as faith-based. David Blunkett opened the door to new faith schools when - in the face of Tory opposition when they were last in power - he approved the first Muslim schools in 1998, eight months after the general election. Plenty of new faith schools followed. Some became voluntary-aided schools, others foundation schools or academies (which is all in governance terms that 'free schools' are) and it is quite likely that the faith-based schools opening this week could have followed this route.

Then, there are four independent school conversions. Here, there is a direct read across to a policy started by Labour, where schools like Belvedere in Liverpool and Colston Girls in Bristol - more significant independent secondary schools than those opening this week - joined the state sector as academies.

Add to that another group of five schools sponsored by academies, mainly new primaries. Some even use the name 'academy'. To be fair to Gove, he has opened the academies programme to primary schools where Labour had confined primary age academies to the 'all through' route. But this group is simply an extension  of existing brands like Ark and E-Act, as well as an imaginative response to demand by the Cuckoo Hall academy in Edmonton, the first of Gove's primary academies. These are simply additional sponsor-led academies.

Perhaps five - including Toby Young's West London Free School - so far are what might be called parent or teacher-promoted free schools (one is preventing a council closure plan). Here, again, Gove has stripped back the bureaucracy that made it difficult for parent promoters in the past, though several did open under Labour and the rules were changed in their favour from 2006.

These schools are all new academies, as their legislative basis makes clear. What they are not is free schools on the Swedish model, where profit-making companies respond to parental demand, and where there was no tradition of the sort of diversity offered by academies, foundation ands voluntary-aided schools.

But it is in the expansion of sponsor-led academies, both primary and secondary, that the potential for a genuine improvement in standards most lies. DFE says that 45 more opened this week, in disadvantaged areas or replacing failing schools, and a further 49 will open in the New Year. The results from the big academy sponsors this year for academies opened under Labour were remarkable, but have not been properly publicised - many had improvements in excess of ten percentage points this year. This is where the gritty school reforms will continue.

Free schools certainly have a place in the fabric of our education system. They can provide parents with greater options, and it would be wrong simply to confine them to poorer areas. But they should also be linked to improvement in disadvantaged areas. It is right to have ways to enable new faith schools to respond to demand and good independent schools to drop fees and selection. However, the Government should be judged on how it lifts standards across the board, including in once failing schools that have become academies, rather than the number of schools it opens under a new brand name.

Don't neuter TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor, the website where reviews can be posted about hotels and restaurants, has come in for a lot of flak of late. It is to be investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK for its apparent propensity to publish fake and unchecked reviews. While the site, which is now a giant money-spinner, may need to tighten its procedures, it would be a big mistake to make it too difficult for ordinary travellers to add their reviews to the website.

I write as one who has been awarded a gold star, no less, for having contributed in excess of 100 reviews to the website over the last few years. I also write as one who has enjoyed excellent hotels and restaurants in places as varied as Istanbul, Dresden and Alnwick as a result of recommendations on the site. Of course, I've come across fishy reviews along the way: the number of glowing reviews for a pleasant, but hardly outstanding, Italian island hotel suggested a degree of conspiracy. Its location still persuaded me to go, and I didn't regret it, though my review was more measured. And it isn't just the obviously fraudulent reviews that irritate: it is just as annoying to wade through the overblown complaints about a trivial reception incident in an otherwise excellent hotel or the numerous moans that Spanish hotels don't do a proper English breakfast.

Yet, for all its flaws, TripAdvisor has greatly enhanced our lives. It can also be a useful corrective to the clever photography and absurd descriptions that too many hotels use to hide their true location or nature - a rather more pervasive example of fakery than dodgy TripAdvisor reviews, in my experience.

In the past, I might have relied on a small number of guide book recommendations, and some of them have been pretty wide of the mark while others have been excellent, or on the brochure choices of travel agents. By offering near complete lists of hotels in cities, and at least an indication of the top 20, one has a great starting point to research further online.

Rarely have I been disappointed in the resulting choices, and most of my later reviews have reflected the original 4* or 5* rankings given by TripAdvisor reviewers. On those rare occasions where a hotel or restaurant has defied its online reputation, TripAdvisor has given me somewhere to let others share my disappointment.

I hope it will continue to provide that forum.

Clegg's real threat to coalition school plans

The Deputy Prime Minister's spinners were out on manouevres this weekend, briefing a lot of nonsense about how our hero had defeated the nasty Tory profit-monger Michael Gove over his plans to allow greedy capitalists to make a few bob out of free schools. Since no such plan is on the agenda in Government (much to the annoyance of some providers and think tanks) and was even ruled out in the Tory manifesto, this particular Aunt Sally seemed to have been introduced merely to impress the more gullible types at the forthcoming Liberal Democrat conference, as well as the Sunday lobby with its particular fondness for the genre.

Unsurprisingly, there is little in Nick Clegg's actual speech today to justify any of that hype. But there is a lot that is potentially rather more alarming for free schools and academies, and is a real threat to their independent development. This threat comes from a clear desire by the DPM to restore the role of local authorities in several crucial respects. Here is what he says:

I think some confusion has been allowed to grow around our long term vision for schools: There’s an increasing belief that we are trying to sideline local authorities altogether because Academies so far have only had a direct relationship with the Secretary of State and the department in Whitehall. So let me straighten this out once and for all. This government wants all schools, over time, to have the opportunity to be autonomous with Academy freedoms. Both Liberal Democrats and Conservatives promised that in our manifestos. But we do not want that to lead to mass centralisation of the schools system. Far from it: as Academies become more commonplace, and eventually the norm, we will make sure people do not lose their voice over what local schools provide. So we will need to develop a new role and relationship between schools, central and local government.

Councils have an essential job. We will ensure they have a stronger role in making sure there are school places in the area for every child, not just those who know how to play the system. We have strengthened their role in admissions. They will oversee our new, fairer, admissions code. A code which makes it easier for the poorest to get the best places and easier for any citizen to complain if the rules are broken. We will strengthen their role supporting children with special needs. Sarah Teather is bringing forward a radical set of reforms which will ensure local councils can help knock heads together to get a better deal for disabled and disadvantaged children. And we will give them a critical role ensuring there is fairer funding Local authorities will help ensure the schools forums which currently divide up the cake locally are more transparent and they will help guarantee that academies, and other schools, are funded on exactly the same basis.

But we can – and we will – go further. Where there are no schools the local authority "owns" any more - there should be no barrier to the local authority working in a new relationship with academies, in partnership with central government.
The local authority could have a key role in deciding who new providers are and holding existing providers more sharply to account. Local authorities, closer by their very nature to their community than the Secretary of State, could be more determined than distant Whitehall to drive up attainment in their own patch – for example by setting higher standards for all schools in their area. That is why I am inviting those local authorities which wish to move to the new phase to grasp this opportunity and be involved in piloting this new role, starting from next year.

For most of the schools converting to academy status, a desire to have greater independence from the local authority is a big selling point. So too for some of those involved with free schools: read what Patricia Sowter, who is sponsoring Woodpecker Hall Academy, told me in my article in this month's Public Finance.

Already, that independence is being eroded, the result one suspects as much of pressure from a resurgent Conservative-led Local Government Association as of the DPM's arm-twisting at the cabinet table. The Government has retreated on plans to move to a national funding formula, as the DPM notes approvingly in his speech, and is giving the job to local authorities to decide (with a few extra restrictions) on the funding of academies and free schools in their area, even if the money is paid by a national agency. It remains to be seen, too, whether large authorities like Birmingham and Kent, where their Conservative politicians oppose coalition academy policies, not to mention the councillors across the country of all parties who are hostile, will see this new phase in quite the same spirit that the DPM envisages.

Yesterday, I thought that Clegg's spin about profit-makers was all about currying favour with his activists. Today I wonder whether it was as much about deflecting the media from his rather more worrying pledge to revitalise the role of local authorities in education. That is a battle that he and his Tory councillor allies appear already to have won.

Where next for academies and free schools policy

I have written a feature analysis piece for the September edition of Public Finance on the development of academies and free schools in the future. You can read the article here.

Early GCSEs are no scam

Today's Telegraph and Mail have found a new target in their relentless battle against the achievements of our schools and young people: the early GCSE. They tell us (with some encouragement from the exam boards, it would seem) that the main reason schools enter their students for exams early is to 'play' the league tables. This is not the case. The practice was actively encouraged for bright students, so that some they might be stretched, just as a growing number of schools have students taking AS levels a year early too. One of the most inspiring classes I ever visited was a 15-strong AS Maths class of 15 year-olds in North Liverpool Academy, a place I should imagine is entirely alien to those who try to concoct new ways to do down students each year. These were young people from some of the most disadvantaged communities in the country. Schools were actively encouraged to do this as part of Labour's 'gifted and talented' drive. Another reason why schools do some GCSEs early is to encourage young people to do a wider range of exams, and to show them that they can achieve. Others do use it is a practice run. Yes, some schools will bank the GCSEs early, but their motive is not just about the tables, it is as much about widening the achievement of their students and stretching them. But that is perhaps too noble an explanation for the shrill voices of the Tory press.

The danger of dumbing down GCSE statistics

Damian Hinds, a Conservative MP, tells us this morning that a set of figures he has compiled from Parliamentary Questions 'show categorically how, over 13 years, the last Labour Government undermined the lifechances of a generation by steering them away from the subjects that employers value most.' Having been a part of that Government's education policy for six of those 13 years, I must have missed the deliberate steering.

It is true that - in line with the approach generally advocated by the Conservative front bench towards the National Curriculum - Estelle Morris removed compulsion in modern foreign languages for 14-16 year-olds, in order to focus more on 7-11 year-olds and to allow a disaffected minority to pursue vocational options. But then it is equally true that a concerted drive from 2006 by Labour ministers to encourage take-up in STEM subjects has halted a decline that began under the Conservatives in subjects like Physics and has led to big improvements in take-up of science and Maths subjects at A-level and GCSE for five years. It is also the case that when it became clear that there was some 'gaming' going on as a result of GCSE equivalences - equivalences that had been recommended by independent advisers for courses that at the time had little take-up - the Labour government shifted the main GCSE measure from 'any GCSEs and equivalents' to one that includes English and Maths.

That remains the main measure by which the Government judges schools; and under it, the number of schools with fewer than 30pc of pupils gaining five good GCSEs including English and Maths fell from 1600 to fewer than 100 last year. Michael Gove has raised the benchmark in response. And the proportion of pupils gaining five good GCSEs (or equivalents) including GCSE English and Maths rose from a 35% in 1997 to 54% in 2010. Indeed even if one focuses just on GCSEs and excludes all equivalent qualifications, the proportion is 49.5%, still a substantial and real improvement.

So, it is simply nonsense to suggest that Labour was engaged in some elaborate dumbing down exercise. Indeed the Labour government maintained and strengthened the Standards over Time work started by the previous Conservative government. Labour's main interest was in seeing far more schools and pupils reaching a benchmark that is accepted by Damian Hinds' colleagues as valid; in that it succeeded so well that the floor targets have been kept by the coalition.

But it is also the case that academic qualifications will not be the answer for everyone: we need more technical and applied options of real value, something Labour tried to achieve with the Diplomas, and succeeded in some like Engineering (according to Tory adviser Sir James Dyson) and IT. And the current Government really does need to decide where it stands on pre-16 vocational qualifications: Alison Wolf thinks they're generally a mistake if they take up more than 20% of curriculum time; Ken Baker wants more technical education from 14 with his excellent university technical colleges initiative. The truth is that the academic core of the EBacc will not be right for every student, which is why Labour focused on English and Maths, and saw substantial improvements in both, especially in the poorest schools. Rather than trading silly insults, perhaps  Mr Hinds, whose Conservative-led education select committee recently damned the EBacc, could assist in resolving the split in his own ranks that really does matter to young people's futures.

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Carol's GCSE maths split could add up to a solution

Carol Vorderman has come up with one very good idea about what to do on Maths, but some of her other prescriptions need more careful thought. Her report for the Conservative Party has attracted standard diplomatic language from Education Secretary Michael Gove, suggesting no great enthusiasm for her findings, but one of her ideas really should be taken forward. Vorderman is absolutely right to argue that GCSE Maths should be split between a functional exam and an exam focused on algebra and trigonometry. It is vital that everyone understands how to calculate, use fractions and percentages; not everyone will master calculus.But it is also important that any functional test is developed with business, if it is genuinely to achieve its aims. Otherwise it could act as a hindrance to achieving wider qualifications - as the Diploma has shown.


However, if a young person gets a good GCSE in functional maths, it is less obvious that they need to continue studying to the same standard to18, as Vorderman recommends: of course maths should be integrated into other courses as appropiate, and those who don't get a C grade at 16 should at least continue to aim for this grade in functional maths. Unless we move towards an International Baccalaureate style exam at 18, it is harder to see how compulsory maths could fit in with our current A levels.
 
Vorderman's attack on national testing in primary school seems more perverse: teaching to the test has always occurred, and happens at GCSE and A level. The issue is what they are being taught and whether being tested helps youngsters to retain what they have learned. If testing currently doesn't do that enough, improve the tests but don't abandon something that helped improve maths teaching in primary schools (along with Labour's numeracy strategy, which Vorderman launched) considerably. There may need to be a renewal of the energy that the numeracy strategy brought, but it would be wrong to replace testing with assessment at 11; doing so would be a huge setback for primary maths.

Enda Kenny's anti-Vatican stance represents ordinary Irish Catholics

Much of the commentary on last week's Dáil speech by Taoiseach Enda Kenny, where he strongly criticised the Vatican for its failures over the child abuse scandals, has sought to present his intervention as being anti-Catholic. But that would be a profound misreading of its significance. Yesterday's decision by the Vatican to withdraw its Papal Nuncio from Ireland would have provoked a crisis had it occurred even 20 years ago: today it may raise a few eyebrows, but at Rome not Kenny.

That is because he spoke up not just for the victims of child abuse, he also gave voice to the millions of bewildered Irish people, many of whom remain massgoers, who feel utterly appalled by the actions of the institutional Church, both its Bishops and the Vatican. Kenny, himself a practising Catholic, gave a speech that was much more powerful because he understands exactly how ordinary people in his Mayo constituency feel about the Church's attempts to cover up incidents of clerical child abuse even, as in Cloyne, after supposedly tough new procedures had been put in place to prevent a repeat of what had been covered up for decades. Kenny's critique of the Vatican was unprecedented:

The revelations in the Cloyne report have brought the Government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture. It is fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy reports, Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children. However, the Cloyne report has proved to be of a different order because for the first time in this country a report on child sexual abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. In doing so the report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection and elitism that dominates the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were down-played or managed to uphold the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and reputation. Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St. Benedict’s “ear of the heart”, the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a Canon lawyer. This calculated, withering position is the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion on which the Roman Church was founded. Such radicalism, humility and compassion comprise the essence of its foundation and purpose. This behaviour is a case of Roma locuta est: causa finita est, except in this instance nothing could be further from the truth.

The Cloyne report’s revelations are heart-breaking. It describes how many victims continued to live in the small towns and parishes in which they were reared and abused. Their abuser was often still in the area and still held in high regard by their families and community. The abusers continued to officiate at family weddings and funerals. In one case, the abuser even officiated at a victim’s wedding. There is little that I or anyone else in the House can say to comfort that victim or others, however much we wish to. However, we can and do recognise the bravery and courage of all the victims who told their stories to the commission. While it will take a long time for Cloyne to recover from the horrors uncovered, it could take the victims and their families a lifetime to pick up the pieces of their shattered existence, if ever they do.....

The people, including many faithful Catholics like me, have been shocked and dismayed by the repeated failings of church authorities to face up to what is required. They deserve and require confirmation from the Vatican that it does accept, endorse and require compliance by all church authorities here with the obligations to report all cases of suspected abuse, whether current or historical, to the State’s authorities in line with the Children First national guidance which will have the force of law. Clericalism has rendered some of Ireland’s brightest and most privileged and powerful men either unwilling or unable to address the horrors cited in the Ryan and Murphy reports. This Roman clericalism must be devastating for good priests, some of them old, others struggling to keep their humanity, even their sanity, as they work hard to be the keepers of the church’s light and goodness within their parishes, communities and the condition of the human heart. 

Thankfully for them and us, this is not Rome. Nor is it industrial school or Magdalene Ireland, where the swish of a soutane, smothered conscience and humanity and the swing of a thurible ruled the Irish Catholic world. This is the Republic of Ireland in 2011. It is a republic of laws, rights and responsibilities and proper civic order where the delinquency and arrogance of a particular version of a particular kind of morality will no longer be tolerated or ignored.
As a practising Catholic, I do not say any of this easily. Growing up, many of us in here learned that we were part of a pilgrim church. Today, that church needs to be a penitent church, a church truly and deeply penitent for the horrors it perpetrated, hid and denied - in the name of God, but for the good of the institution.

Through our legislation, through our Government’s action to put children first, those who have been abused can take some small comfort in knowing that they belong to a nation - to a democracy - where humanity, power, rights and responsibilities are enshrined and enacted always for their good; where the law - their law, as citizens of this country - will always supersede canon law that has neither legitimacy nor place in the affairs of this country.

This report tells us a tale of a frankly brazen disregard for protecting children. If we do not respond swiftly and appropriately as a State, we will have to prepare ourselves for more reports like this. I agree with Archbishop Martin that the church needs to publish any other and all other reports like this as soon as possible. I note the commission is very positive about the work of the National Board for Safeguarding Children, established by the church to oversee the operation by dioceses and religious orders. The commission notes that all church authorities were required to sign a contract with the national board agreeing to implement the relevant standards and that those refusing to sign would be named in the board’s annual report......The then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said: “Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church”. As the Holy See prepares its considered response to the Cloyne Report, I want to make it clear, as Taoiseach, that when it comes to the protection of the children of this State, the standards of conduct which the Church deems appropriate to itself cannot and will not be applied to the workings of democracy and civil society in this republic - not purely, or simply or otherwise, because children have to be and will be put first

Bishop Magee, the former Papal secretary who became Bishop of Cloyne, was perhaps even more a creature of the Vatican than many of his colleagues, but with the sole exception of the current Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, there is little sign even yet that the hierarchy understands quite how much pain it has caused not just to those who were physically abused but to the many more people who trusted its priests and hierarchy to stand for the conservative values their predecessors preached relentlessly in the early decades of the Free State and the Republic.

Ireland has freed itself in many ways from the vice-like grip that the Church had on the body politic: voters have accepted divorce and contraception, though not abortion. The censorship that saw great writers and movies banned has long been relaxed. The bookies' and pollsters' favourite for the Irish Presidency is the gay Joycean scholar, Sen David Norris. The moral attitudes of Irish young people differ little from their European counterparts. Yet, until Kenny's speech last week, no senior Irish politician had captured the feelings of those who were brought up as Catholics, and may still practice, but felt a huge sense of betrayal in that upbringing.

Kenny's speech will surely rank as being just as important in Irish history as DeValera's 1943 St Patrick's Day address during the Second World War (referred to in Ireland as 'the Emergency'), where he talked of "a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens". While that speech signalled another two decades of isolationist introversion, Kenny's speech suggest a determination to grasp the country's failings, social and economic, which had been lacking in the hapless later Fianna Fail years, especially after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.

The irony is that eighteen months ago, Kenny was being written off by the pundits as a no-hoper. I joined an RTE discussion that sought to draw comparisons with the fate of Gordon Brown. Yet in that time it is Fianna Fail that has sunk to its lowest ever representation and the Taoiseach has ratings that any European leader would dearly love: a 53% approval rating at the weekend. Kenny's newfound popularity has given the Dublin coalition an unprecedented opportunity to reshape Ireland for the better: it is one that he and his Labour coalition partners must grasp with every power at their disposal.

Hidden by the hacking: end-of-term education manoeuvres

With the eyes of the world turned elsewhere, the education department has been performing a few subtle U-turns that could save it further embarrassment later on.

First, they effectively ditched the whole idea of a National Funding Formula yesterday, as they bowed to the local government lobby and launched a consultation to continue using local factors, effectively a simplification of the existing formula. While many headteachers favour a formula that reduces the extraordinary anomalies that exist between schools in similar circumstances, but across council boundaries, it was always going to be a tall order to introduce the change at a time of funding cuts. There would, of course, have been many howls of outrage if the cuts had been even more severe. But now, even academies and free schools will have their funding tied to local formulas, albeit with the more generous funding that comes from not taking local authority services. Sensibly, they propose to strengthen school forums, but this will need to be more than cosmetic and to avoid gaming, it should have to gain support from a majority of secondary and a majority of primary schools for anything beyond the basic formula. The shift was obscured by a more contentious statement on Building Schools for the Future, where Michael Gove said he would do what he intended all along.

Second, while ministers have clung to the English Baccalaureate in its current form in the league tables, they have announced that the existing vocational equivalences for GCSEs will continue for two years. Had they dropped them quickly, there would have been huge problems for schools adjusting, akin to the outrage caused when the EBacc was introduced retrospectively. However, they have missed a chance to add a Technical Baccalaureate to the mix, something that Kenneth Baker and Andrew Adonis have joined many heads in arguing for. The two year vocational hiatus should allow time to think again on this: but students starting their GCSE options in September need to know what their qualifications will be worth, as do their schools.

Anti-immigrant protectionism is not the answer

Until now, it probably didn't matter a whole lot what Maurice Glasman had to say about anything. I quite happily allowed the chatter about Blue Labour to pass me by. Indeed, I probably thought there was something in the attempts to revive things like credit unions at a time of banking crises. His community projects offered a useful counterpoint to David Cameron's Big Society. But Ed Miliband was not in any position to challenge Cameron, and few cared what his 'gurus' had to say about policy. Not any more. Miliband's deft handling of the ever-widening hacking scandal has given him a new prominence, and the utterances of this guru start to matter.

As someone who has played my part in taming, if not slaying, a few sacred cows, I suppose I shouldn't really object if this 'guru' wants to start a bovine bloodbath. But when what he proposes is a troubling combination of protectionism and a view of immigration that would be seen as daringly brave in the Monday Club, it is surely time to question Miliband's wisdom in listening too closely to his views.

To be fair, there is always a bit of Maurice Glasman that is worth listening to: his wish to revive crafts and community has much merit. But it is his corollary of those ideas that can be worrying.

In an interview published in today's Daily Telegraph, apparently conducted for the Fabian Review, Glasman has plenty to say about previous Labour leaders, regarding Tony Blair, who won three general elections, as having a 'slightly demented' view of modernisation. He is, of course, entitled to his opinion. So I trust he will forgive me if I raise an eyebrow at his view of the role of migration in a modern economy, though I will leave any psychiatric analysis to professionals. Here's how Mary Riddell reported him:

[He would] renegotiate the rules on European workers and freeze inward migration for EU and non-EU citizens, except where employers or universities make a case for a specific, skilled individual. "We've got to reinterrogate our relationship with the EU on the movement of labour. The EU has gone from being a sort of pig farm subsidised bloc... to the free movement of labour and capital. It's legalistic, it's administrative, and it's no good. So I think we've got to renegotiate with the EU. His call is to restrict immigration to necessary entrants such as highly skilled leaders, especially in vocational skills. "We might, for example, bring in German masters, as we did in the 15th and 16th centuries to renew guilds."
But exemptions should be made on a case-by-case basis? "Yes. We should absolutely do that... Britain is not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first." Even if that means stopping immigration completely for a period? "Yes. I would add that we should be more generous and friendly in receiving those [few] who are needed. To be more generous, we have to draw the line."

Let's just get this straight. We need to stop migration, regardless of the contribution migrants make to the economy. That means losing billions from university students who pay to study in the UK. It means forcing industry to employ only British workers, unless they are German meisters, though quite why they might wish to come here now with their own economy doing so well is not clear. It means that the economy should be allowed to take a nose-dive while we test the theory that those who are currently out of work are ready to take on the jobs that are currently filled by EU migrant labour, in turn surely increasing unemployment in the short term and making it impossible for British workers to work overseas. It means reducing our opportunities to export into international markets. Businesses facing real difficulties can go whistle if they need to recruit abroad to survive.

And, of course, it means leaving the European Union and defying our international asylum obligations to retreat into bucolic splendid isolation. Of course, the whole thing is not just isolationist, it is economically suspect, simply ignoring the realities of globalisation in favour of workerist nostalgia that would even have stretched crudulity in the 1950s Soviet Union. There was a reason that New Labour was an electoral success: it was in tune with the realities both of people's lives and of the world they lived in. David Cameron had to make similar adjustments with his party. The last thing Ed Miliband - and Labour - needs is an attempt to turn the party into an isolationist, anti-immigrant, protectionist force: that is hopefully not where the centre ground of British politics really lies. 

More reasonable force in the classroom

I'm delighted to see that the coalition is ending decades of wet liberal discipline policies in schools by giving teachers the right to use reasonable force in the classroom, something they have not been legally allowed to do since that scourge of disciplinarians David Blunkett published a piece of guidance entitled circular 10/98 (with those same rights to be enshrined in a 'right to discipline' in the 2006 Education and Inspections Act). Circular 10/98 said that teachers could use reasonable force where pupils were

• committing a criminal offence (including behaving in a way that would be an offence if the pupil were not under the age of criminal responsibility)
• injuring themselves or others;
• causing damage to property (including the pupil's own property); 
• engaging in any behaviour prejudicial to maintaining good order and discipline at the school or among any of its pupils, whether that behaviour occurs in a classroom during a teaching session or elsewhere.

It received the backing of teaching unions (aside from NASUWT, which warned teachers off it as it is worried about litigation ) at the time. Of course, there may be a little more rhetorical flourish in the new regulations. But it is absurd to suggest that previous governments have not sought to address this issue. The reality is that it is fear of parental litigation not too much state regulation that is holding back teachers who don't use their existing powers. Perhaps, the parallel changes to the rules on allegations against teachers will change that. But in today's litigious climate, I wouldn't count on it.

After the World has ended

I feel sorry for many of the journalists who have lost their jobs as a result of the demise of the News of the World. Like many, I know people like David Wooding, the associate and political editor, to be good journalists who do their jobs professionally. I also still enjoy reading newspapers and recognise that there is a lot to be said for the variety that is available in both Britain and Ireland, and that such competition is in many ways healthy. But I refuse to mourn the potential demise of two unpleasant aspects of a British newspaper culture that have been more damaging to our society than MPs' claiming for duck islands on their expenses.

The first is the notion that anybody who is successful deserves to be brought down, by whatever means possible. Of course, there are those who are breaking the law or being grossly hypocritical, and they deserve to have their hypocrisy or illegality revealed. But the extent of the hacking that appears to have occurred, and the standard fare not just of the News of the World but of the tabloid press generally, works on the assumption that virtually everybody in political or public life is a wrongdoer who deserves to be exposed by whatever means possible. That is the culture that led to a toleration of hacking and apparently of contaminating computers with Trojans, using private investigators to obtain illegally private information or accepting that lying is all part of a greater good. It is not just a problem with the Murdoch press, and if we see it as confined to the News of the World, we will miss a chance to develop a much clearer sense of where the public interest differs from the potential prurient interest of the public.

The second is a degree of prurient morality that holds people in public life up to standards that few people manage in their private lives, and which are certainly not maintained by those who produce the newspapers. This morality holds that the fragility of many private lives must be held up to public ridicule regardless of the circumstances. That was as much the stock and trade of the News of the World as it is of the other tabloids (often, it is true, followed up by the broadsheets with a pretence of po-faced distaste or of inquiry into the activities of the tabloids.)

The inquiries that David Cameron has announced this morning need to do more than get to the bottom of the hacking scandal, or even of other illegal methods used to acquire private information about individuals who just happen to find themselves - even by tragedy - in the public eye. It needs, as Ed Miliband has said, to see a robust replacement to the Press Complaints Commission, one that is legally required to uphold both the freedom of the press and the responsibilities that it has too. It also needs to gain a new consensus both on those responsibilities and the parameters of the public interest. There needs too to be an understanding of where these roles lie in an increasingly electronic media.

Those who argue along these lines have, in the past, been accused of wanting to muzzle a free press. But the way that newspapers have evolved in the last two decades, where even the broadsheets make it difficult to separate fact from comment, has done more to undermine the strengths of a free press than any such regulation. The challenge for the press now is to recognise that this is far more than a challenge for News International: they need to help lead the new rapprochement or they will find that it is imposed on them; and, to do that, they need candidly to admit that, in backing the toothless charade that is the Press Complaints Commission, they have so far failed to grasp this nettle.

This post also appears at Public Finance.

Time for a genuine cross-party consensus on care

Andrew Dilnot has produced an excellent report today on the future of social care for older people, addressing head on the fears of many about the costs of care in their old age. His proposals, that the level above which assets are taken into account should rise to £100k is more realistic than the current £23k, while his proposals for a cap on care costs and on living expenses in care are both reasonable. Ed Miliband offered yesterday to develop a cross party consensus on this issue, a generous offer given the pathetic pre-election attitude of the health secretary Andrew Lansley to imaginative suggestions from Andy Burnham while he held the same post, dubbing it all a 'death tax' in a piece of sub-Palinesque (Sarah not Michael) rhetoric ill-suited to such a sensitive subject.

Now there is again the chance to develop a proper consensus on this issue. David Cameron needs such a consensus as it will involve significant costs, and some difficult decisions about how to pay for it. He has been open to using individual Labour politicians on some issues: it is as important to be open to genuine cross-party working where it is so patently in the wider interest. For Ed Miliband, there is a lot to be gained from being consensual on such an issue. It was politically shrewd to speak to the Sunday Telegraph on the issue yesterday.

But this is, above all, about reaching a solution that is right for a growing elderly population, providing reassurance to those not yet in need of care, but also ensuring quality if they do need to enter care. And a lot more work is also needed to provide a proper quality mark for care homes and to create higher minimum standards, as that is as much a concern for many as cost. It is absurd that the Government is scrapping rather than widening the star rating system: families need a single easy to understand system that is clear on both facilities and standards, and it needs to be regulated and enforced by the government regulator. There should also be an equivalent of TripAdvisor where families can add their views and comments, as Janice Turner suggested in Saturday's Times.(£)

Social care is an issue that will not go away. It is something where politicians can genuinely make a difference - and show themselves in a better light in the process.

Private or public: a challenge to the independent sector

This blog has welcomed Education Secretary Michael Gove's recent revival of the sponsor academies programme. But a big challenge this presents is finding sufficient sponsors. One sector that has not yet been tapped to its full potential is the network of trusts that run our 'public schools'. In a remarkable lecture to the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust last night, Andrew Adonis laid down the gauntlet to the private sector with an unanswerable argument based on these trusts' own missions.

As Gove has also spoken recently about his wish to see more private school academy sponsors, the challenge now is how to realise this vision. But as it is a hugely important contribution to the debate, I thought it worth reprinting Andrew's lecture on this blog.

There is no point being in public life unless you seek, as honestly as you can, to address the big problems facing the country and make a stand for policies you genuinely believe will make society better, free from outdated dogma. This is the lesson I learned from my two political mentors, Roy Jenkins and Tony Blair, with both of whom I worked closely and admired greatly, not only for their political skills but for their enduring values and their courage as progressive reformers and leaders. Tony Blair’s motto was “the best policy is the best politics,” and I can’t think of a better one.

So forgive me if I am not all motherhood-and-apple-pie this evening. I want, if I may, to tackle two of the biggest challenges which face us in education today.

The first challenge is not simply to reduce the number of underperforming comprehensives – where we have made reasonable progress in the last decade – but to eradicate them entirely, replacing them with successful all-ability academies.

The second challenge is to forge a new settlement between state and private education in England. I put these two challenges together because they go together. It is my view, after 20 years of engagement with schools of all types, that England will never have a truly world class education system until state and private schools are part of a common national endeavour to develop the talents of all young people to the full and build a “one nation” society instead of the “them and us” of the past.

My experience as a reformer has also taught me that almost all the best solutions to big challenges are simple. Complexity comes in trying to avoid or qualify the simple solution because it is unpalatable. You of course need to be simple and right, not simple and wrong; and a good deal of research and experience – and where appropriate, piloting of policy – needs to go into getting to the right simple solution. Simple doesn’t mean simplistic. Nor does simple mean easy. It means getting to the heart of the problem, and making the fundamental change which makes a fundamental difference.

So just as the challenge is simple – how to unite state and private schools in a common endeavour – I believe the solution is also simple. Every successful private school, and private school foundation, should sponsor an academy or academies, in place of existing underperforming comprehensives. They should do this alongside their existing fee-paying school or schools, turning themselves into federations of private and state schools, following the lead of a growing number of private schools and their foundations which have done precisely this and would not think of going back, including Dulwich, Wellington, the Haberdashers, the Mercers, the Girls Day School Trust, the City of London Corporation and the King Edward VI Foundation in Birmingham.

And by sponsoring academies I don’t just mean advice and assistance, the loan of playing fields and the odd teacher, etc. I mean the private school or foundation taking complete responsibility for the governance and leadership of an academy or academies, and staking their reputation on their success as they currently do on the success of their fee-paying schools.

For the private sector, I set this totally apart from the opening up of more places in existing private schools to those who can’t pay the fees. This is a good thing for private schools to do to make themselves less socially exclusive, but it does nothing to create more good schools, let alone to breach the educational Berlin Wall between private and state education.

To leaders in the state sector, I put this forward as a complementary – not an alternative – policy to the brilliant job that so many successful state school leaders and organisations are doing in establishing academies. We need many more good academy sponsors from all successful parts of the education system – state schools, private schools, universities, and educational foundations – and we need them to learn from each other and collaborate.

I want to develop the argument for this new state-private settlement in some depth, because the forces against progress are deeply entrenched in both the state and the private sectors of education, mirroring prejudices on the Left and Right of politics which go back decades if not generations.

Over the entire second half of the 20th century, these prejudices made it exceptionally hard to do more than fiddle around at the margins of state-private partnership. This, in turn, bred a deep fatalism which is with us still. Everyone knows that the status quo is terrible – rigid separation between most of the nation’s most privileged and powerful schools and the rest. Yet no-one has a credible plan or will to do much about it except say how bad it is, why it’s someone else’s fault, and why it will never change because, well, this is England, it’s deep and cultural, and it all began with Henry VIII. It’s the same fatalism which greeted gridlock in central London before the congestion charge, hospital waiting lists before patients’ rights, and rain stopping play at Wimbledon before the roof.

The call now is for activists not fatalists. The future doesn’t have to be like the past. There is no reason whatever why the Berlin Wall between the state and private sectors of English education cannot be brought down fairly quickly, if every private school and private school foundation sponsors an academy or academies, running independent schools in the state-funded as well as the fee-paying sectors, immersed in promoting excellent education for the least well-off as well as the best-off in society, and progressively combining the best of both.

To develop the argument, let me say more at the outset about underperforming comprehensives on the one hand, and private education on the other, before addressing the fundamental relationship between the two.

On underperforming schools, we still have far too many of them. Where they are not improving rapidly, every year, they should be replaced by academies. My ambition from the moment that academies started to prove themselves successful was to replace the entire bottom half of the comprehensive system with academies, unless the schools were improving rapidly. I didn’t put it quite like this at the time, not wanting to be burned in effigy by my admirers in the Anti-Academies Alliance even more frequently outside Sanctuary Buildings, but I don’t think my direction of travel was much of a secret.

By academies, I of course mean “sponsored academies.” The whole purpose of academies, in respect of underperforming schools, is completely to replace existing governance and local authority control with new independent sponsors, untainted by past failure, who demonstrates the capacity and ambition to create excellent all-ability schools. For this, a large number of outstanding sponsors are needed, able to manage perhaps a thousand more secondary academies.

Let me say therefore that I entirely support the Government’s decision to raise the floor of minimum performance – the proportion of pupils in a school gaining five or more good GCSESs including English and maths – from 35% to 40% per cent next year, and then to 50% in 2015. Michael Gove was absolutely right to say, a fortnight ago, that “there is no reason, if we work together, that by the end of this parliament every young person in the country can’t be educated in a school where at least half the students reach this basic academic standard.”

I also welcome Liz Sidwell’s appointment as Schools Commissioner to help bring this about. From her years leading the Haberdashers’ academy federation, no-one knows better than Liz how to bring sponsored academies into being, and how to harness their potential to drive the fundamental reinvention of secondary education in areas where comprehensives have basically failed in the past. She also knows a thing or two from the Haberdashers about state/private partnership in academies.

This is a moral cause. But it is also an economic imperative. As Michael Gove also pointed out, 80 per cent of students in Singapore already get above a similar threshold of five O levels including English and maths (they still sit Cambridge board O levels in Singapore). It was visits to schools in Singapore, Finland, Taiwan and Hong Kong in 2007, where I saw not only near uniformly high standards but also a relentless drive to raise them still further, that transformed my thinking on the scale of the task we face in England. I gave a lecture shortly afterwards suggesting that we needed by 2020 to become an “80 per cent” education system – by which I meant at least 80 per cent of 16 year-olds reaching a basic baccalaureate standard. At the moment we are at just over 50 per cent. But we can’t really wait until 2020 to be as good as Singapore and Finland today, so it is not incremental change but step change that is needed.

I say this in full recognition of the great progress that has been made in recent years by headteachers and teachers nationwide, all the more impressive when one considers the state of the education system only a generation ago.

Fifteen years ago, a staggering half – half – of all comprehensives weren’t even getting a third of their pupils above the five good GCSE level including English and maths. This wasn’t entirely surprising when two-thirds of 11 year-olds, in the first national SATs tests in 1995, were found not to be reaching an adequate standard in the three Rs.

I still shudder to think of my visit to a comprehensive in Sunderland a few years ago where the previous summer only fifteen 16-year-olds had got to the five good GCSE level including English and maths, and a local authority official said to me: “Lord Adonis, you need to understand that they used to leave here, go down the hill, and turn left to go into the shipyards, or turn right to go down the mines, but now there aren’t any jobs so they might as well walk straight into the sea.” That school is now closed and replaced by an academy sponsored by the University of Sunderland and a local hi-tech company.

It was on visits like this that I also came to understand why things were so bad, because of the secondary-modern antecedents of so many comprehensives, including that one. When people talked of the comprehensive revolution, this was in fact a misnomer. Across most of the country there was no comprehensive revolution, just a continuation of the secondary moderns. In the early 1960s there were 3,700 secondary moderns and only 1,200 grammar schools. One way and another more than a quarter of the grammar schools stood apart from the comprehensive reform, including most of the most prestigious and successful grammar schools which went private rather than be abolished. So across most of the country, comprehensives were simply the former secondary moderns with a new sign outside, and a few prefab buildings or portacabins to accommodate the raising of the school leaving age to 16 in 1972.

As for what this meant, the single most depressing but revealing book I read when trying to get to grips with the nature of our educational crisis was a 1967 study of the secondary modern school by David Hargreaves, who most of you know for his inspiring writing and his stint as head of the national qualifications and curriculum agency a decade ago. It was the fruit of a year which David, then a young researcher, spent at a secondary modern in Salford Docks. He described the secondary modern as pretty standard for a working class community in the mid-Sixties. In one key respect – the school had new buildings – it was better than standard. Yet the description of the school is unremittingly grim. Most of the boys at the school took no external exams at all and gained no qualifications whatsoever. Only a minority even in the top stream of the school were even entered for a local school leaving certificate, for which cheating was widespread among staff and pupils. The new national CSE exam was coming in - a much inferior form of O-level - but there was no encouragement from the headteacher or most of the teachers for even the brightest pupils to stay at school beyond the minimum leaving age of 15 to take it. As for O-levels, Hargreaves wrote:

Only one member of staff felt strongly that even the best boys, in the top stream, were of sufficient ability to take O-level; most of the other teachers of the higher streams took the view that ... to enter them for O-level would be to mislead the pupils with hopes of academic success beyond their powers. There is also little doubt that some of these teachers were reluctant to teach to O-level since they had never done so and were uneasy about their competence to do so.

As for the wider ethos of the school: Lessons and exams were treated with contempt by most of the boys. ... For many of the teachers and most of the pupils life at the school was a necessary evil. Life was directed towards a reduction of potential conflict by a minimal imposition of demands one upon the other. If the upper streams passed their [school leaving] exam and the lower streams did not riot, the school was for most teachers succeeding.By this yardstick, even the worst comprehensives in the 1990s were an improvement.

Understanding the past made me all the more alive to the immensity of the challenge to overcome it, a challenge of community transformation as much as educational reform. But it also made – and makes – me all the more radical in seeking solutions which measure up to the immensity of the challenge. Hence academies.

So we are making progress, but there is so much further to go. For example, half of the city of Birmingham’s 75 secondary schools – half – are still not achieving five good GCSEs including English and maths for half their pupils. Birmingham boasts some of the best private and state schools in the country, yet it still has a long tail of seriously underperforming schools. It should be no surprise that Birmingham’s unemployment is twice the national average; that its workforce skill levels are among the lowest in the country; and that it still only has seven sponsored academies open or in the pipeline. And I could tell a similar story about many other parts of the country.

Now let me turn to the private sector. The debate about private education in England encompasses two different private sectors. There is the private profit-making sector. And there is the private charitable sector. There is a growing debate as to whether we should follow Sweden and parts of the United States, among others, and allow private profit-making companies to run state-funded schools. I am opposed to this. When Minister, I said to the private profit-making companies wanting to set up in England that they should sponsor academies philanthropically, and if they could demonstrate great success, then they might be able to make a case. None has yet done so.

It is true that in the much-cited case of Sweden, commercial operators have been a major force behind free schools. But I would make two comments about this. First, the experience has been problematic. Sweden has faced a number of recent scandals around profit-taking from commercially-run state funded schools. The Swedish education minister recently announced an enquiry into how free schools which fail to meet accepted standards can be prevented from taking out profits.

Secondly, the position in England is fundamentally different. When Sweden embarked on free schools, it had a weak private charitable school sector. England, by contrast, has one of the largest, and possibly the very strongest private charitable school sector in the world. Both of our major churches are large-scale school sponsors, in the private and the state sectors; and the great majority of our private schools – and all of the historic private school foundations which dominate the private school elite – are historic charities. The private sector which can make a big difference to English state education isn’t the private commercial sector but the private charitable sector. We need to focus on the whale not the minnow.

Let’s look first at the statistics. Dwell not on the seven per cent of school age pupils who go to private schools, which is the most misleading of the stats. More revealing is the 18 per cent of full-time students over the age of 16 who are at private schools. The one in three of A grades in A-level physics, chemistry and history which go to private school students, earning them a similar proportion of places in most Russell Group universities and half of all places at Oxford and Cambridge.

Stop there for a moment: that’s 8,000 ex-private school students at Oxbridge, compared to a mere 130 students at Oxbridge who, at school, were eligible for free school meals. So 130 Oxbridge students are drawn from the poorest 13% of secondary school pupils, while 8,000 – sixty times as many – are drawn from the most privileged seven per cent. No surprise then, those Sutton Trust reports which tell us that three in four judges, two in three top barristers, and half of leading company chief executives, solicitors, journalists and politicians were educated at private schools. Sport, drama, TV, and both pop and classical music are also largely dominated by the private schools.

England in 2011 is governed by a Prime Minister educated at Eton, a Deputy Prime Minister from Westminster, a Chancellor from St Paul’s. Charterhouse, Rugby, Radley, Wellington and Cheltenham Ladies College are all in the Cabinet too, along with a second from Westminster; almost all of them children of very wealthy parents. We do indeed have a coalition government – a coalition between Eton and Westminster. It is only a slightly broader coalition which funds, manages and entertains the country too.

Seen in this way – the dominance of a privately educated elite over the social, economic and political life of this country – you realise why it is so important, if we are ever to be one nation, to have the people who run the private schools, and who teach in and attend these schools, engaged institutionally with intimately with state education too.

Let me also say a word about the teaching profession. Back in the 1970s, the pupil:teacher ratio in private schools wasn’t much different than in state schools. Now, on the back of fees which have doubled in real terms in a little over twenty years, the private school ratio is about half that in state schools. 14 per cent of the nation’s teachers are in private schools, and a far higher proportion of teachers with better and higher degrees. Moreover, a recent report by the Centre for the Economics of Education notes that by far the single largest source of new teachers in private schools is experienced teachers in state schools, whereas traffic the other way is minimal. To put this in perspective, the excellent Teach First scheme, which as a Minister I did everything in my power to promote (including signing very large cheques) because of its significance in strengthening the link between the top universities and the state teaching profession, will this year recruit 800 graduates into state schools. A great achievement. Yet according to Centre for the Economics of Education data for 2006, there was a net recruitment – after transfers the other way – of 1,400 experienced teachers from state schools into private schools in that year alone.

How did it all come to be like this? Like the secondary modern antecedents of the comprehensives, the Victorian antecedents of today’s private schools are highly illuminating. Historians of education talk a lot about Gladstone’s 1870 Education Act, which essentially started state education. But equally significant were Gladstone’s 1869 and 1873 Endowed Schools Acts, which essentially turned the great public schools – and many of the newer grammar schools – previously run in a rackety way by Crown, church or local appointees, into a Victorian equivalent of academies, with new independent governing foundations to control their assets, management and leadership. This Victorian academy status greatly strengthened the private schools as institutions, but their fees, and the conservative use of their charitable assets by their new governing bodies, kept most of them largely closed to all but the upper and upper middle classes, and they remained so as the state secondary system developed in the decades after the 1902 Balfour Education Act.

There was a moment, at the end of the Second World War, when history might have taken a different turn. An official report, published in 1944 on the day Eisenhower reviewed his bridgehead in Normandy, said the social division between private and state schools “made far more difficult the task of those who looked towards a breaking down of those hard-drawn class distinctions within society.” Churchill himself, visiting his alma mater of Harrow, talked to the boys of “broadening the intake and the public schools becoming more and more based on aspiring youth in every class of the nation.”

But it didn’t happen. Sixty-six years after the war, the only significant changes to the private school system are that it is larger, richer, and its average educational attainment has risen to among the highest in the world.

This is because during the whole period since the war, Labour and Tory governments alike have adopted a simple one word policy in respect of private schools: isolationism.

On the Labour side, ideological antipathy to fee-paying education, and later also to selective education, bred hostility. But the social and legal position of the private schools, plus – ironically – the personal educational preferences of Labour leaders from Attlee to Wilson, kept at bay any attack beyond the rhetorical, except for the withdrawal of state funding schemes for small numbers of pupils to attend private schools, which the 1974 Labour government did in respect of the direct-grant scheme introduced by Butler in 1944, and the 1997 Labour government did in respect of the Assisted Places Scheme introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1980.

I particularly treasure Roy Jenkins’s exchange with Harold Wilson when turning down Wilson’s offer to become Education Secretary in 1965. In his memoirs Roy doesn’t say why he turned the job down: he told me it was because he regarded Education as a second order department and he had no idea of a constructive education policy to pursue, itself a telling commentary on the state and status of education at the time. But here is his exchange with Wilson, as recorded in his memoirs. “Looking for an excuse [to decline the job], I said that all three of our children were at fee-paying schools and that this surely was an obstacle to being Minister of Education in a Labour government. Wilson brushed this aside as being of no importance. “So were mine,” he said.”

Under Tony Blair – Durham Cathedral School, Fettes, St John’s College Oxford – any undermining of the private schools was equally out of the question. Instead there was friendly waffle about mutual respect; and some committees and minor partnership projects which did not a lot. That is, until academies, of which more hereafter.

On the Tory side, there was an equal and opposite isolationism. Partly this was a matter of letting sleeping dogs lie. Most Tory ministers and MPs went to private schools and sent their children to them. So long as Labour kept the dogs off, they had no desire to court controversy by proposing any expanded role for the private sector. On the Tory left, epitomised by the Etonian Sir Edward Boyle, education minister under Macmillan and Douglas-Home, two more Etonians, there was also a dose of patrician guilt and support for comprehensivisation, provided it didn’t affect the private schools.

However, for the Tory mainstream, the major concern was about dilution. The dominant view was “more means worse”: the view that there were only a small, and pretty fixed, number of “good” schools, mostly existing private schools and the remaining grammar schools, and they needed to be preserved in aspic. This secured, the only safe and politically viable Tory reform in respect of private schools was to open up a tiny number of places in private day schools to children with poorer parents. Hence the assisted places scheme which with much fanfare paid private school fees for 30,000 children out of a private school sector of 500,000 children and a state school sector of more than 8 million. Not so much an education policy as escapology.

So much for the politicians. The leaders of state and private schools were – and many of them remain – similarly isolationist. It was an article of faith among the leaders of the comprehensive movement that private schools were not only socially divisive but also, in respect of educational practice, largely irrelevant. This remains a pronounced view, even among some of my friends who run academies. They say, to paraphrase: “what can that lot who just spoon feed the children of the rich ever know about education in Hackney and Knowsley.” As for the heads of the private schools, many of them have been only too eager to agree, when the suggestion is made that they might manage state-funded academies. Pressed further, they often say it’s not about ordinary children versus privileged children but about non-selective schools versus selective schools, a view put to me recently by the chair of governors of one of our great public boarding schools, which I found richly ironic, given that until recently his school was basically an all-ability comprehensive for the rich and titled.

This mutual isolationism didn’t matter much until now, because there was no opportunity for systematic and deep engagement between the two sectors. Now it matters a lot, because before us, if we seize it, is a simple, radical and workable agenda to end the isolationism of the past. It is for every successful private school and private school foundation to sponsor an academy or academies, and transform themselves into state-private school federations.

The arguments of principle are manifold and manifest. We will never build a one nation society unless we eradicate failing schools and systematically leverage our most powerful social leaders and our best educational institutions in the service of the wider community. That means many more good schools, replacing underperforming comprehensives community by community. Academies – independent state schools – are now proven as the successful institutional means of harnessing our most powerful social leaders and best educational institutions in the management of new schools. So we need many more such academies.

Successful private schools ought to be prominent among the sponsors for the next wave of academies. Everything about academies is in the DNA of the successful private school: independence, excellence, innovation, social mission. And the benefit is not only to the wider community, it is also to the private schools themselves, whose mission is enlarged, whose relative isolation is ended, and whose social engagement, beyond the families of the better-off, is transformed.

Let me deal with some of the concerns. To those on the Left, and in the state and academy sectors, who see private schools as an irrelevance, I hope I have said enough about their huge footprint in almost every national elite to show why the isolationism of the past cannot continue if opportunity is to be for the many not the few.

To those in the private schools, and their governing bodies, who are reluctant to embrace academies, I appeal both to their professionalism and to their moral and charitable missions. It was excusable to stand apart from state-funded education when the state and its leaders did not want you engaged in the first place. But that is the isolationist politics of the past. The politics of the present and the future is that the nation seeks your engagement in setting up new independent state-funded academies in a way which does not compromise your independence, and which renews for the 21st century your essential moral and charitable purposes.

Let me say a few more words about these charitable purposes. William of Wykeham established Winchester for the education mainly of poor scholars, and only a minority of “noble commoners”. Henry VI set up Eton for poor scholars. Charterhouse was established by Sir Thomas Sutton, the wealthiest commoner in England, for – yes, more poor scholars. Elizabeth I endowed Westminster School for the same purpose; to this day it is an integral part of Westminster Abbey, its governing body chaired by the Dean of Westminster appointed by The Queen. John Lyon set up Harrow in 1572 as a free grammar school for the education of boys of the parish of Harrow, and the parish objected strongly when the Endowed Schools Act removed this obligation. I could go on and on, but you get the gist. The governors of these great educational charities should look honestly to their charitable purposes. If they do, I believe it is hard for them to conclude that a few more bursaries here and there are enough, when they could be running new schools serving the very missions for which their assets were intended in the first place.

As for the idea that these great schools are not capable of making a success of academies with more challenging pupil intakes, this is a comic proposition. The Governing Body of Eton is chaired by my distinguished colleague in the

Lords, and former Minister, William Waldegrave. Its members include three professors, three knights, five PhDs, and the former Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales. The Dean of Westminster, who chairs Westminster School’s Governing Body, is my good friend John Hall, the former chief education officer of the Church of England, who was the driving force behind the C of E’s decision to set up more than 30 academies. His fellow governors include the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, two professors, two canons, two knights, one baron and one dame.

Every public school governing body in the country is a catalogue of the very great and the very good, including eminent business and educational leaders. The idea that these organisations, if they have the will to do so, cannot command the resources and the expertise needed to run a successful school or schools in less advantaged areas – well, if that were true, then England would indeed be Greece, about to default on its whole society not just its government borrowing.

But there is no need to argue only by assertion. Just look at those who are taking a lead, and see the movement for change which is gathering pace. Dulwich is successfully sponsoring an academy in Sheppey. Wellington is successfully sponsoring an academy in Wiltshire. The King Edward VI Foundation is successfully sponsoring an academy in Birmingham, alongside its two private schools and five state grammar schools. All of these academies replace failing comprehensives. The Girls Day School Trust has converted two of its outstanding private schools, in Liverpool and Birkenhead, into state academies.

Three of the most impressive academy chains – built up by the Mercers Company, the Haberdashers Company, and the City of London Corporation – have grown out of the management of historic private schools, leveraging this educational expertise and experience to establish chains of academies alongside.

The City Corporation, historic sponsors of the City of London Schools for Boys and Girls, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, now sponsors three academies in its neighbouring boroughs on Islington, Southwark and Hackney. David Levin, the headmaster of the City of London School for Boys, and this year’s Chairman of the Headmasters’ Conference, in a highly constructive speech last week in Guildhall, suggested that fellow HMC schools might start sponsoring primary-level academies. I welcome this, but why stop at primary academies? HMC schools are secondary schools; it is secondary education they know best and where they can make most difference. Never go for the smaller reform option simply because it is smaller, is another of my maxims.

The Mercers, historic managers of St Paul’s Girls and St Paul’s Boys Schools, now sponsor an academy nearby in West London, and a chain of academies growing out of the Mercers’ outstandingly successful Thomas Telford School – one of the original City Technology Colleges – in Telford.

The Haberdashers, with their historic private schools in Elstree and Monmouth, now have two clusters of successful academies, one in Lewisham and the other in Telford. A fortnight ago I spoke at the Haberdashers’ Annual Education Dinner in their magnificent new livery company hall next to Barts, alongside the Earl of Wessex, a Haberdasher. The heads and many of the governors and staff of the Haberdashers academies and the private schools were there, discussing their work together and their plans for the future. Each year all new pupils from all the schools visit Haberdashers Hall. For an eleven year old, it must be a truly awe-inspiring experience.

A month ago I was at Wellington Academy in Wiltshire, speaking alongside Anthony Seldon, the Master of Wellington College, at a joint conference of the staff of both Wellington College and Wellington Academy. The academy has a boarding house, a Combined Cadet Force, an emphasis on service, academic excellence and holistic development, all traits of Wellington College.

Anthony told the story of how Wellington came to take on the academy project. Wellington College was founded in the 1850s as the memorial for the Duke of Wellington, to provide free education for military orphans in the wake of the Crimean War. The school is proud of its traditions and to this day offers fee support for children who have lost parents in the service of their country. But they are now only a small proportion of the intake.

The governors of the college decided to sponsor an academy to strengthen this original social mission. They deliberately took over a failing school in Tidworth, close to the Tidworth military garrison on Salisbury Plain, to reflect the college’s traditions and expertise. The academy takes up to half its pupils from military families. High levels of mobility are an obvious fact of life for children in military families, so the boarding option is particularly important.

With vision and leadership, there could be hundreds more academies sponsored by private school foundations, changing the face of education in this country for the better. Now is the time to act.

While I was helping to pioneer academies, two pieces of historic wisdom often came to mind. The first was Machiavelli. “It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system,” he famously wrote.“For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who should gain by the new ones.” He must have been writing about the reform of English education, I used to think. Fortunately, the success of academies is now pretty clear. The new system is there. It just needs to be scaled up.

However, equally compelling to me, as a reformer, are Churchill’s words on the opening of the new chamber of the House of Commons in 1950, replacing the one bombed by Hitler. “We mould our institutions and they mould us,” he said.

Institutions shape societies, and educational institutions do so perhaps more than any others outside the family. Last Friday I visited the Petchey Academy, one of the five new academies in Hackney. Its sponsor, Jack Petchey, is one of the greatest East End businessmen and philanthropists of recent decades and his academy – hoping to get above the 80 per cent GCSE level in its first GCSE results this year – is inspirational is so many ways. The academy isn’t just about exam results, it is about education for character, for community and for citizenship. They do it brilliantly in one of the most deprived inner-city communities in the country.

They were particularly keen I should see their debating teams from Years 10 and 11 debate before the whole of their two year groups. The debaters were articulate and well-prepared, just like in all those private school debating societies.

But the motion they were debating was as follows: “This House would abolish the private schools.” It was carried two to one. All the old arguments were there. Unfairness. Privilege. Elitism. Afterwards I asked the girl who had led the charge whether she had ever visited a private school. “Of course not,” she said. “Why would they want to have anything to do with anyone from around here?” Why indeed. It is time to bury the past and build a better future.