Doing marginally less harm to schools

This is going to hurt. I’m already shivering in anticipation..

I am, after all, a Labour tribesman. Tony Blair threw everything at he that he could in order to get me out of the Party, and I remained, rooted to the spot, until at last he was forced to achieve his objective by the desperate stratagem of invading Iraq.

But, painful though I know it’s going to be, it has to be done, and I might as well get it over with. Here goes.

Congratulations on your speech about education, Mr Cameron.

Not – I rush to say – that you’ve produced a good or even a workable education policy, because you haven’t. You haven’t because it’s based on the same grubby little lie that underpins New Labour education policies: the lie that governments can deliver a choice of schools to parents.

They can’t, and in your heart you know they can’t. The Policy Exchange report on which you based your policy calls for an end to “barriers to supply-side reform” as though state school places were a commodity, like pre-prepared meals in supermarkets, and you can put one back on the shelf if another looks more appealing.

School places don’t work like that. All you will achieve by your policy of planting a new school in an area which already has enough school places is the decline and death of one school or the other, and the destruction of the life chances of all those pupils unfortunate enough already to be in it – for once a school is doomed, it turns into a failing school, if it was not one already.

Governments can’t deliver choice, and most parents don’t want them to. They want a good school in their area, where their children will be safe and well taught. It’s not much to ask, and, as you say, Mr C, it’s a scandal that after a decade in power and a huge amount of extra investment, Labour hasn’t achieved it.

Still, there are two good reasons for congratulating the Conservative leader.

While his proposal sounds like simply an expansion of academies, it actually removes some of the most harmful features of Lord Adonis’s model, by changing the role of sponsors.

Lord Adonis’s model was based on sponsors putting in £2 million to capital costs, and in return for this having total ownership and control of the school in perpetuity, with an inbuilt majority on the governing body.

This was because Lord Adonis peddled another grubby little lie: that philanthropic businesses were willing to put money into state education, and expect no return. Of course, most sponsors don’t put in anything like that, and business sponsors can divert their money into their own enterprises. Take, for example, car dealer and evangelical Christian Peter Vardy, who sponsors, owns and controls five academies in the north east.

His schools have paid £111,554 for "support services such as marketing and recruitment" to his car dealer firm, Reg Vardy Plc. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, set up by the world-famous American preacher, was paid £14,039 as reimbursement for time on academy business spent by Sir Peter's brother David. None of this work was put out to tender, which is a legal requirement in state schools.

The Tory leader at least seems to want to bring parents back into decision-making, with a powerful voice on governing bodies, and to end the dominant role of sponsors. And that makes his model marginally less damaging than Lord Adonis’s model. One and a half cheers for Mr C.

Ditch the dogmas, Ed

So children’s secretary Ed Balls wants to know why, despite putting unprecedented amounts of money into education, we still have failing schools and children who have been failed by our system.

I can tell him. And I can tell him what to do about it.

The government put in enough money. It could have solved the problem if spent wisely. But instead, the government tacked on a set of outdated political dogmas, requiring schools to jump through doctrinal hoops. The money still did some good, but not as much as it could have done.

So the trick is to uncouple the money from the dogmas, to retain the former, and throw the latter on the fire. Here are the three crucial dogmas that did the damage.

First, the dogma that ultimate control of schools must be wrested away from the parents, teachers and local council representatives who used to run governing bodies, and handed over to a company, church, or other external body, usually with no particular relationship to the area. Trust schools changed the balance on governing bodies to the detriment of local people, and academies went the whole hog, providing the sponsor with an inbuilt majority on every governing body (as shown in my book The Great City Academy Fraud.)

Now, it is simply not true that the local people who use the school are less able to make a success of it than a body like the United Learning Trust, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Church of England which is the biggest academy sponsor, or Sir Peter Vardy, the evangelical Christian car dealer who is in the top few academy sponsors. And the proof is in the result. Despite absorbing many times as much public money as other schools, academies do not do particularly well, often no better than the cash-starved schools they replace.

Second, the dogma – especially close to Lord Andrew Adonis – that we need to separate out brainy kids from thick ones at an early age. This is why many areas, like Kent, still have the eleven plus exam, and why trust schools and academies were given the power to select ten per cent of their intake.

This dogma is only sustained by a lordly disregard of the facts. We know that those who fail the eleven plus are overwhelmingly those from poor households, and that the schools they go to are known locally as schools for failures. And therefore, we know that selection embeds failure and makes it hereditary.

And third, the dogma that there is nothing the public sector can do which the private sector cannot do better. Therefore if we have a school in a poor area – say, for example, the Isle of Sheppey – then the way to improve it is to get a very expensive private school – Dulwich College, to pick an example at random - to come in and show them how it’s done. The fact that no one at Dulwich College has ever seen a class like the ones you get on the Isle of Sheppey has not previously occurred to policymakers.

Get rid of the dogmas, Ed, and watch things get better.