Blair still affects choice whilst keeping a tight grip on actual control. From the Daily Telegraph:

Every secondary school is expected to become an independent, self-governing academy within five years, Tony Blair said yesterday.

Parents would be given power to change the curriculum, replace failing heads and start new schools, he promised. Anticipating today’s education White Paper - “a pivotal moment in the life of this Government” - he outlined radical plans to “complete the reform” of state education in England that Labour started when it came to power eight years ago.

Councils will be stripped of their responsibility for schools; businesses, churches, City livery companies and wealthy individuals will be allowed to take over schools; independent schools will be encouraged to accept state cash and join the state sector; and there is to be a new emphasis on grouping pupils by ability and offering advanced classes to the brightest.

(My emphasis).

Blair will allow schools to run their own budgets but he will not allow them to raise their own money. So ‘their own budgets’ actually aren’t. They’re whatever the government of the day deigns to give them.

And, frankly, I do not believe for one moment most of these claims of new freedom for our schools. I anticipate that for each of these freedoms granted there will be limits, parameters and that the LEA - which will still have a role - will be able to veto those independent decisions made by schools but which the left simply don’t like.

There are signs that Blair’s desperate attempts to secure some sort of positive education legacy - a Guardian/ICM poll shows that just 29% of respondents said schools had improved since 1997 - are forcing common sense - of a sort - to exert itself in his thinking. From The Guardian:

In a swipe at past Labour policies, he said local authority efforts to create equity had resulted in “deadening uniformity”, with child-centred learning and a rigid adherence to mixed-ability teaching too often failing to meet basic standards.

This actually sounds promising - until one realises that this is part of his vision of “self-governing independent state schools” - surely the oxymoron of the century. If it’s state-owned it is simply the beneficiary of devolved power - not independence - and devolved power can be given and it can be taken away. Schools will not be able to raise their own money and they will not have control over their hiring and firing processes.

The only way for the poorest children to achieve world-class education is for world-class education to be the norm. Currently, with half of primary school leavers failing the three Rs - and Ofsted still lamenting that the more effective traditional, synthetic phonics reading method is still ignored in favour of fashionable ‘whole language’ teaching - world-class education is nowhere in sight. Wealthier parents already achieve the best education for their children either by paying directly for it or by buying the more expensive houses within good schools’ catchment areas (and so paying a premium for their children’s education via their mortgage payments). Poorer children get what’s left.

Learning and advancement are not helped or hindered only within schools but since schools are the prime institutions involved in formal education I would suggest we allow them all the freedom they can handle in educating our children.

We really ought to remove the state from schooling and give parents a voucher that a school can redeem for the approx £5,200 per pupil that state education costs. Let schools compete for the vouchers by offering to parents what parents want. And allow schools to raise additional money by charging additional fees or by other means.

Let business agencies (the CBI for example), charities (The Literary Trust, for example), churches and other interested parties contribute to the setting of school educational aims and aspirations. But allow schools the final say in devising their own targets - and let them decide how best to meet them. Let schools determine who they hire to achieve their targets - and how much they pay them.

The government can arrange the provision of a separate set of examinations designed to test the brightest pupils, stretching them to discover who the outstanding children are and giving them the special guidance they need. And recognise that not all pupils will be academically inclined so allow schools to devise vocational programmes for these children.

More than anything else, schools should not be seen as isolated educators but part of a larger, fluid project in developing our children in all the varied ways that a person can be developed with local businesses and institutions being utilised to give them experience and exposure to the realities of life. A society that expects the school system to produce the very best - whatever the very best happens to be - and allows teaching professionals to devise ways of getting there will raise standards for all.

On a slightly lighter note:

It emerged last night that a complete print run of 5,000 copies of the White Paper had to be pulped over the weekend because of spelling mistakes and drafting errors. A revised version will be ready for consideration this morning, a spokesman for the Department for Education said.