Tory schools policy: Getting carried away

At the height of a national panic over BSE in May 1990, agriculture minister John Gummer was in the vanguard of efforts to reassure the public over British beef. Tired of speechifying, Gummer decided to give his calming message a human face – specifically, that of his six-year-old daughter, to whom he tried to feed a hamburger before assembled television cameras. Nearly twenty years on, Gummer's reputation has still to recover – a cautionary tale, if ever there was one, of the inadvisability of using one's children to make a political point.

David Cameron's harsher critics will likely be accusing him of doing just that, after his announcement last week that he intends to send his children to state secondary schools. Certainly, such a move would help to alleviate the “toffish” image with which Cameron has been burdened after his years at Eton. But Cameron's commitment—which was matched by shadow children's secretary Michael Gove—is more than a stunt. It should properly be seen as a statement of intent: superhumanly confident as ever, Cameron is convinced not only that he will win the next general election, but that he can render standards in the state education system comparable to those in the independent sector by the time his daughter Nancy starts secondary school. He's got six years.

Cameron might breezily tell the Daily Telegraph that it's “crazy” for higher rate taxpayers to fork out thousands more for private education, but many of those who can afford to do so would think it crazy to do anything else. While fees at elite schools such as Eton have now passed the £25,000 mark, spending per pupil at British state secondaries stands at less than a fifth of that – and it shows. Pupils at the most expensive schools see the achievement of five good GCSEs as all but a given; yet fewer than 50 per cent of state school pupils attain the government benchmark.

Rather than surrender to the power of the market, however, the Tories' education plan aims to harness it. Labour's academy programme, aimed at teaming up with the private sector to deliver educational centres of excellence, had a promising start – but it has stalled of late, the recent failure of a flagship academy in Carlisle highlighting the problems faced by the scheme. Cameron and Gove intend to provide it with “rocket boosters.” The Tories would abandon the government monopoly on founding new schools, encouraging parents, charities and private companies in deprived areas to set up so-called “new academies.” All such institutions, the Conservatives' education green paper asserts, would “depend for their current revenue entirely on their ability to attract pupils.” Failing, unpopular academies would fall victim to natural selection.

The scheme smacks of traditional small-government conservatism: the Tories will “create the circumstances” conducive to success, according to Gove, and let market forces do the rest. The reasoning behind it is unarguably attractive – a lack of competitive pressure has contributed to the stagnation of many failing schools, while the gargantuan Building Schools for the Future initiative has bogged down a good number of existing academy projects in bureaucracy.

Yet the Tories' ability to deliver “a superb new school in every community” could be less secure than they imagine. Any doubters are referred to the success of a similar scheme in Sweden, but the system will not necessarily translate between cultures – after all, Sweden had virtually no existing independent school sector to complicate matters when its education voucher system was introduced. And the Tory plans presume a strong financial contribution from the private sector – a source that looks increasingly unreliable amid the bleak economic outlook. A precariously debt-laden state will be ill-placed to make up the shortfall.

His swaggering self-confidence restored along with a towering poll lead, Cameron's register seems to be drifting towards the messianic: Gove's department “will be a team of zealots when it comes to excellence,” he told the Telegraph, while his talk of “defeating” mysterious “forces in the education establishment” sounds like something out of Return of the Jedi. But worthy ideals—admirably prominent throughout Tory education policy, not least in their plans to restore prestige to teaching—can swiftly come a cropper amid the harsh facts of a shockingly unbalanced education system that has echoes, as Nick Clegg noted last week, of a caste society. If Cameron's plans for state education fall through, he may yet come to regret his pledge to make use of it.