Good education due around 2050...perhaps

David Willett's speech to the CBI on the subject of education is set out in full in the Telegraph today. It's a good source for a more detailed discussion of some of the issues I raised in my post on the self-flagellation over grammar schools which is besotting and consuming the Conservatives at the moment.

A few stand-out points:

We already have more per capita funding than in the past and we officially have a system of school choice. But it hasn't transformed educational standards as we hoped. This is because there are no mechanisms in place to enable successful schools to expand, to take over failing schools or for new schools to be created.

So why don't you privatise them, you silly billy?

It is the failure to open up the supply side which is the reason why, despite years of ambitious attempts at education reform, Britain now lags behind many other advanced western countries.

Correct. So what have your two brains decided to do about it?

We must make it easier for people, including parents themselves, to set up new schools. New school providers must be able to enter the maintained sector, responding to what parents want. This is not how the system works at the moment.

Why do you want a maintained sector? You are trying to set schools free, aren't you? If they are in the maintained sector then governments can tie them up in red tape. You are playing into the hands of Whitehall and the teaching unions, Mr Two Brains.

[Blair] proposed, for example, that no new schools should be created by local authorities - a powerful device for bringing new providers incrementally into the maintained sector.

And you support this why, exactly? Do you think I want incremental change? What you are saying is that, for the majority of people, you are offering a good education to their grandchildren. And then only if a future Labour government doesn't reverse it all and hand the schools back to the teaching unions. It will be Railtrack all over again. 

At the heart of our education reforms is creating, in Tony Blair's words, 'self-governing independent state schools'. 

Oxymoron. Moron. Two brains, and both demented.

Bloody hell.