Passport to Eton?

Bruce Anderson says the Tories’ revolutionary new education policy will devolve power to schools and parents

In 1874, Disraeli told the House of Commons that ‘Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.’ Over the subsequent decades, few senior Tories would have disagreed — yet hardly any of them can be said to have put those words into practice. Rab Butler did devise the 1944 Act which was intended to shape the structure of post-war education. Less than 30 years later, Margaret Thatcher was dismantling it. She turned more grammar schools into comprehensives than any other Education Secretary, with few safeguards to ensure that they did not become bog-standard comprehensives.

That was Thatcher before Thatcherism, but even in her long years of power and ideology, education remained un-Thatcherised. There are no grounds for thinking that children in state schools were receiving a better education at the end of the Thatcher-Major years than in 1979.