To transform schools, sack bad teachers and hire great ones. It’ll transform education – and the economy

The Labour years can, in retrospect, be seen as a massive experiment into the link between cash and education. Gordon Brown almost doubled spending per pupil over the past decade, the biggest money injection in the history of state schooling. But as he did so, England hurtled down the international league tables. It now languishes in 18th place, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The plan didn’t work.

Only now is the full cost of that failure becoming clear. In an age when ‘work’ is increasingly something done with the head rather than the hands, education standards determine the wealth of nations. There is now enough data to draw a direct relationship between the two and put a price on it. Smarter nations are richer nations. Eric Hanushek, an academic at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has pioneered a way of quantifying this and was commissioned by the OECD.