Tristram Hunt’s proposals for public schools are nothing new

The Shadow Education Secretary is suggesting that private schools provide qualified teachers to help deliver specialist subject knowledge to state schools. It’s depressing that they don’t all already have in-house specialists. Not surprising though, according to Terence Kealey, who argued in 1991 that the state should never have got involved in education in the first place:

Ever since St Augustine had founded King’s School, Canterbury in AD 597, charitable church schools had flourished. They were rarely short of sponsors. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, for example, was raising no less than £10,000 p.a in London alone in 1719. New societies continued to be formed… But the Commons did not believe that the free market could supply sufficient education. From 1807, the House reverberated to claims that the Prussians and the French, with their universal state education, were bound to overtake us economically and culturally. Yet, decade after decade, the British kept their lead.