‘We should have been bolder’

It is 7.30 a.m. and I am the first to arrive at Harris City Technology College in south London, where Andrew Adonis, the schools minister, wants to meet for breakfast. The building is shut, the weather is freezing and a kindly cleaner asks me inside to wait. ‘Are you here for an interview?’ she asks. I nod, and she offers me a cup of tea. ‘What position are you applying for?’ I almost spit out the tea and explain I’m interviewing Lord Adonis. ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Him again.’

Most schools would go into overdrive before a ministerial visit, but this particular establishment is used to seeing the lanky figure of Lord Adonis showing guests around. When we meet, he admits his strategy. ‘When a Labour MP starts on me about City Academies I say, “Look, I don’t want to have this argument. Why don’t you go see one of the schools for yourself?” I send them here,’ he says, looking around. ‘They invariably come back saying that they want one in their constituency.’

The battle to reform state schools has been a bloody one for Tony Blair, on a battleground which his party regards as sacred. From the offset, Lord Adonis has been his chief adviser. Ten years ago he was a journalist writing about education in robust terms. He denounced the ‘comprehensive school revolution, which destroyed many excellent schools without improving the rest’. He deplored the end of grammar schools, a move ‘carried out in the name of equality but which served to reinforce class divisions’.

It’s the kind of stuff which is too hardcore for a Conservative manifesto these days. Yet its author tells me he still believes every word. ‘I have not changed my mind in ten years,’ he says. ‘If I could redo the 1960s and 1970s education policy, I’d do it very differently.