There is no surer foundation for the prosperity of a Kingdom than the right education of its youth. Yet in England today the schooling of children is governed by a system that punisheth excellence, rewardeth conformity, and placeth the convenience of administrators above the ambitions of parents and the futures of their sons and daughters. A generation of reform — hard won, and in many places already bearing fruit — is being dismantled, not because it failed, but because it disturbed the settled arrangements of those who prefer a system they can control to one that might actually work.
The present government hath set about rolling back the autonomy of schools, hobbling those institutions that had begun to flourish outside the grip of central direction, and visiting punitive measures upon private schools — not because such measures improve the education of a single child, but because the spirit of envy, which ever attendeth upon the governance of this Kingdom, demandeth that if all cannot have a thing, none shall. This is the doctrine of levelling down: the conviction that fairness is achieved not by raising the lowest but by pulling down the highest. It is a doctrine that your servant rejecteth entirely, for it punisheth the industrious, discourageth the ambitious, and leaveth the whole nation poorer in mind and in spirit.
What is needed is not less freedom for schools but more. The distinction between state and private education — which serveth no child's interest, only the bureaucrat's convenience — should be dismantled by degrees, not by destroying private schools but by granting state schools the same liberties that private schools already enjoy. Parents should command the resources that the state setteth aside for their children's education, and should be free to direct those resources to the school of their choosing. The curriculum should concern itself with the transmission of knowledge, not with the fashionable pursuit of skills abstracted from any actual learning. And examinations should be so benchmarked against the standards of the wider world that no child leaveth school with a certificate whose worth cannot be measured beyond these shores.
These proposals are designed to be structural and lasting — to build a settlement that no future government could easily unpick, because parents, teachers and schools would have grown accustomed to freedom and would not lightly surrender it. For your servant hath learned, in the ordering of the King's affairs, that a reform which dependeth upon the goodwill of those who come after is no reform at all; only that which altereth the very architecture of the institution endureth beyond the term of those who built it.
I. School Autonomy
Relinquishing government control over the conduct of schools.
All state schools, whether singly or in groups, should become autonomous institutions with significant control over their own curricula, staffing, ethos and admissions. The model is not new — it is the logic of the academy programme and of the grant-maintained schools before it — but it must now be applied universally and irreversibly.
State schools should enjoy freedoms equivalent to those of independent schools. Where a school can demonstrate competent governance and sound finances, the state should have no more business dictating its curriculum than it does dictating the syllabus at Eton or Manchester Grammar. The role of government is to fund, to inspect and to intervene in failure — not to direct the daily work of teaching.
II. Employment Autonomy
Schools as employers, free to recruit and reward the best.
Schools or school groups should become the legal employers of their own teachers, determining terms of employment and paying salaries directly from their grant funding. This would break the monopoly of centralised teacher training providers and allow schools to recruit from a far wider pool of talent — paying more where necessary to attract exceptional people, and dispensing with those who cannot teach.
National pay bargaining should be replaced with localised negotiations between schools and their staff, tied to a comprehensible budget that each school controls. In areas where the cost of living is lower, this might allow schools to pay salaries that are competitive with the local private sector while freeing funds for capital investment, equipment and smaller class sizes. The point is simple: schools that control their own money will spend it more wisely than any central bureaucracy can spend it for them.
III. A Voucher System
Putting the education budget in the hands of parents.
A voucher system for school education would allow parents to direct the state's per-pupil funding to the school of their choice — state, independent or otherwise. This is the single most powerful mechanism available for introducing genuine competition into the system, rewarding good schools with growing rolls and exposing poor ones to the discipline of parental choice.
Payment for private education should be made tax-deductible, removing the perverse situation in which parents who choose to educate their children privately — thereby saving the state the full cost of a school place — are financially penalised for doing so. Private schools with charitable status should operate under a home fees regime that makes their benefits more widely accessible.
IV. The State-Private Divide
Abolishing a false distinction that serves no child's interest.
The requirement for the Secretary of State to approve new schools should be abolished. Schools should navigate the planning system like any independent school, fostering competition and allowing supply to respond to demand. Where parents want a new school, the barriers to creating one should be no greater than those facing any other institution that must secure premises and meet regulatory standards.
Schools should be permitted to levy top-up fees, with parents able to allocate their child's share of the education budget towards these fees. This would encourage mixed models in which fee-paying and non-fee-paying pupils learn alongside one another — not as a matter of charitable condescension, but as the natural consequence of a system in which the money follows the child and schools compete openly for custom.
Over time, this would blur the line between state and private schooling to the point where the distinction ceases to be meaningful. That is precisely the objective.
V. Curriculum and Knowledge
A knowledge-based curriculum, not a skills-based one.
The curriculum should be rooted in the transmission of knowledge. The fashionable emphasis on transferable skills, critical thinking divorced from subject content, and competency-based assessment has produced a generation of pupils who have been taught how to learn but given precious little worth learning. Skills without knowledge are empty; knowledge without skills is merely untidy. Of the two deficiencies, the former is by far the more damaging.
Autonomous schools should have wide latitude to determine how they teach, but the expectation should be clear: children should leave school knowing things — the history of their country, the literature of their language, the fundamentals of mathematics and science, and enough of the wider world to form reasonable judgements about it.
VI. Examinations and Standards
Internationally benchmarked qualifications that mean what they say.
Grade inflation has rendered domestic qualifications increasingly unreliable as measures of attainment. Examinations should be standardised around internationally recognised qualifications — the iGCSE and the International Baccalaureate — ensuring consistent standards and facilitating meaningful global comparisons. A child sitting an examination in Birmingham should be measured against the same standard as a child in Berlin or Singapore, not against an annually adjusted curve designed to make the system look better than it is.
VII. Structural Permanence
Reforms designed to resist future rollback.
The overarching aim of these proposals is to create a system in which schools operate independently, teachers function within a normal labour market, parents exercise genuine choice over where and how their children are educated, and the education budget is allocated by the decisions of families rather than the directives of officials.
Once parents are accustomed to choosing, once schools are accustomed to competing, and once teachers are accustomed to being employed on terms they have negotiated themselves, any future government that attempted to reassert centralised control would face resistance not from lobbyists or think tanks but from the people who actually use the system. That is the surest guarantee of permanence: not a constitutional lock, but a population that has tasted freedom and will not willingly give it back.