Education

Cameron clearly doesn’t rate Ed Miliband. That may be a mistake in the long run but it worked fine today. The opposition leader returned to PMQs after a fortnight’s paternity leave and Cameron welcomed him with some warm ceremonial waffle about the new baby. Then came a joke. ‘I know what it’s like,’ said Cameron, ‘the noise; the mess; the chaos; trying to get the children to shut up,’ [Beat], ‘I’m sure he’s glad to have had two weeks away from it.’ This densely worded, carefully crafted, neatly timed quip had obviously been rehearsed at the Tory gag-conference this morning. The fact that Cameron had time to polish it suggests that he anticipated no trouble from Miliband today.

Last week, the FT revealed that Michael Gove was planning to introduce direct funding of schools, a move that weaken local authorities’ grip on education funding. Theoretically, it is a central component of Gove’s plan to free schools from local authorities’ bureaucratic control in a bid to improve standards by creating a quasi-market. It was, as Gove’s aides have been at pains to express, ‘exciting’. But Gove denied the story on Andrew Marr this morning: the legislation will contain no such clause. The FT responded this afternoon, proving that Gove has diluted the legislation.

Local authorities are already doing their utmost to block the coalition's schools reforms, so just how will they respond to this story on the front of today's FT? It reveals how Michael Gove is planning to sideline local authorities from the funding of all state schools – not just free schools and academies. The idea is that state schools will get cash directly from the state, without any need for the council middlemen that currently control the system. Here's an FT graphic that captures the change: The money would be allocated to schools in proportion to the number of pupils they have, and headmasters would have much more freedom in how to spend it. This is the same simple but transformative dynamic that inspirits the rest of the Gove reforms.

Simon Schama, who is advising the government on drawing up a new history section of the national curriculum, has an essay in The Guardian today setting out why and what children should learn about our ‘island story’. Schama highlights Thomas Becket’s clash with Henry II, the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt, Charles the First’s execution, the establishment of the British Raj in India, the opium wars and the Irish question, as things that every school kid should be taught about. But at the risk of being too crudely Whiggish, the most important thing is surely that pupils learn how Britain became a democracy. It will help people understand the importance of their democratic rights, if they know how they were won.

The Times has a spread on free schools (p20-p21) today (£), focusing on the model of Kunskapskolan, one of the largest Swedish chains, who are setting up shop in Britain. "Pupils set their own homework, decide their timetables, set themselves targets and work at their own speed - oh, and they clock off at 2pm," says Greg Hurst, the paper's education editor. He visits one of their schools in Twickenham. "At the heart of the personalised learning", he says, lies a "one-on-one tutorial with a teacher for 15 minutes to review progress, weekly and long-term targets and timetables to meet them." A pupil, Lisa, is quoted saying: "You talk to the teacher and you cannot embarrass yourself. If you want to say something personal, you can say it to her.

Away from the mid-terms, we have the little issue of tuition fees. David Willetts will today set out the government's response to the Browne Review, and it's expected to look something like this: a £9,000 cap on fees, but universities will have to show that they are making extra provisions for poorer students if they charge over £6,000. Students would effectively be loaned the money by the state, and would start paying it back once they earn £21,000 after graduation. It's certainly a compromise arrangement, constructed with one eye on the Lib Dems and another on the universities. For Clegg's backbenchers, there's a rejection of the unlimited fees advocated by Browne, and an overall emphasis on "fairness" and on helping the less well-off into university.

Free schools are all well and good – but what about the schools that remain? Some CoffeeHousers raise this question in response to my earlier blog, and it’s important enough to deserve a post in itself. Because introducing new schools to compete with council schools is the best way of raising standards for all – and studies around the world prove this. The ‘free schools’ agenda is not some Govian brainwave, but a simple reform that is being enacted from Chile to Obama's charter schools. The fullest example of this has been in Sweden, which the Gove system is modelled on, where about 13 percent of upper secondary kids are now in free schools.