Schools

I'm on the train back from doing Radio Four's Any Questions – broadcast live from Derby, repeated at 1.10pm tomorrow – where I had a bust-up with Christine Blower of the NUT. CoffeeHousers may recall she was the star of a cover story we ran a few weeks back, about the campaign of bullying and intimidation levelled against headteachers who are trying to seek Academy status. She raised that article during recording, and things kinda kicked off. I told her she should be ashamed of the way her union thugs try to intimidate young teachers who seek to break away from local authority control and reach independence. She denied writing the words ascribed to her, I sought to read them to her – and things descended from there. Anyway, a few thoughts... 1.

Michael Gove has just been explaining in the Commons where the £7 billion for the fairness premium that Nick Clegg announced on Friday will come from. Revealingly, David Laws was present as Gove answered this urgent question. I understand that Laws was crucial to both the pupil premium being implemented at a decent level and the real-terms increase in the schools Budget.   Laws himself told John Pienaar’s show last night that “obviously I've talked to him [Nick Clegg] about some of the things that I've been associated with in the past, like the schools funding issue... because I was the schools spokesman in the last parliament”.

Only five days to go until the spending review – and after weeks of emphasis on the cuts we're about to see, the government has today unveiled a new spending commitment. It comes courtesy of Nick Clegg: a new "fairness premium" targeted at the least well-off young people. Lib Dem Voice has full details here, but the basic point is that £7 billion will be spent, across 4 years, on programmes for disadvantaged 2 to 20 year-olds. Much of this will go towards the "pupil premium" that we've heard so much about, and which should advance school choice in the most deprived areas. Putting aside his genuine commitment to it, Clegg is facing two ways with this announcement: the public and his own party.

The Tory conference in Birmingham is the last big political event before the cuts come. After the 20th, every time a senior Tory appears in public for the next few years they will be about why this or that is being cut. As the row over defence shows, these questions will come from right across the spectrum. For this reason, Simon Schama’s interview with Cameron in today’s FT is probably one of the last that will start with the assumption that Cameron is genial, non-ideological fellow. Once the cuts are happening, it will be harder to cast Cameron as a consensual figure. His edges will appear harder, more defined.  But when Schama asks Cameron what he wants his legacy to be we get a reminder of how non-ideological Cameron is.

Today's GCSE results demonstrate the tremendous success of City Academies, a hugely heartening trend given that this formula - which was so slowly rolled out under the Labour legislation which introduced them - can now be rapidly implemented under the new Academies Act. It's always been a con to look at the absolute results of Academies, as under Labour the only schools given such status were schools that were doing poorly. What matters is improvement. Let's take the three Academies groups and look at the ratio of  pupils winning five good GCSEs (i.e. A-C including English and Maths). In the The Harris Federation, which now runs nine schools, there was a 10 point increase. In the ARK academies, a 13 point increase. In the ULT Academies, an 8 point increase.

David Cameron has today told the News of the World that he is "terrified" about the prospect of sending his children to an inner-London state school. This is quite some statement, given how many tens of thousands of parents are in the same predicament. Isn't it the classic politician's error? To betray how his aloofness from voters by showing how he fears what ordinary parents have to put up with? That's what Tony Blair thought – so he'd pretend to be happy with state schools while sending his kids to the ultra-selective Oratory School. That is hypocrisy. What David Cameron has said represents honesty. After all, why shouldn't he be terrified? As I say in my News of the World column today, the record is appalling.

Michael Gove's welcome freeze on Building Schools for the Future will invite tomorrow's press to claim only that this means 715 various building projects are not being carried out. In fact, what it means is that the fund will be open for the Swedish-style new schools. The budget will be transferred from bureaucratic priorities to those of communities, as expressed by those who wish there to be a new school. One of the great tragedies of the politicians' stranglehold over education is that they just love huge, shiny buildings to point at, complete with new whiteboards and all the latest gadgets. The Swedish experiment has shown the parents care not one jot about how grand the building is: their value is placed on the importance of teaching.

Polly Toynbee was on ‘mute’ on Sky News in my office, the remote wasn’t working, which is frustrating because I’d love to hear how someone mounts a passionate defence of why local government should have monopoly control of state schools. Very few things in politics are indefensible, but a system which doles out sink schools to sink estates is one of them. When Michael Gove was a journalist, he described comprehensive education as the greatest betrayal of the working class. And now, as Education Secretary, he is outlining a system that will give the poor the same choice of schools that the rich have. Who on earth could be against that?