THE GOVERNMENT'S answer to educashun, educashun, educashun is still experimentation, experimentation, experimentation. It has let a thousand Bunsen burners flare in city academies, community academies, specialist schools, beacon schools and Sure Starts. Ruth Kelly’s promise to consider letting parents run schools is another attempt to drain the ideological swamp by circumventing local authorities. But if “parent power” is to mean anything, the State needs to relinquish much more control than it has so far seemed minded to do.

There is an appetite for parent power, born of desperation. In Whitechapel last month, I met a Bangladeshi Tube engineer who had just got off the night shift and driven his children halfway across London to attend a two-week summer school. His own state education in London had been fine, he said, but his children’s was unacceptable. In a Victorian hall, two teachers were giving up their holiday time to teach almost 30 Bangladeshi children, aged from 5 to 15, with nothing more than poetry, flip-charts and high expectations. The plastic chairs were about as far as you could get from the “video-conferencing, interactive white boards, and e-mail” advertised by the new Bexley City Academy designed by Foster & Partners, on which the Government has lavished £35 million. But what mattered to these children was teachers who demanded and gave. Even the most bolshie teenager — for immigrant parents may be highly motivated but all teenagers are teenagers — eventually handed in homework. And the average reading age of these children leapt by ten months in two weeks. What had they been doing for the other 50 weeks of the year?

Those parents would like to start their own school, if they could find a way to pay for it. But they are wary of a licence from the State. Robert Whelan, of Civitas, which has set up what it calls a New Model School with parents in North London, says that they “want to teach history with dates and geography with maps, not the latest theories in Whitehall”. The kind of people who are prepared to pioneer a new school, he claims, want the freedom to do it their way. The New Model School sets out to be independent and charges fees of £1,000 a term. But the State puts enormous obstacles in the way. Planning regulations make it hard to find a site; health and safety regulations that demand state-of-the-art lavatories make it even harder; and two years ago Ofsted announced that it must inspect all new schools before they opened — a more draconian requirement than any on business.

Only the most determined parent is going to fight his or her way through such a minefield. Parent power will only mean something if it means that parents can prevent the Government from shuffling severely disruptive children into their school; if they can release teachers from crippling paperwork; if they can overcome health and safety requirements that discourage them from extracurricular activities. The problem is that such freedoms should apply to all schools, not just those with energetic parents. It is marvellous that 100 parents are overseeing the building of Elmcourt School in Lambeth. But the fact remains that the parents whose children most need better schools are those whose contact with education consists mainly of assaulting teachers who have dared to put their kid in detention.

One of the most impressive headteachers I ever met was head of the Malcolm X charter school in Washington DC. He rapped his way into classrooms where poor black children lined up to go to lunch, were sent home if they had no shoes and absolutely adored him. He said his school was oversubscribed not because of its excellent results but because parents who worked shifts were attracted by the long school day. It was not the parents who had made that school a success. It was a head who had the freedom to hire and fire his staff and run the school with his particular brand of genius — including a zero tolerance approach to indiscipline that was the best hope those children had.

If the Government is serious about parent power, it might also listen to the 38 per cent of parents who apparently say that they would send their child to a private school if they could afford it. In 2005 it seems absurd to live in a state of educational apartheid in which people either have to pay enormous sums to go posh, or nothing to go comp (if you ignore the higher house prices in the catchment). It is crazy that 85 per cent of the 100 top-performing secondary schools this year were private schools, when only 7 per cent of parents can afford to use them. It is disgraceful that social mobility in Britain is now lower than almost any other industrialised country.

Some of the bravest experiments are those that leap the ideological barricades between public and private. For four years, the independent Belvedere Girls’ School in Liverpool has offered means-tested bursaries that enable it to take pupils entirely on merit. Seventy per cent of girls are subsidised wholly or partly by the Girls’ Day School Trust and Sir Peter Lampl, the philanthropist who must be almost unique in actually putting his own money where his conscience is. A third of the girls now come from homes with incomes of less than £12,500, and the school has just had its best-ever GCSE results. At a stroke, one ladder from poverty to educational success has been restored and, with it, proof that good teaching does not just thrive on the clichéd middle class.

Yet although it costs less to educate each pupil at Belvedere than to educate an average state pupil — as parents are helping to pay — the Government will not consider extending the experiment. Helping poor pupils to attend some of Britain’s best schools is just one experiment too far for ministers who dare not whisper grammar school. But if they really want to let a thousand flowers bloom, they must embrace all the experiments, including those that could fail, upset people or challenge conventional wisdom. Isn’t that what experiments are for?

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