This is the week when the Conservative Party got serious about education reform. Our approach rests on two things. First, an instinctive Conservative belief in rigour, parental choice and competition as the best way of raising standards. Secondly, on the evidence of what works – both in Britain and around the world.

Twenty years ago, this country was in the vanguard of education reform, with innovations such as city technology colleges and grant-maintained schools. Since then, however, we have been overtaken by countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands and some states in the US. They have all been trying to do what we need to do here: raise standards in the poorest performing schools, in the poorest areas.

They have succeeded. In Wisconsin, for example, a new generation of charter schools is bringing the highest standards of schooling to the poorest kids in the poorest neighbourhoods. In areas with charter schools, fourth-grade science scores have risen by 20 per cent in just three years.

I believe we can do it here too. And that’s why I’m so determined to move on from a sterile debate about building a few more grammar schools. Parents will not forgive any political party’s ideological self-indulgence on education at a time when 350,000 pupils are failing to get five good GCSEs including English and maths, and when last year a quarter of boys did not even get a single good GCSE.

These shocking figures help to explain why the number of young people not in education, employment or training – once described by Gordon Brown as a “human tragedy” and an “economic disaster” – has actually increased under this Government. They help to explain why universities have to provide remedial education for some first-year students, and why employers consistently highlight a damaging lack of basic skills, even among some graduates. Most importantly of all, Labour’s failure to tackle educational underperformance diminishes opportunity for our young people.

But for us to be the party of opportunity and aspiration, and to help to reverse the decline in social mobility that we have witnessed in recent years, it is not enough to recite these words like a mantra. We need a serious plan for education reform.

The starting point is to change the terms of the education debate – away from arguing about how we allocate a fixed number of good school places, to a debate about how we get more good school places in total.

That means opening up the supply of education – to social enterprises formed by parents, groups of teachers, charities and others. They would receive state funding for each pupil they attract, would be free to do things differently, and their success would then provide a benchmark of what can be achieved, encouraging existing schools to raise their game.

This positive competitive pressure is why Caroline Hoxby, of Harvard University, has described school reform as “the rising tide that lifts all boats”. And the best international examples of school reform share two key features.

The first is a fair funding formula showing clearly how much money goes with each pupil – nobody must be able to say “these schools do better just because they have more money to spend”. The second is a bar on academic selection – pupils choosing schools rather than schools choosing pupils. Indeed, it is so important for the new entrants to prove they can do better that none of them wants to be accused of just taking the children that are academically most able.

David Willetts and I are applying Conservative principles and best-practice education reform from around the world to our schools in England. This is what Tony Blair came to realise was necessary and has been moving towards in the latter stages of his premiership. His education Act last year was a step in the right direction, which is why we backed it. But it can now be seen as the high-water mark of Labour’s commitment to school reform. Last week Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, said that there was a limit to the creation of academies.

Academies are a key part of my vision for school reform – another important way of creating more good school places. For example, through a requirement for setting and streaming, they can ensure a “grammar stream” in every subject in every school. So we will accelerate the academy programme, making it easier to set up an academy, and enabling providers to run federations of schools rather than negotiating a separate contract for each one.

Vital though it is, however, the liberalisation of the supply side of education is just one aspect of the Conservative schools revolution we intend to lead. We will focus with equal vigour on the action we can take that will have an immediate impact on the quality of education our children receive.

Top of the list, as I learnt last week when I spent two days teaching at a secondary school in Hull, are discipline and behaviour. So we will enable head teachers to impose a zero-tolerance approach to bad behaviour and bad language, ensuring that they are not penalised or overruled (as they are today) for excluding disruptive pupils. Combined with our commitment to stop the closure of special schools, and to work with social enterprises to transform educational provision for excluded pupils, this will make it significantly easier for teachers to teach and for children to learn.

I am proud that my party is now putting in the proper intellectual effort that the crisis of educational underperformance in this country demands. We are serious about standards; serious about discipline; serious about school reform. And nothing will distract me from those vital priorities.

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