HOW THRILLING! Just a few weeks after the Prime Minister’s lament in Blackpool that “every time I’ve ever introduced a reform in government, I wish in retrospect I had gone further”, we are about to see the first fruit of the newly emboldened Blairite agenda.

When the Education White Paper is published next week, we are promised that it will be full of radical reforms. The focus, we are told, will be on school independence and parental choice. As the Prime Minister put it last week: “By the end of the third term I want every school that wants to be, to be able to be an independent non-fee-paying state school with the freedom to innovate and develop in the way it wants and the way the parents at the school want . . . ”

It all sounds wonderful. And the various ideas that have been carefully leaked are certainly an improvement on the current state of play. Schools will be able to join together as education “brands”, with the best heads encouraged to take over whole groups. Local education authorities will have many of their powers removed, allowing successful schools to expand and to set their own curriculum, and new schools to emerge where parents want them. And if they are unhappy with the standards of their children’s school, parents will be able to lobby for new management.

But bold as some of the ideas seem, the best they will do is get us back to square one. Take the idea of “independent state schools”, about which Mr Blair enthused last week. There’s nothing new there: we had them until he became Prime Minister and abolished them. They were called grant-maintained schools — schools that were free from LEA control and funded directly by Whitehall. In eight years in power, Labour’s bold third term reform is to arrive back where it started out.

The most eye-catching proposal among the White Paper leaks is a plan to entice genuinely independent schools — private schools, in other words — into the state sector. Again, it sounds terrific. How radical and free thinking of Labour to want not to stamp on private schools, as in the past, but to utilise what they offer pupils.

Well, yes. But how typical to get things back to front. If the Prime Minister’s analysis — that the state sector needs to learn from and copy the independent sector — is correct (and it is) then the sensible response is not to nationalise those private schools that want to be bought out, but to make an independent sector education available to all. Instead of taking independent schools into the state sector, the sensible policy would be to take state-funded pupils into independent schools.

The Government’s expected proposal won’t even get things back to square one, because it won’t match the scheme that for decades did what was needed — until the last Labour Government abolished it. Direct-grant schools were entirely self-governing and independent, but took pupils funded by the state.

As the authors of a book about social mobility put it in 1997: “The direct-grant scheme succeeded . . . in opening up many of the best independent schools to ability rather than wealth. It is a sad irony that in destroying the direct-grant schools on the altar of equal opportunity, the 1974-79 Labour Government succeeded only in denying opportunity to many poor children and increasing the number of fee-paying parents (because the schools chose to remain independent rather than be nationalised)”.

The authors were spot-on. Of course they were; I was one of them. But the identity of the other is far more important: Andrew Adonis, now Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister.

Before his appointment in June, Andrew Adonis was the Prime Minister’s key education adviser inside No 10. As such, he was the force behind the Government’s education policy. But for all his skill in battling Whitehall, he and Mr Blair were barely able to move reform into first gear, let alone the fifth gear that was needed.

His appointment as Schools Minister in June was designed to fight that battle from behind enemy lines, within the Education Department. But the lesson from the forthcoming White Paper is plus ça change.

There is no doubt that, left to his own devices, Lord Adonis would reintroduce direct-grant schools. His words in our book were explicit about their merit. But for all the bold words from the Prime Minister, the reality of his political strength — or rather weakness — was exposed when Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, was able to veto Lord Adonis’s appointment as a Minister of State and consign him to a junior role as a Parliamentary Under Secretary. She won that battle, and it seems she has won this one, too.

There is an even bigger problem with the White Paper. As always, the Government’s rhetoric far outstrips its actions. In Blackpool, Mr Blair hit the nail on the head: “There’s a great myth here, which is that we don’t have a market . . . now. We do. It’s called private schools . . . But it’s only open to the well-off . . . I want decent hardworking families to have the same power.”

So it’s clear that he understands what needs to be done: all parents, not just the wealthy, need to be given the power of the purse string. But the logic of the Prime Minister’s words points inexorably to the boldest reform of all: vouchers. By handing real power over to parents, vouchers destroy the influence of the bureaucrats, the teaching unions and the education establishment that have had such a pernicious impact on British state education.

But will we get vouchers from Labour? Even to pose that question is to give the answer. So much for going further.

Stephen Pollard co-authored with Andrew Adonis A Class Act: The Myth of Britain’s Classless Society

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