IT WAS, EVEN by New Statesman standards, a radical idea. In an eloquent and elegant leader, Peter Wilby, who was then editor, proposed that places at state schools be assigned by lottery. A spin of the wheel was a fairer means to a good education than buying a house in the right catchment area: the first was available to all, the second only to the wealthy.

NS-niks cheered Wilby’s audacious cure for new Labour’s biggest headache — while shaking their heads with knowing smiles. When it comes to being a good parent, they agreed sheepishly, you have to be a snob and not a socialist.

This was two years ago. The editor of the New Statesman and indeed the Secretary of State for Education have changed since then. But education reforms remain central to the Government’s plans, chiefly the much-contested idea of giving schools a lot more autonomy, including over admissions.

That puts the spotlight on Labour’s dirty little secret. For all the Blairite rhetoric about fairness, efficiency, and compassion, the Prime Minister knows that his party must stop punishing the middle-class parent’s guilty ambition to leave the dross behind. We want our children to be People Like Us. This is not snobbery of the Hyacinth Bucket variety, concerned with genealogy and terminology (toilet, loo or lavatory? Lounge, sitting room or drawing room?) We don ’t care whether our child’s playmate is Asian or Caribbean, whether her dad drives a Lexus or mum wears a hijab. We do care, however, about her brains and behaviour. We want a playground where no one pulls a knife, a class that is not disrupted by underachievers, and a school ethos that condemns bullies and rewards good manners.

That’s not snobbery, it’s being au fait with the educational studies that show how parents and peers influence a child’s performance (academic as well as behavioural) far more than teachers or textbooks.

Hardline Labourites may declaim that all children make equally desirable classmates, and that social integration is the only route to social mobility, but parents know best. If your daughter spends eight hours a day in a classroom with well-behaved and bright children, whose parents at home reinforce the values and lessons learnt at school, her prospects are a great deal rosier than if her classmates struggle to read their own names written on an ASBO.

The social apartheid that results from the current scramble for the best places means that Britain is now more class-ridden than ever: for all Labour’s talk, the UK has become less socially mobile and now ranks with the US at the bottom of a league table of eight European and North American countries. Academic selection may have been unfair (and it is certainly taboo) but the system that replaced it is vulnerable to worse, covert manipulation, based not on the child ’s exam performance, but parental savvy and cold cash.

Any middle-class parent knows how to rig the system to be with People Like Us. Simply buy a property in the catchment area of a successful school — sending house prices spiralling in said area, making it even harder for the oiks to get in. Or you can claim religious observance and send your children to the faith schools that year in, year out, top the league tables. Or both. Labour’s new, privately sponsored city academies are another good bet. In theory, they are non-selective. But it is ambitious parents and well- behaved children that tend to get through the complex bureaucratic admissions procedure. And with the money you save on school fees, you can pay for private tutoring.

Middle-class parents also know to act fast when they think a school has reached the tipping point: let a gang hang about the school gates, or a switchblade come out in the playground and the twitchy mums and dads immediately start plotting their escape strategy — elsewhere in the state sector when possible, to the private schools if necessary.

Perfectly in tune with their middle class electorate, Tony and Cherie sent their offspring to the London Oratory, a state-financed Catholic-run school that boasts an excellent academic record. That Euan gained a coveted place at Bristol University, which bends over backwards to admit the supposedly disadvantaged products of the state system, shows just how distorted the system can be.

In short, state schools are not proving the great engines of social mobility that Labour had envisaged; they are in fact a vast middle-class welfare programme, a handy service available to those who cannot or will not cough up private school fees but still want their child polished and prepped. Aneurin Bevan would not approve, but show me parents with a new Labour label, and you can bet they they have either tweaked the system or gone private. Bog standard comprehensives are for other people’s children.

Mr Blair is now proposing for the whole country the system that benefited his own children at a handful of selective London state schools: the minimum of local authority control and the maximum autonomy for head teachers. The Left is howling in protest: they much prefer a system that looks superficially fair, while being easily rigged by determined parents. A really independent, ambitious head teacher may just decide that the dim and lazy offspring of the million-pound house next to the school gates are less deserving of places than the bright and hard-working children of a family outside the nominal catchment area. That would be good for social mobility — and almost as nasty a shock to the middle-class monopolists as a New Statesman-type lottery.

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