Here’s my education white paper. Please read it — I spent nearly 15 minutes drawing it up and one hates to see such valuable time go to waste. Feel free, too, to table amendments. But keep them short.

1.Every secondary school pupil should go to his or her nearest school. All able-bodied pupils — ie, those who are not crippled or blind — must walk to school or get a bus.

2.Schools will be run by head teachers who are answerable first to the local education authority and secondly the government. Within the parameters of the national curriculum head teachers have autonomy. Those who kowtow to “local community leaders” over such issues as uniform, the teaching of religious education and other thorny issues, shall job swap with the janitor.

3.Schools that are deemed by Ofsted to be failing shall not close or suffer the ignominy of watching their middle-class children drift away. Instead, if the school is failing because it is in a poor area and lacks funding, it shall be given more funding. If the school is failing because the head teacher and the staff are morons, they will be replaced by better people.

4.The only selection for schools will be geographical. However, the schools will be rigorously — although flexibly — streamed to ensure the bright kids and the retards are taught at the appropriate level.

5.Pupils will be expelled (not “excluded”) only when they have done something very, very bad indeed; not because they are a bit difficult or are as thick as a plate of mince, thus harming the school’s position in the league tables. Each school has a duty to teach all the kids in its catchment area, except for the crack addicts and trainee rapists, who will be sent to a different kind of school with metal bars on the windows.

6.The national curriculum will ensure children learn stuff, rather than merely interpret it.

7.Teachers will be allowed to use reasonable force to ensure classroom discipline. This will include Chinese burns, the winding of the hair around the finger, etc.

That’s about it. What do you reckon? The most important thing is that parental choice has been expunged and, as a result, pointless and damaging inter-school competition.

The insistence on “choice” has become a mantra for all three of our main political parties: but I’m not sure that parents — especially parents outside London — want choice. Instead, they want their kids to go to the local school and they want that school to be well run. If a minority of parents are prepared to move house in order to find what they judge a “better” school for their children, let them.

I drew up my white paper on the train back to London, having spent time filming in some schools in the northeast for a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary to be shown tomorrow night. The film is about the growth of evangelistic Christianity and, partly, the way in which this government has allowed evangelicals to start running state schools. The schools set up (and part financed) by Sir Peter Vardy — a bluff and rather likable car dealer from Sunderland — are smart, shiny and new and enforce a code of discipline that would have done justice to Haiti’s Tonton Macoute. All well and good, you might argue.

They also ram a particularly uncompromising version of Jesus Christ a long way down the throats of their students and are extremely dubious on questions such as: when was the earth formed? The head teacher — another decent, likable man, named Nigel McQuoid — reckons it was made by God 5,000-6,000 years ago — which does not accord with scientific inquiry.

The school has good exam pass rates that may be at least partly down to a policy of booting out difficult pupils at 20 times the rate of other schools in the area.

Ah, you might say, that’s exactly the school for my kids. You’d have a point. Leaving all those, um, idiosyncrasies aside, the Vardy schools do at least part of their job well; the kids allowed to learn there are refreshingly polite and pass their exams, by and large.

But should one rich, well-meaning, philanthropic individual be allowed to impose his singular vision of education on state schools ? Doesn’t this have the faint whiff of the early Victorian age about it?

Again, we come back to the question of choice. In this case the government has decided that in order to increase the diversity of (and secure funding for) schools, people such as Vardy should be allowed carte blanche to run schools how they wish, give or take Ofsted inspection. The local people have, theoretically, been afforded a choice: but for the vast majority it is no choice at all.

They wished to send their children to the local state school and suddenly the local state school is a very different creature indeed. It is a school with a strident message to impart and run along the lines envisaged by a nice bloke who left school at 15 and who has trousered a fortune by flogging used Renault cars. You cannot blame Vardy: he is driven by the most sincere and commendable of motives. Instead, you should blame the chimera: choice.

rod.liddle@sunday-times.co.uk

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