Iain Martin in today’s Telegraph lauds the Conservatives’ plans for schools.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=PBT00JS0UMSG3QFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/opinion/2007/11/22/do2203.xml

 The Tory plans for schools…are genuinely exciting: the Tories promise to unleash a wave of reform in our moribund state education system.

 Iain points out that the Conservative’s green paper on education, ‘Raising the bar, closing the gap’ promises:

 a supply side revolution, stripping away the monopoly power of local education authorities, the state monoliths that strangle diversity of provision and competition. Would any parents want to open and run schools, as they would be allowed to under Tory plans? Perhaps. They did in Sweden, when such a scheme was a trigger for widespread improvements.

 From the perspective of CentreForum, however, the most interesting aspect of the Conservative proposal is to recommends a pupil premium: an increased per capita funding for pupils from deprived backgrounds. This measure would incentivise schools to accept less advantaged pupils. This is, of course, the policy CentreForum proposed and articulated in the recent pamphlet ‘Tackling Educational Inequality’. It is interesting and positive that the Conservatives are now proposing a genuinely liberal vision for school reform.