bananas and breakfast cereals.

Last week Douglas Carswell, a Conservative MP, summed up the stupidity of Westminster trying to run every school in the country by diktat, ring-fenced budgets and targets.

He commented, "If politicians ran supermarkets, there would be a waiting list for bananas and catchment areas for breakfast cereals."

We recently saw the tragic results of allocating secondary school places by lottery, - an even smaller proportion of families achieved their desired school than under the system they were trying to replace allowing parental choice

This week we had the admission by the Schools Minister, Jim Knights, to the moderate teaching union, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, that primary classes of 38 were manageable and that groups sizes of more than 70 were "perfectly acceptable" if teachers were helped by classroom aides. In fact it seems that a year or two back 6,000 secondary pupils were taught English or Mathematics in classes of more than 50, and 715 pupils in classes of more than 60.
(Given the classes of 15 or 20 in private schools, this may explain partly why these schools are more successful.)

Education Department figures show that the number of situations were class size exceeded the statutory 30 pupils for 5 t0 7 year olds, went up from 740 to 910 between 2005 and 2006 The latter figure represented 1.6% of the national total.

The Government authorised the increase to a great extent in 2007, since the number of over-large classes without Government approval actually fell from 530 to 390!

Despite the vast sums pumped into education, we have a bananas and breakfast cereal situation. In fact the OECD reckons our classes to be large by international standards, and our education was reckoned 23rd out of 29 developed nations, behind Hungary, Slovakia, Mexico and Slovenia!

What can you expect when so few members of the Government have ever worked in industry or commerce, and the percentage among political advisers could even be lower. For such a large enterprise the control is in the ideologically motivated hands of the inexperienced!

What happened to the hope of teaching tailored to the individual child?