The Schools Secretary's threat to close "failing schools" typifies the centralised, command control approach to education which has led to this failure. International survey after international survey consistently ranks Britain's education system poorly, and a
recent report for the OECD placed Britain 21st in science teaching, behind Ireland, Hungary and Sweden. For a nation with a
history of scientific innovation, this is a disgrace.

This is not to say that Britain doesn't have great schools – just
look at the number of foreign parents who pay vast sums to have their children privately educated here in the UK. And many British parents scrimp and save to send their children to more modest private schools too. Others move to the catchment area of a good state school. This is often referred to as a postcode lottery, but that's misleading. It is no lottery – if you can afford to buy in a good catchment you will gain access to a good school.

This Labour Government is obsessed with a targets driven culture. They believe that directives from Whitehall can solve problems for every student, patient and welfare recipient. Ed Balls's demands for failing schools to close will be as successful as the directive for every NHS hospital to be "deep cleaned".

Make no mistake, to ensure the perception of success, a few schools will indeed be closed, just as (eventually) all hospitals were deep cleaned. However, just as hospital infection rates continued to rise after the deep clean, education standards for the poorest will remain desperately low.

And when targets are not achieved, figures are massaged. Witness the nonsense of the GCSE results every year showing that kids are getting brighter and brighter by the day and the "grade inflation" whereby they now give out starred A grades as too many students were getting As.

Long ago, the Government gave up making cars, running airlines, extracting coal or running the telephone system. This was mainly because government was appallingly bad at running them. The education system is more important than these businesses, so why do we let the government run our schools? The food supply is extremely important, but the government doesn't run supermarkets – just imagine the chaos if they did.

The answer for education in Britain is not more centralising directives from London, but real autonomy and freedom for thelocal schools and parents. In Sweden, parents are given a voucher for their child's education. This voucher is redeemable at any state, charity, church, or privately owned school.

This empowers parents. If they don't like the school nearby they can transfer their child to a school better suiting his or her needs. Poor Swedish schools seldom close – once 10 per cent of students leave a failing school, the owners are forced to make changes or lose the remaining 90 per cent. In many cases, parents dissatisfied with a school set up a new one – sometimes alone, others in co-operation with a respected school.

Since the introduction of vouchers in Sweden in 1994, all students have benefited, including those who remained in the state-owned schools. The perceived or real threat of competition forced state schools to raise their game.

Truly effective school choice would set few, if any, regulations on schools. The best people to decide what is best for their children are most often the parents. While there are parental failures, these are less frequent than state failures. Who cares more about a child – a parent or a bureaucrat in Whitehall worried about government targets, political expediency and trade union relations?

A modern, liberalised school choice policy would allow true flexibility and customised education for all. Students with an aptitude for mathematics or arts could pursue a course unimaginable in today's centralised state system. With 7.3 million children in 20,800 schools, how on earth can Ed Balls hope to cater for every child's unique needs?

In Sweden, some schools are open until 10pm. This may not suit all parents, but it clearly suits some. School choice is about minority rights. It might be the minority who want their children to learn Latin or the minority who want a focus on music. Freedom from centralising control will create diversity and innovations as unimaginable today as the iPhone was when the telephone system was run by
the GPO.

The best thing the Government can do for education is to stop meddling, step back and get out of the way. Teachers and parents know what's best for children.


Shane Frith is director of the Progressive Vision think tank (www.progressive-vision.org).