The Conservatives’ radical plans for England’s school system, the party tells us, will achieve many things. They’ll raise the status of the teaching profession. They’ll allow good schools to expand, and force bad ones to improve or die. Perhaps most impressively, though, the party thinks they’ll actually save the country money.

The UK, economists are fond of telling us, needs more exports. It may be the country that launched the industrial revolution, but in recent years, its economy has become altogether too focused on airy-fairy sectors like banking, housing and small bits of numbered plastic. What Britain really needs, they say, is to go back to making things that the world actually wants to buy.

Any lingering cynicism about Building Schools for the Future can be dispelled by a quick trip to one of the schools. Head teachers will proudly take you on a tour of their gleaming new buildings, extolling the virtues of airy atriums, wider corridors and beautifully landscaped gardens. The pupils are still excited, they’ll say. It’s raised ambitions, energised the staff – done everything, in short, that everyone had promised it would.

Perhaps more than any other policy, the Building Schools for the Future programme was a product of Labour’s long boom. Instead of restricting itself to those schools in the direst need, it was to cover every secondary in England. Ministers wanted not just to replace crumbling schools, but to transform education. Its price tag even leapt up by a nifty £10 billion, as it expanded to encompass academies and special needs schools. This was a programme devised in good times. Read more...