One of the first education, education, education steps New Labour took ten years ago was to abolish the assisted places scheme which was educating hundreds of children from poor backgrounds at some of the country’s leading schools. One of the Teach First graduates I mentored a few years ago came from an afro-caribbean background, had a single mother living above a pub in Birmingham, and joined Teach First after gaining a first from Oxford in Classics. He achieved much of that courtesy of an independent school education and the assisted places scheme. When interviewed on the radio this morning, the Sutton Trust’s Sir Peter Lampl stressed that the UK is currently bottom of the social mobility league and that sending able children from the poorest backgrounds to the best independent schools might be a good idea. It was, it worked.

What Sir Peter said that I found more interesting was his plea to political parties to drop their ideological differences over education and join together to improve this dire situation. On that I couldn’t agree more, but unlike Sir Peter, I can’t see it happening and curiously not because of the politicians, but because of those vast numbers of teachers who still believe their job is to politicise someone else’s children.