So it looks like only a handful of Free Schools will be opening in 2011, and some high profile projects like Toby Young’s West London Free School might be delayed for a year or two. Following on from the PR disasters of the BSF funding announcements and the widespread criticism of the way that the Academies Bill was pushed through the Commons in late July, it looks as if the Coalition’s flagship education policy is in trouble.

Not a bit of it. Gove got off to an unsteady start and the summer break will surely lead him to reflect on his department’s manner of policy presentation, if not its substance. This autumn, I suspect we will see a rather more sober Gove, emphasising caution and caring at every turn.

Clever politician that he is, he might even argue that the slow start to the Free Schools project is actually a good thing, indicating that government is playing it by the book and that the new schools are subject to the same financial and planning strictures as the maintained sector.

And yesterday’s Institute for Fiscal Studies report showing that the government’s austerity drive is going to hit the poor the hardest will only confirm to Gove and co the need to keep arguing that their education policy is there to help the disadvantaged.

The pupil premium will be introduced in the coming months; who knows, perhaps around the time of the potentially restive Lib Dem conference? But whatever the timing, expect much to be made of it, even though many hard-pressed headteachers I’ve spoken to say that even in their schools, with high numbers of students on free school meals, its introduction is unlikely to make up even a fraction of the shortfall left by other cuts.

But for all this, there will be no change of heart or direction from government on the schools front. The so called Free Schools and the new ‘outstanding’ academies are at the heart of the Coalition’s determination to break up state provision and introduce private initiative and finance at all levels of the welfare state.

Of course, a few schools will flourish; backed by corporate capital, powered forward by influential figures, drawing on the most talented pool of pupils, how can they fail? And of course, they will include in their ranks some of the country’s poorest but most talented pupils whom you can be sure, come results day, like yesterday, will be pushed to the front of all publicity photographs.

But what about the schools in those areas decimated by economic changes of the last few decades, struggling with polarised and deeply pessimistic communities? Will they be able to generate the same sparkling transforming institutions?

Slashes to the mainstream education budget will hit local schools in poor areas, and the increasingly marginalised local authorities, losing central finance to the new academies and free schools, will be hard pushed to offer them the support they need.

This is the real story of this government’s education policy. It’s got nothing to do with Latin in state schools or celebrity journalists turned wise old pedagogues. It concerns the right to a decent education for the poorest citizens of our nation.

We should judge the Coalition and the success of their education policy by the future and fate and of these citizens and these communities. Whether the Free Schools fling open their doors next September or the September afterwards matters very little to that central question.

Melissa Benn is a writer and journalist. Her latest book on education in the modern age, The New Class Wars, will be published next autumn by Verso.

There are many reasons, of course, for the shift in modern politics, away from a collegiate/cabinet emphasis to a more Presidential style of party leadership but the set piece TV debates have only accelerated this trend. 2010′s election campaign has been structured entirely around the Thursday debates, and associated briefings and endless analysis. This means, as many have observed during this singularly depressing campaign, that the only women who seem to count are the glamorous loyal wives whom, it is hinted, will be able moderate their husband’s excesses and weaknesses in traditional medieval court style. The power beyond the throne: yes indeed; nothing to do with democracy. As for the elected women, they are nowhere to be seen. Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour Party, is occasionally glimpsed in her bright red coat ( much good it does her) standing at the edge of some media scrum or apparently pushed to the edge of a platform.I have glimpsed the top of her head at least three times on television in the last week; they don’t even bother to show her face. Of course, the main media players are only interested in the main political players. There’s a few women in there, but not many.

As for Tory policies on education, they will be an unmitigated disaster. If schools can select their own pupils, secure their own funding and float away from struggling schools in their neighbourhood – the independent school model, unwritten by the state this time – inequality will only intensify. The Tory claim to want to tackle poverty and inequality is disingenuous; if anything proves it, it is their education policy.

Not so. The argument rumbles on, boosted by recent publication of Alan Milburn’s study on social mobility: the latest example being a fairly pallid offering from Mary Warnock in the Independent.that was robustly rejected by Professor Richard Pring in the letters page, a couple of days later.

Here is Pring’s excellent letter reproduced in full:

Grammar schools are divisive, unjust and ineffective

Friday, 31 July 2009
It is difficult to understand how a philosopher of Mary Warnock’s distinction could still peddle the myths about grammar schools (“Children need to be taught to think highly of education”, 29 July). Far from rescuing “children from disadvantaged homes”, the 11-plus examination failed to do just that – despite its pretensions to detect innate intelligence accurately at the age of 10-plus, when most took the tests.

The Crowther report, exactly 50 years ago, expressed its concern that so few of those from the bottom quarter in terms of poverty, who did in fact get to grammar school, actually obtained an O-level; 40 per cent of those from the unskilled working-class who passed their 11-plus left school without a single qualification.

Those who, like Mary Warnock, want to bring back grammar schools, or wish to retain the remaining 165 (which distorts comprehensive provision in about 45 per cent of local authorities) must subscribe to three propositions: first, that it makes sense to distinguish a minority group (about 20 per cent) of intelligent young people (the rest not capable of handling abstract ideas or learning for its own sake, as the Norwood report in 1943 put it); second, that this intelligence is fixed, not to be acquired through subsequent experience or teaching; third, that that innate quality can be accurately measured by IQ tests.

The injustice of such assumptions was demonstrated in the 1950s when Phillip Vernon showed how coaching could shift pupils’ IQ scores by as much as 14 points. And that partly explains why the children from more advantaged homes did so much better.

Professor Richard Pring

Below,  a profile of one such woman that appeared in this week’s Guardian.

Katherine Rake: Feminism’s calm champion

Katherine Rake has led The Fawcett Society, the UK’s leading campaign for human rights, for seven years. On the day she bows out, she tells Kira Cochrane about being vilified as ‘worse than Hitler’, the postcode lottery for rape victims – and why she never gets angry.

Read the rest of the article here

‘Women with children earn about 22% less than their male colleagues, according to a new report that explores the “devastating” impact of motherhood on earnings.

“Before becoming parents, men and women are equally likely to be employed, but childbirth marks the start of a great divide, which continues even after children have left home and does lasting damage to women’s careers,” the report finds’

Read the rest of this article here.

And for more details of the tenacious campaigning organisation that brings these issues to our attention on a regular basis, go to the Fawcett Society website.

Read the rest of Melissa Benn’s article on Liberty Central, on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, here

Melissa Benn is a member of the Writers in Prison Committee of English PEN and co-minder of honorary member Aung San Suu Kyi.

English PEN Writers in prison committee and JAM host Breaking Through the Silence. St Margaret’s Church, Westminster Abbey, July 9, 7.30pm. Tickets from English PEN.