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.

11:09 am, 30 June 2010 | Melissa Benn

For as long as I can remember, Frank Field has been thinking the unthinkable. Now part of David Cameron’s cost-cutting team, some old ideas are being re-cycled in a new supposedly culturally and politically sensitive form. His proposals, however, will face some very familiar problems.

Single mothers have long been in the firing line. Remember Peter Lilley and his 1992 conference speech about having a ‘little list…of benefit offenders I’ll soon be rooting out’? Thatcherite Britain was defined by its class-based distaste for ‘babies on benefit’.

This time, however, the argument is more subtle. Field clearly thinks it is a woman’s job to raise children and the man’s to provide for her. He blames a generation of ‘upwardly mobile very successful women’ for trying to drive young mothers into work.

But Field doesn’t quite grasp the fundamental shift in women’s lives. Yes, many mothers prefer to spend the early years closer to home; some due to lack of educational and work opportunities. But many don’t, including the wives of most of our senior politicians. You can’t design a 21st century benefit system around a 1950s model of motherhood.

Either way, you certainly won’t help poor mothers who want to bring up their own children with proposed reductions in housing benefit or the slicing away of the baby tax credit, the toddler tax credit and the Pregnancy Grant.

As the unexpected star of the recent budget debate, Yvette Cooper, presumably one of the upwardly mobile women Field is referring to, taunted her opposite number Iain Duncan Smith, ‘At least Margaret Thatcher had the grace to wait till the children (were) weaned before she snatched their support‘.

But fathers too are being scrutinised in a new way. Thatcher set up the once ill-starred Child Support Agency to chase feckless fathers for payment. The new plan is far harsher: cut the benefits of those dads who won’t get back into work.

Once again, the coalition will run into trouble. A fresh and surely expensive (not to mention ignominious) layer of government will be needed to prove DNA and the outcome of one-night stands.

The other huge but as yet unspoken part of the jigsaw is unemployment; not just the chronic worklessness in areas decimated by structural and political changes of the Thatcherite 1980s but the hundreds of thousands of job losses coming our way.

What good is it saying to a young man: work for your babies or live in bottom line poverty, if there really is no work on offer?

It’s official: New Labour is no more. We have it on the word of one of the previous government’s sharpest political brains, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the first to throw his hat into the ring for the party leadership. With his trademark air of authority, Miliband has informed us that we are now living in the era of Next Labour.

Personally, I’m still reeling from the demise of the old regime. Although never a fan of New Labour, it seemed indomitable in its way. But then so did Thatcherism and Blairism ( the yolk to New Labour’s egg) once upon a time.

So what will Next Labour look like? Of course, it’s too early to say. Labour faces a prolonged period of soul searching. It urgently needs to reconnect with both the public and the party’s grassroots, many of whom fell away, particularly in the years after Iraq. In fact, I suspect that none of the leadership candidates will continue to profess loyalty to the decision to go to war in 2003.

The Miliband brothers have both declared a refreshing willingness to re-think the party from the ground up. Idealists within the party over the last 13 years may have been dismissed as dinosaurs or utopians or both but David himself now talks of the need for ‘idealism and transparency’ and radical political reform. His younger brother Ed, currently the only other contender for the leadership, has talked of the ‘loss of a sense of progressive mission and of being in touch with people’s concerns’.

Of course, New Labour was always good at talking the talk, on fairness, flexibility, aspiration and the rest, often leaving the rest of us unsure what they actually hoped to achieve, a skill that the Con/Dem coalition leaders have successfully reproduced. By September, however, vaguer talk of change will need to solidify around some clear pledges for progressive reform on everything from housing to education, welfare and the living wage .Despite, or perhaps because of, the fast moving 24/7 news age, with its newly Presidential tone, never has it been more important to say what you mean and mean what you say. Neither the public nor the party faithful have the stomach for more high flown fluffy generalities, with the real stuff of government going on behind closed doors.

For that reason, it is vital that the next Labour leadership engage with, and show greater respect towards, their own activists. As David Miliband pointed out on Newsnight last night, Labour did best in those seats like Birmingham Edgbaston (and Barking) where a grass roots campaign was mobilised. People not money. People not platitudes. These are surely the meaningful lessons to be drawn from Labour’s recent defeat and longer term decline.

So over the next few weeks or possibly months ( the timetable for the election will be decided today) the candidates will have to consult widely and think hard about the building blocks necessary for the progressive coalition and nation they want to build. Only when these are in place, and voted for, will we have a clearer idea of what Next Labour really means, and how different it really is from its brutally discarded political sibling

Now if only there had been more about housing…not to mention a promise to abolish Trident… a pledge to break down the crippling divisions within our school system…..a pledge to withdraw from Afghanistan….

* Opinion piece in this week’s Public Finance on why neither party can win the class war.

* An in depth interview in The Guardian today with Mary Foley, an extraordinary woman, who has forgiven her daughter’s killer.

* A review in this week’s New Statesman on Kate Figes’s latest book on modern coupledom.

If a tired Labour government, 12 years in, struggles to develop a credible vision to sell to the voters, the Conservatives seem to have hit on a rich and popular idea that I am sure we will hear more of as the election edges near, an idea I shall crudely summarise as ‘Save our local everything!’

For the rest of the post click here

Only a week ago, the idea of a fresh vision from Labour on any policy area was being belittled by a largely cynical commentariat, who have got into the habit of seeing everything Brown does as the last gasp of a desperate beast.
At the same time, an increasingly jumpy Opposition had got the bit between its teeth on arguably unrealisable pledges to increase spending, particularly on popular issues such as social housing and schools.

Read the rest of Melissa’s latest Public Finance piece on the government’s Education White Paper here.