“THE issue is, Phil,” says a friend of mine, “that there’s just no time to do anything well. The compulsory lesson format is so rigid that we rapidly flick through a few facts, read a bit of a text to them, make them do some written activity and then it’s on with the next one.

“Everyone is so heavily timetabled there’s no time at all to do any marking. There’s no depth to the learning, no quality. Kids in British state schools have to be the worst-educated in the world.”

“The market’s not interested in quality,” I say, “it’s interested in efficiencies.”
 
Under Thatcher, the Education Reform Act of 1988 outlined ways to introduce marketisation into the education system by treating the parents as consumers, increasing the level of choice they might have and by trying to inculcate competition into the system in order to improve its (and here’s that word again) quality.