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TODAY parents learn if their children have a place at their first-choice school. Tens of thousands of London schoolchildren - about one in three - will be disappointed. This week Schools Secretary Ed Balls cast doubt on the policy of allocating places by lottery. That aside, ministers have no real solution to the imbalance of supply of places at good schools and the massive demand for them. It is a failure that enrages London parents, and our story today shows that primary-school places are a problem too.
It was not supposed to be like this. Schools policy in the Blair years was meant to drive up standards and give parents greater choice. But standards have risen sluggishly and unevenly. Even in the city academies, designed to give schools autonomy and extra funding, progress has been slow. Heads still have no real power over admissions or teachers' pay. Expansion of choice is still formally the Government's policy but it lacks the drive of the later Blair years, and there are doubts about Mr Balls's commitment to academies' autonomy.
Meanwhile education has become an area of ferment for the Tories. Having effectively abandoned calls for more grammars, they want to make it easier for independent groups to establish new, state-funded schools, using a Swedish-style voucher system. It is an imaginative approach but will need formidable commitment to succeed in pushing up the net number of schools, as less successful ones are edged out. It will also take time: David Cameron risks raising parents' expectations unrealistically.
Still, Mr Brown urgently needs to convince London parents that he has a better alternative. Much of the Government's effort has been focused on thwarting middle-class demand for the best schools - for instance, by forbidding interviews. Instead, ministers' energies should be refocused on ensuring that there are more decent schools to go round.
Sheer greed
ACCORDING to new evidence heard today by MPs, the pension enjoyed by former RBS chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin was simply waved through by his fellow directors, who did not fully inform ministers of what they had done. John Kingman, chief executive of UK Financial Investments, which holds the taxpayer's bank stakes, said the pension could have been half the size. However, some board subcommittees, one of them meeting in the middle of the night at the height of the crisis, chose not to dismiss Sir Fred with 12 months' notice. Instead, they allowed his departure to be treated in a way that doubled his rewards. Meanwhile there is anger over revelations in Northern Rock's annual report over executive pay: four dismissed directors got payoffs totalling almost £2 million, while new chief executive Gary Hoffman gets £280,000 a year in pension contributions.
Of course such amounts pale beside the size of the bail-out. But public anger over bankers' rewards is justified - especially when the taxpayer is propping up the banks concerned. Sir Tom McKillop, RBS's departed chairman, should now face the music for feathering Sir Fred's nest so lavishly. City minister Lord Myners deserves criticism too. He did not see how bad the £690,000-a -year-pension would look, or ask if the sum was set in stone, let alone justified.
The story will not end there. Remuneration on this scale was the product of a self-serving boardroom culture of excess. Yet the government that presided over the boom could have helped change that culture. It did not - and for that it should be held to account.
Facing forward
TONIGHT'S gala at the National Portrait Gallery in aid of its education and outreach work is a reminder of the appeal of this unique collection. As gala chairman Joanna Trollope writes, portraiture stimulates the imagination. Those faces from the past show us, too, that many have survived testing times in this capital before, and will do so again.
