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It has long been the case that politicians do not answer questions on the Today programme in spite of being hounded by the interviewers. Mostly they answer another question of their own choosing.

Has anybody heard anything to approach Jack Straw this morning? Poor Jack Straw ahd obviously not brought his own question with him. He floundered. He did a John Prescott without the bravado and gusto.

I particularly liked it when he said, more or less out of the blue “It is is now ten hours since I said we should reflect on it” (the French Non). That’s all. Nothing else. What did it mean apart from giving us a time check?

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The news that a flagship inner city academy had failed in England prompted a question which has long lain dormant. Has the comprehensive school ideal succeeded or failed?

In one sense the comprehensives have succeeded. The grammar school / secondary modern system of state education has largely disappeared. Privilege has been uprooted.

More realistically the less effective comprehensive schools are found by and large in the inner cities. Hence even a Labour government found the need to invent the City Academies. And now one of those has been taken into special measures. Looking up its website, I find that it has not been updated for at least two years. Oh dear.

It would appear that for several generations of students, schools in the inner cities have too often provided a poorer quality of education while purporting to provide the same opportunities for learning as their counterparts in leafy suburbia. The curriculum and syllabus may be the same, the exams identical but if the results are consistently poorer do we blame the comprehensive system or the students themselves?