The author, a former headteacher and now a county councillor, argues that the structural changes to the education system put in place in the first weeks of the new government in the summer of 2010 will exacerbate the gap between the highest and lowest achieving schools, will destabilise the state-funded education system, will expose it to marketisation and partial privatisation and will diminish local democratic accountability. It is a policy which is divisive, unfair and costly, driven by a narrow-minded ideology which pays little attention to evidence and professional experience.