Unnoticed at the recent election, the Conservatives had a schools policy which was almost right. It advocated allowing parents to take the £5,000 per year which the state spends on their child, and spend it at any school which doesn't charge extra fees.

It came pretty close. That 'no top-up' rule will have to go, allowing parents completely free choice of schools, and giving lower-income parents access to better schools. It also needs something dramatic on the supply side to allow new schools to spring up to provide what parents want. Perhaps a regulatory presumption in favour, allowing new schools to be set up and operate without having to climb the paperwork mountain?

Given these two additions to the Conservative policy, many of the school education problems would be solved. Parents would seek out the schools which offered the education they preferred, new ones would be established to do that, and the sink schools would close down. Crucially, it decentralizes education and gives power to parents rather than bureaucrats.

It comes as a surprise to find the Tory shadow spokesman for education, David Cameron MP, backtracking on a policy which finally promises success. According to George Jones, the Telegraph's political editor,

Mr Cameron told the Conservative national education society in London that the Tories were in danger of "missing the big point" in education by talking more about "structures" and giving parents greater choices between different sorts of schools… Mr Cameron said Tories should focus on simple and straightforward issues. "Discipline. Standards. Promoting teaching methods that work. Scrapping those that don't. Building on tests, league tables and exam standards that genuinely measure success, failure and progress.

But parental input is the big point. It is what will enable failure to be weeded out and success emulated. To attempt to impose improvement from the centre first of all imposes one set of ideas about what that constitutes, and secondly it re-treads the familiar road of trying to force improvements through layers of self-interested bureaucracy and teachers’ unions. That is what doesn’t work, and it is why it must by bypassed by parental choice.

It is rather depressing to see a shadow minister who seems to think the will-power to impose sound ideas is what makes success. We've been there.