http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4330806.stm

By the end of this third term, I [Blair] want every school that wants to be to be able to be an independent, non fee-paying state school, with the freedom to innovate and develop in the way it wants and the way the parents of the school want, subject to certain common standards."

The forthcoming White Paper from the Education Secretary Ruth Kelly is expected to suggest ways in which schools can innovate and which parents can have more choice.
Do my ears deceive me? A Labour government is going to impliment what was basically the Tory education policy at the 2001 election, ie abolish LEAs in all but name?

Have they gone mad? I couldn't bring myself to defend that policy when it was ours, because it was so obviously not going to work. Who was going to plan to match numbers of places to children? Who was going to look after special educational needs? Where were all the extra thousands of switched on governors etc going to come from when each school was essentially a stand alone business? What were we going to do when "parental choice" turned out to mean "mono-ethnic fundamentalist religious schools"?

OK, the Labour government is now officially more right wing than I am. More stupid too, but then I already knew that.