In the end, teachers are on their own

These are the words of the Conservative government’s last secretary of state before May 1997 and of an ex HMCI, who currently takes the Conservative whip in the Lords and is the co-author of the Conservative Party’s review of public services. Kenneth Baker’s caricature of a health secretary telling a surgeon how to operate, quoted in Chapter 2, was by way of affirming his view that it ought never to the job of education ministers to tell teachers how to teach.