I have a solution to the education problem.

All children in Britain should have access to excellent schools

Everyone acknowledges that despite the huge sums of money pumped into education, there is precious little improvement. The most worrying thing (not just for middle class parents, but for the country at large) is quite how shocking so many inner city schools are.

We know that the answer to that is (at very early ages) rote learning of times tables, phonics, the Schonell spelling lists and First Aid in English (though I can't vouch for the new edition).

But I don't object to learning being fun. Indeed, part of the problem of modern educational theory is a failure to understand that rote learning is fun for young children. Similarly, they can't imagine older children "getting" ancient cultures.

As if ancient cultures didn't like partying and dancing and sex and fighting and war and drugs and whatever passed for rock and roll in their day. Read Martial. or Catullus, or Horace, or Lesbia (what little there is) or Homer.

Here's how you sort it out.

Privatise the whole lot.

You want a rock band to teach primary school children basic cosmology? Bingo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyz7e8iQ6Uo

The same band on geopolitical structures?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP4VVGN2LUU

OK, it's facile. Do you think your child's teacher is delivering something a great deal better? If not, why not?

And if you're happy that she or he is, because you're paying for your child's schooling, and you're doing that because no one in his right senses would hand him or her over to the local authority schools, have you complained to the council?

Have you asked for your share of the education budget back? Or demanded that it is properly spent on educating the poor, so that they can actually learn to read and write and add up, rather than just mug you when you go to get the newspaper which they can't read?

Any conservative (with a small c) would  – as a generalisation – rather hand his or her children over to a bunch of over-educated middle-class liberal hand-wringers than hard-working inner-city schoolteachers – though, in my encounters with them (I was once a governor in an inner city school, and am now a governor of a well- managed Church school in a country town), I liked and admired the latter much more than the former. My worry is that they tend to make no difference in how children manage after school.

Why? The first lot (teachers, that is) can spell and count, if they're over 40. Because they were taught by old-fashioned disciplinarians. The exception in the inner cities is schoolteachers from the Caribbean over the age of 30, who had a similar childhood training. They tend to be very good on the basics.

The strap and the 12 times table worked. If we don't want to use them now – and I acknowledge there are lots of reasons not to – we need to find something as good to equip children for the world. The very best private schools are doing it. But it isn't really a matter of money. 
So why can't every school?