Mike Tomlinson's report on education provision for 14 to 19 year olds in England and Wales is timely.
The introduction of the new A-level examinations was a fiasco, and there is widespread disillusionment among both teachers and pupils with a school system dominated by tests and targets.
To New Labour, schools are factories churning out workers, but how could education be run in an equal society, asks poet Michael Rosen.
When you're in the middle of teaching and lecturing, it's hard and even painful to allow yourself time to imagine what education could be like. And yet it's something we have to do, because the most potent weapon we have has two edges - the dream of something better and the willingness to fight for it. To which we can add: if our dreams are too dreamy no one will join the fight and it is in the fight itself that we will glimpse new dreams.
Poet Michael Rosen slams New Labour's education agenda.
First of all, can I say thank you for having given socialists yet another reason not to waste any time in the Labour Party. Your decision to send your son to a private school helps those of us who say that New Labour is really about inequality.
If you were a Tory, then what you've done would be a simple matter. Tories say they believe in the privilege that comes with either money or birth or both. The problem is that you've spent the last 20 years giving out the message that you're opposed to it.
Education minister Charles Clarke was forced to begin a climbdown over top-up fees within days of the Queen's Speech that announced their introduction.
The level of dissent from backbenchers - 136 of whom had signed an alternative motion - and from the public has led him to hint that he might raise the income level at which students would have to start repaying their fees from £15,000 to £20,000. Desperate to win over backbenchers by playing around with the edges of the bill, New Labour hopes to avert the biggest rebellion it has yet seen.
Labour's crude currency of success in education is the market.
Are you aware of the state of education in Britain today? For example, do you know how many of these institutions are in your area: city learning centres, city academies, children's centres, pupil referral units, early years centres, specialist, advanced, beacon, special measures, training or special achievement schools?
