Sir Philip Green right to propose centralised approach

Of course, this is back to the future. My late father worked in the private sector, and one of his jobs was to negotiate contracts for millions of exercise books to local education authorities up and down the country. Because the orders were being placed on a huge scale, and in a very competitive environment, councils could, and did, demand very tight pricing. And when I worked in the Inner London Education Authority in the early 1980s, the cost of computer disks and other supplies was held right down by the Greater London Council's supplies department.

The benefits of local educational management of schools are beyond doubt. But if a school is responsible for its own land and buildings, its own staffing, and its own purchasing, it will often be less efficient. There is, in my view, a minimum size for organisations to operate truly independently, while securing reasonable efficiency. A further education college with a £20m turnover is probably big enough. But most academies, secondary schools, free schools, and primary schools are simply not able to secure economies of scale. That's one reason why the first swathe of academies operate in chains, and why local education authorities were thought of in the first place.