During Prime Ministers Questions on Wednesday Sam Gyimah, MP for East Surrey asked David Cameron if he agreed ‘that if we are to tear down the apartheid in the education system, for which he argued a few weeks ago, not only should well-performing private schools support under-performing state schools on an ad hoc basis, but we should go further and encourage them to federate?’ (http://tinyurl.com/5u5paw4). This was simply a reprise of Camerons speech to the Conservative conference on 5th October.

The term apartheid carries a firm imprint of racial segregation and cultural context although it simply means ‘apartness’ in Afrikaans. It is very unlikely that either British born but Ghanaian educated Gyimah or old Etonian Cameron could be blind to the linkage that this loaded word carries in our society, nor the DUP member of the NI Assembly who used it in the Assembly two days earlier in a similar context. Indeed Cameron actually visited apartheid controlled South Africa in 1989 when a rising star in the Conservative Party. My concern is not that something as malignant as the South African regime of DeKlerk and Bohta has been compared to relatively benign differences in our education system, but that these three men from both sides of the ethnic debate have failed to consider how apartheid actually ended in South Africa. The politically dominant and numerically inferior white community ceded power to the rest of the society, despite the clear risk (as understood by many on both sides) that this might lead to a total collapse of the society due to the inexperience of the majority. The impact of the change was felt across the whole of the South African society, not just in a few deprived townships that might have been lifted up by their bootstraps by the stockbroker belts in Jo’burg and Capetown. Mandela became President of South Africa, not just Mayor of a few town twinnings. Neither Dave nor Sam can be ignorant on what Apartheid achieved. Are they signalling an intention, not to multiply a few local partnerships between ‘succesful’ public schools and ‘failing’ state schools, but for a wholesale dissolution of the private sector in favour of a new state sector which integrates both state, academy and ex private status schools. If that is not what they mean they should say so and start to clean up their vocabulary.

If their ambition is more modest, then the true abolition of the ‘apartheid’ would clearly lead to at least as many successful state schools taking over the running of failed private schools as the other way around. That is not what Sam and Dave have indicated so far, perhaps we should expect another series of speeches?