Tony Blair said his three priorities were Education, Education, Education. Andrew Adonis played a decisive role in turning this slogan into a reform programme. This book describes his quest to transform England's schools and his ambition to make English education truly world class. The reinvention of the comprehensive school was the key. Comprehensives were replaced with academies – a radically new form of independent state school characterised by strong leadership and an ethos of aspiration, success and social mobility. Adonis tells the story of academies, from the germ of a reform idea in the late 1990s to the national movement for educational transformation they have become today. And he sets out a new reform manifesto: to make teaching the foremost profession in the country and to break down the Berlin Wall between private and state schools.
