It only remains to be seen whether the already withering remnants of local authority education functions stagger on, or whether, like Nixon to China, it is a Labour government that signs their death warrant.
In modern society, education functions both as a channel of the reproduction of the upper class and a chance for the lower class to move upward.
The ideology of school choice, which has been at the center of DeVos's education based philanthropy, is grounded in the belief that PK-12 education functions best as a marketplace where students, parents, teachers and administrators are left free (or freer) from the constraints of state and federal bureaucracies to make the choices reflective of individual school or community needs.
We suspect that education functioned in our study as a proxy for oral cancer risk factors (e.g., smoking and heavy alcohol use) and for having regular dental care.
As the groups of parents behind other free schools come to realise that managing schools is harder work than they imagined, a range of companies are lining up to offer help, including Zenna Atkins' Wey Education, who said last December that it saw an opportunity brought about by "the deconstruction of the education function within local authorities".
Wilshaw proposed that Birmingham city council could have its remaining education functions taken away, or be broken up, because it was unfit and too large.
On the other hand, if you strip local authorities of all their education functions and hand them over to new, larger bodies, that may make them more remote and less responsive to local people.
■ Wey Education, one of the unsuccessful bidders for the Breckland contract, told the stock exchange in December that a market opportunity brought about by "the deconstruction of the education function within local authorities" offers a clear potential to "make a substantial return to investors and improve education in the UK".
The report is the latest, and in some ways the most important, attempt to grapple with the technical-sounding question of a middle tier in education – in other words, who takes charge of the various education functions that sit outside of schools.
Blended learning, because of its flexibility, allows us to maximize many positive education functions.
