But if Britain is to help its educational under-achievers, school choice must play a big part.
This is not surprising, because educational under-achievement – not finance – is the key reason for a lower proportion of working class students in higher education.
It is the country's unusually long tail of educational under-achievement.Fortunately, from such a low ebb things can surely only get better.
Partners in Learning is part of the wider Black Pupils' Achievement Programme (BPAP), a government-funded project in which 25 local authorities have addressed the problem of educational under-attainment among African Caribbean pupils.
In Scotland's Future, it said: "The solution to ill-health is not in the hands of the NHS alone – it depends on breaking the cycle of poverty, educational under-attainment, worklessness, poor mental wellbeing, and, through these, preventable ill-health".
So many Muslims have told me they feel disgraced on behalf of Palestinians, Kashmiris and Iraqis, and in the UK, where the community suffers educational under-achievement, unemployment, poor housing and mental illness.
He said the Government needed to tackle the problems of welfare dependency, educational under-achievement and low self-esteem which hold some young Britons back from fulfilling their "vast and latent" potential.
Even before last week's riots, there was something approaching a cross-party consensus that more needed to be done to support broken families and intervene to help very young children before they drift into lives of educational under-achievement and dysfunction.
But so do New Zealand's teenagers and they do not do any better than, say, Norwegians, who spend an unusually short time on lessons in both subjects.Next and of particular interest to cash-strapped governments there appears to be little evidence to support the argument, often heard from teachers' unions, that the main cause of educational under-achievement is under-funding.
He has actually been round Methody unthinkable a few years ago but he was clearly underwhelmed by what he saw, for he remains a leading opponent of selection.Mr McGuinness argues that the present system breeds inequality and produces a long tail of educational under-achievement.
