The following is one key point of the Queen's Speech proposals, from the front of today's Telegraph:
Academy schools introduced in England and Wales under plans to free outstanding primaries and secondaries from local authority control.
So the plan appears to be to take those schools for whom the current arrangements are working well and change those arrangements, while those schools for whom the current arrangements are failing are to remain under the current arrangements.
Don't we need to free the ones for which control by the LEAs isn't working, more urgently than the ones for which it is?
Could this be motivated by the cowardly desire to move the best schools to academy status, in the hope that they continue to be the best schools, and then try to attribute their success to their academy status, contrasting the statistical performance of academy and non-academy schools?
Or perhaps it's because they realise that the worse schools will need more investment and innovation, but they won't allow the profits that will enable the substantial private investment necessary, and they won't allow the degree of freedom that would allow major innovation by the headteacher.
Or perhaps it's because, at heart, Michael Gove is a Brownite micro-manager who believes that bureaucratic control, rather than freedom and accountability, is the key to improving poor performance.
Michael Gove was perceived as one of the more principled, clever and innovative Tories. If so, I hate to think how irrational, unintelligent and reactionary lesser colleagues (like Theresa May) will be.