In the Nineties, Chris Woodhead faced a harsh backlash from the educational establishment, led by the teachers' unions, for his work as Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools and before that chief architect of a new national curriculum. Borrowing the title of a 1958 science-fiction film, the exasperated Woodhead labelled his opponents "the blob". In the film, the blob is an amoeba-like alien that grows more powerful with every attempt to destroy it. Peter Mortimore is the blob personified and the desperation he displays in the final pages of Education Under Siege suggests it can be beaten. He sinks to a feebly low level in his defence of a broken system: "Those seeking change will be up against strong opposition from all who see such ideas as dangerously liberal. Right-wing think tanks — funded by anonymous donors — will do their best to rubbish the arguments." Astonishingly, Mortimore then asks, "Who knows who has been behind the systemic fragmentation of the education service?" 

He will be disappointed to learn there is no malevolent conspiracy at work here. Parents, politicians from each of the main political parties, teachers like Katharine Birbalsingh and administrators like Chris Woodhead are tired of a system that has failed to tackle the gap in attainment between the well-off and the less fortunate and that lets down thousands of children every day. 

It is of little comfort that Tristram Hunt says he "doesn't agree with all of [Mortimore's] prescriptions". Young adults in Britain rank 22nd out of 24 OECD countries for literacy and 21st for numeracy, and Education Under Siege oozes with the orthodoxies that landed them there.