Driven in part by his experience at George Orwell School, Adonis joined Tony Blair's policy unit and launched the city academies reform, which saw failing schools removed from local authority control. Many of these academies achieved extraordinary turnarounds, but progress was slow. In 2005, the continued extent of the disorder in Britain's schools was laid bare by Undercover Teacher, a Channel Four hidden-camera documentary in which a supply teacher named Alex Dolan secretly filmed school classes in London and Leeds. The footage is truly jaw-dropping, and the worst behaviour by quite some way took place at Highbury Grove. This Islington comprehensive, once a model of order and attainment under Rhodes Boyson, was little short of bedlam. On her first day, Dolan is told to "fuck off" by a pupil. When she challenges him, "You can't tell a teacher to . . ." he butts in, ". . . fuck off? Yeah, I just did." Lessons routinely descend into fights and one class she is given are known for rioting. We see one of these riots: pupils jump across desks, take the fire extinguisher off the wall, throw books across the room, and violently attack each other. At one point, Dolan asks a senior member of staff whether this is taking place simply because she is a supply teacher. "No, it's just they're completely hopeless," comes the response. "You just have to make do. Don't have too high expectations." 

Dolan challenges another senior member of staff about the poor behaviour. "It might be that we don't actually have clear parameters," is the matter-of-fact reply. "We don't list out the school rules and make a big thing out of it. We don't say, ‘You're not supposed to do this, if you do this, this will happen.' We haven't got anything like that." Such language displayed perfectly how the precepts of progressive education, so radical and persuasive in the 20th century, had, by the 21st century, hardened into straightforward neglect.

If Islington has been a weathervane of changing educational fashions from the 1960s to today, there is some hope that British education may yet be saved. In 1998, Islington's Local Education Authority (LEA) received one of the most damning Ofsted reports I have read, opening with "Islington LEA has a few strengths but many weaknesses." So bad was its record that the management of its schools was turned over in 2000 to a private company called Cambridge Education. Between 2000 and 2012, the proportion of Islington secondary school pupils receiving five good GCSEs rose from 27 per cent (22 per cent below the national average) to 79 per cent (4 per cent below the national average). Islington Green Comprehensive was ignominiously closed in 2005, and reopened in 2008 as City of London Academy Islington, sponsored by the City of London Corporation and City University London. In 2013, 61 per cent of pupils achieved five good GCSEs including English and maths, compared with just 33 per cent the previous year.

It would be a stretch to say that Islington schools have achieved a recovery through a wholesale abandonment of progressive education, but the reassertion of strict discipline policies has been a common feature in the recent improvement of many London schools. This is just one example of how significant school improvement  depends on abandoning an educational philosophy that has done so much damage since the Sixties. Perhaps one day the Islington middle classes will send their children en masse to the local schools, when they are confident that the teachers will do more than simply "leave them kids alone".