What is needed is a prudent level of investment that secures long-term growth even if current disposable income and

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What is needed is a prudent level of investment that secures long-term growth, even if current disposable income and returns on shareholders capital are reduced slightly as a result.What then, can be done to make better provision for education by a fair and modest increase in public expenditure raised from taxation? Although taxpayers are in a sense repaying the cost of their own education by funding the current generation, it is useful to look at ways in which an increment in investment could be sourced fairly.One could argue that it would be unfair for those not directly benefiting from the education system to subsidise an increase for those that are. It is a miracle of dedication by staff, governors and advisers that the system still works at all.Whereas the objective of low taxation and low government spending is a good one, if the result is that the future prosperity of the country is put severely at risk, then the Government is doing the country a disservice. Professional shareholders, such as the managers of large investment portfolios, recognise companies which achieve a good balance and are wary of organisations that live for the moment in the hope that minimal investment and a stroke of genius at the right time will achieve future competitive advantage. The state funding of education is UK plc's way of ensuring that all the country's children are given the opportunity to make maximum use of their talents and provide businesses with the skilled and creative workforce of the future. Unfortunately, the current directors of UK plc are driven by the need to court their political shareholders with promises of low taxation, so that they stand a chance of retaining their seats at the next "shareholders' meeting".Politically, the Government seems to take advantage of the fact that education is not a priority issue among the electorate as a whole due to the minority of adults who have school-age children at any one time. As a result, they have not chosen to invest wisely for the future but instead to stake all on the ability of schools to scrape through with meagre funds and not complain too loudly.In an increasingly competitive world, the future of this country can no longer depend on the abilities of the privileged few whose parents can afford private education, nor on the children from showcase schools in the state sector who could fill their available places many times over.The present reality of state education is one of mainly old-fashioned, crumbling buildings, insufficient books, stitched-together equipment and harassed and often abused teachers.

Any successful businessman will tell you that two key factors in maintaining success and growth in a company are, first, to make maximum use of the skills and creativity of all the workforce and, second, to strike the right balance between dividend payments to shareholders and the use of profits from current operations to invest in future products. Research into streaming (in which pupils are in the same ability group for all lessons) 30 years ago showed that it depressed rather than raised standards. Setting could be more acceptable to both parents and teachers.Mr Blunkett wants to reinvigorate comprehensives. No easy solution is on offer but state secondary schools at the beginning of the 21st century will almost certainly look very different from those at the end of the 20th..

Mixed-ability teaching has been responsible for much of the anxiety felt by middle-class parents about comprehensives, but many teachers resist the division of pupils according to ability on the grounds that it demoralises low achievers. The second is that a system devised in the Eighties under which a local authority allocates pupils to schools may be hard to sell in the Nineties when the notion of parental choice is paramount.Yet the present arrangements for school allocation are, in many parts of the country, a lottery with parents lobbying to get into the best comprehensive just as frantically as they lobbied to get into grammar schools.Perhaps the least controversial way of addressing inequalities between schools would be to leave school admission policies unchanged but to introduce setting, in which pupils are put in different groups for different subjects. The first is that some children have to travel to a school which is not their local one. This may be less practical in a rural county than a big city. According to Peter Mortimore, director of London University's Institute of Education, it worked.