After Labour's conference pledge to scrap Ofsted and private schools, does the envied Finnish education system provide the blueprint?

Obviously it does, or at least it should. Finnish schools are amazing. As they point out, wholesale copying won't work. What we need to do is take the Finnish attitude to education and adapt it to the UK. It wouldn't even be that hard, most teachers would love to run schools in a more holistic style - after all, they spent years being trained in modern pedagogical theory and practice - what they need is the ability to do that (many schools are stopped from changing by governor's boards, PTAs and local/national authorities) and the money to do it with.

So much of the problem is down to money. Education funding is fucked to the point that some schools are considering 4-day weeks because they can't afford to stay open. Meanwhile the "elite" (at least financially if not academically) private schools are avoiding over a billion in VAT on fees alone. I'm not sure about closing them down but they should definitely stop being charities. If you can afford £40k/year for Eton you can probably afford to pay VAT and make it £50k/year. Then maybe my friends who teach at city schools won't have to buy their class's art supplies out of their own insultingly low salaries.