What do you do if you live in the inner cities and your children are approaching secondary school age? For many middle class and aspirational parents the options seem to be these; you move to the shires, preferably to a house directly opposite the gates of the wonderful local comprehensive or you stay in town and go private. Or if you’re Jeremy Corbyn, your wife sends your kids to a grammar school but you divorce her to keep up appearances.

Where I live in the London Borough of Lambeth the problem of secondary school education is desperate. There just aren’t enough suitable schools for the local population. Children in year six are taking endless different three hour tests and still finding themselves without a place. An incredible 70% of 11 to 16 year olds are educated outside the borough, and though there are some vacancies, these are often because parents are simply not prepared to send their kids to those particular schools. Who can blame Jack Straw for sending his kids to a school over the river?

So inspired by the success of the Charter School in Dulwich, a group of parents in the Clapham and Brixton area launched our own campaign for a new secondary school in the centre of the borough. We gave our organisation the name SSCIL, pronounced ‘skill’ (we are the generation that never had a literacy hour) which is shorthand for the ‘Secondary School Campaign in Lambeth’. There were all sorts of basic parameters that had to be established. By what date did we think this new school should be opened? This question was greeted with a brief pause while everyone quickly worked out exactly when their own child would reach the age of eleven. But when it came to the type of school that we wanted, we were in no doubt; a mixed, non-denominational, non-selective comprehensive school with a sixth form.

We organized a public meeting and put this modest proposal to a vote of everyone present and there was virtually unanimous agreement, (apart from a couple of people who felt our campaign should also aim to end global capitalism). We organized a petition, and a thousand local parents put their names to our appeal. We got on telly, we held a demonstration, and wrote letters and lobbied our MPs and persuaded our children to look anxious when the photographer came from the local paper. But our campaign was less than a year old when something disarming happened. The government suddenly announced a new ‘City Academy’ for Lambeth. ‘You’ve got your school’ said the Education supremo on the council. Except it gradually became clear that this wasn’t ‘our’ school – it was something quite different.

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