School chaos

A short clip on television introduced me to a new kind of school in England: the 'studio school', in which children wear business suits and work from 9 to 5 to get them ready to be good wage slaves. They are encouraged to make projects with local firms to make money. There are already 15 of them, and apparently they are very popular with parents. There are now so many kinds of school in England and Wales (not Scotland, which has its own educational system). There are Bliar's academies and faith schools, Govner Gove's free schools (which taxpayers finance without having any control over them) and now studio schools, plus the surviving grammar schools and comprehensives, not to mention the public schools and a few private schools. The result surely is going to be an even more socially divided country. I am quite ready to see parents choosing a different education for their children, but it should be at their own expense; taxpayers should not subsidize them, and their schools should not have the status of charities. For the bulk of the population, the State should fund schools that are so good that only a few people would want to opt out of them, and where the education is so broad that only a few would object to their curriculum. The French do it, so why can't we?