Ban private schools now!

How can schools be engines of social mobility if rich and poor don't mix? (Getty)

What if I said to you that the solution to the problems in our education system would be to "make private schools illegal and assign every child to a [state] school by random lottery"? That's the view not of Karl Marx or the Chinese Communist Party but of the billionaire US investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett.

Private schools are a blight on our society; they are divisive and corrosive. Here in the UK, we don't like to talk about such schools or discuss their excessive power and influence. It's one of the biggest taboos in British politics; the educational elephant in the room. Too many politicians and pundits would much rather argue about the challenge of grade inflation, the future of "gold-plated" A-levels or the role of the teaching unions than address the reality that, in the words of the deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, the "great rift in our education system" is "between our best schools, most of which are private, and the schools ordinary families rely on.