Equal Opportunities

Some years ago, while I was at the local one o'clock club with my toddler, I was approached by a young lady with a clipboard. She was involved with a new government initiative called Sure Start, she explained, and wondered if I would mind answering a few questions. She didn't ask many, because after I had responded to her early query about my postcode, she explained politely that my child wouldn't qualify for the programme anyway.

That was fair enough, except that my street has a very broad socio-economic mix. While my own household is certainly not "deprived", there are a lot of families on the street who are in a quite different position. When I pointed this out to her, she flicked her eyes down her list, and confirmed that on my short road there were indeed a lot of postcodes that did come within the ambit of the project. I found this level of detail to be impressive and reassuring.

As I say, this was a while back, and Sure Start has changed since that time. It now offers universal as well as targeted services, and the present plan is to have a Sure Start children's centre in every community by next year. Yet this week Iram Siraj-Blatchford, who is a professor of early childhood education at the Institute of Education, warned a parliamentary inquiry into Sure Start that expansion of the programme would dilute its progress. "If you improve quality for everyone," she said, "you can actually extend the gap."

Therein lies the problem with the idea of equal opportunity for all. Some people are simply better placed to take advantage of opportunity, and if equality of outcome is what you are looking for, then the way to achieve it is by offering the greatest opportunity to the least advantaged, and – here's the snag – vice versa.

Only the other day, Lord Mandelson once again illustrated just how annoyed people get about "engineering" equality of outcome. He suggested that pupils at poorly performing schools should be awarded a two-grade "headstart" over...