Before addressing that question it is important to establish some knowns.

The quality of teaching in State schools is diverse. There are amazing teachers, there are crap ones.

The quality of teaching in Public schools is diverse. There are amazing teachers, there are crap ones.

Sam was beautiful. Her hair was a firey red and her eyes shone.

There is a collection of huge granite spires that stand thousands of feet above the Kern River at the southern edge of the Sierra Nevada in California. As eager fresh faced graduates, we took the easy drive down from Los Angeles with a trunk full of beer and the most basic of climbing essentials. The four of us had been climbing together for years, and had long since abandoned ropes in search of a purer form of excitement. When people would quiz us about the purpose of such apparent foolishness, telling us that we were risking death, our stock reply was "well that's kind of the point." It was exactly that knowledge, that gut-wrenching feeling, that your life is literally in your hands we were trying to capture. There is something about facing your own mortality nakedly that makes the pettiness of much of life disappear and allows you to taste and feel those things that truly matter.

I believe that there are many hidden geniuses out there (in fact, I believe everyone is a genius – just that we all have different fields of expertise). They are hidden because the education system that they are a part of does not provide opportunities for unlocking the genius.

Here are a few examples of moments that have warmed my heart over the years:

David Cameron has just spoken about the violence that has sprung up across England over the last few nights, and in a strong and passionate speech he made some excellent points. Unfortunately, the spin doctors have insisted on the use of the broken Britain rhetoric. And in questioning, he alluded to better discipline in schools as being a part of the solution.

When I was a teenager, each and every Tuesday for years at secondary school, I would have to attend a lunchtime detention. Religiously set by my Religious Studies teacher each and every Thursday afternoon for reasons I failed then and fail now to comprehend. I was no angel at school, far from it, but I was also no bad apple either. For whatever the reason, RS was always chaos and I seemed to have a face that asked for a detention. So there I would sit for 35 minutes during Tuesday lunch, copying out page after page from the Bible.

What strikes me this morning, listening to Nick Gibb, Schools Minister, is yet again schools are being used as the punch bag. So when ill informed, trying to get a soundbite, journalists state that 33% of children are "failing", Nick's immediate response is to talk about schools and standards of teaching and learning, blah-de-blah-de-blah.

At not one point does he mention that, actually, if your kids can't read, write and do simple arithmetic at age 11, then blaming the school is a red herring, take a long honest look at your own parenting.

It's a funny old thing, the homework malarkey. There is no reliable evidence to suggest that doing homework has any impact on students' understanding of mathematics or the standards that they achieve, yet still all over the country it is seen as a given that students must do homework. And in mathematics this often looks like students wading through question after question after meaningless question.

In 2005, speaking at a Special School in Gloucestershire, David Cameron, the then education spokesman for the Conservative party called for a halt to the number of special schools being closed. Since coming to power in 1997, the Labour government had overseen the closure of around 10 percent of all Special Schools by 2005. Every teacher knows that one of the biggest buzz words in education under New Labour was "inclusion". In relentless pursuit of this ideal, schools had more and more pressure put upon them to make provision for students with any type of special educational need. Clearly there is an ideal, a deeply held philosophical belief here. Students should not become social outcasts because they have been born with challenges such as physical or mental disabilities. It is hard to not agree. It is hard to think that anything other than full inclusion is right. But, in my opinion, what stemmed from an ideal, a dream, has turned in to something altogether different. Students who were happy, successful, social and ambitious have been thrown in to mainstream schools and been poorly provided for, bullied, marginalized and lost their self-esteem.

When I was 16 years old, I plodded off across Europe in the hope of seeing the astounding Pink Floyd in concert. North of Paris in a field with one hundred and fifty thousand other fanatics, I spent a hot summer afternoon waiting for the band to begin and then another three happy hours immersed in music and fuelled with the spirit of the night. As the concert ended and the crowds dispersed, I became separated from my friends and was left alone wandering around the tiny village a couple of miles from the concert venue trying to catch a train.