Every day this week, one or other radio programme that I have been listening to has had Angela Eagle on, talking about the alternative education white paper. In every interview, she has used this astonishing statistic at least once: in 2004, just 26% of the poorest young people (those eligible for free school meals) got 5 GCSEs at A*-C grade. (the Hansard source is here, if you don’t believe me or Angela Eagle) That compares with a rate of 52% for all pupils.

One of the perils of being a teacher is everyone thinking that they can do your job. We all know what makes a great teacher, we think, so anyone can do it. I don’t want to fall prey to that trap, and I certainly couldn’t be a teacher, at least not unless I had some pretty intensive retraining and a refresher course on most of my degree, but I’m interested in what would make the difference to our poorest kids. It’s obvious that there is no one solution, that money alone won’t do it, and that leaving the teachers to their own devices isn’t possible or desirable, no matter how attractive it may seem to them.

So what will do it? I’m not an expert, but I do care deeply, and through work I come into contact with young women from disadvantaged areas who tell me how school let them down, so here are some of my ideas, few of which are original. Feel free to disagree or add your own in the comments box.

1. Firstly, let’s make sure every young person arrives at school in the frame of mind for learning. Some of our poorest kids may not have had anything to eat, so let’s make sure all the kids get something before school. Some kids get bullied or ostracised because they haven’t got the right uniform or because they don’t wear the right clothes, so school uniforms should be compulsory, generic (i.e. not have to be bought from a special shop because they are an odd colour etc) and there should be plenty of financial help to buy them for the poorest families. And schools must have homework clubs, as lots of young people from poorer families don’t have anywhere quiet to study at home. We also ought to look at a loan or part-buy system for laptops to help bridge the digital divide and give children access to the internet at home.

2. Let’s start from a standpoint that if young people are proud of what they are doing and feel valued, they’ll do better. The school uniforms will help, as will every school having great facilities and a fabulous learning environment. Did you know that Labour has a pledge to renovate or rebuild every secondary school in England in the next ten years? It’s called Building Schools for the Future, and we should shout about it more. Let’s also make the schools that our poorest kids go to the schools everyone wants their kids to go to. The academies have something to teach us about this: do they end up popular and oversubscribed because a venture capitalist has put in a million pounds? No; they end up like that because someone who cares has started from scratch, with a great new building, a new name, uniform, a glossy prospectus and the ethos that kids who go to that school can aspire and achieve. Let’s show these kids, just one in four of whom will otherwise get those five GCSEs, that we care so much about what happens to them that we have given them these amazing buildings.

3. Personalised learning is where it’s at. Sounds like a horrible Blairite buzzword, doesn’t it? But should we make every child do all the same subjects throughout their compulsory schooling? Should we say that the only way to learn is sat at a desk facing a whiteboard? We should expand and properly fund the increased flexibility scheme so that young people who want to can spend time at FE college studying vocational subjects alongside the academic ones, and we should be prepared to think about different ways of organising teaching if that will improve attendence and engagement. And teaching should be based on the young person’s needs as determined by assessment of their work so far, as this style of tailoring learning to the needs of the individual young person really does raise achievement.

4. Our schools have to engage with people who aren’t pupils, including parents and carers. We’re expecting young people to stay economically dependent on their parents for longer nowadays and we know that parental attitudes have a huge impact on both aspiration and achievement: for poorer children, whose parents are likely to be worse-educated, it is more crucial than ever that parents are able to become engaged with and support their children’s education. If schools are more than schools but are instead community facilities which are used by everyone, then maybe there’s an opportunity to engage parents.

5. We know selection at 11 disadvantages poorer kids, even bright ones. This is where I get all old Labour: I just don’t see why we can’t abolish grammar schools and secondary moderns. Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s get rid of faith schools that are for one faith alone, and schools that have a faith ethos, as we know they do better because they select better-off young people with more family support, so in themselves they add little value. Let’s replace them with community schools that value young people equally and have a social mix and a mix of abilities. I’m interested in the idea of making schools take young people from all ability bands in proportion to the local ability range.

So, that’s my thoughts exhausted. I think it’s incumbent on those of us who don’t agree with some aspects of education policy to think about how we’d change it as well as about what we’d abolish tomorrow. Lots of lefties say they would abolish inspections and Ofsted, league tables and SATs, but I don’t think I would, as being able to measure how young people are doing and whether schools are delivering effectively seems to me to be information we need.