This last week saw the announcement that the independent Birkenhead High School is set to be taken over by the government, becoming a city academy. The school is the third independent school to become a city academy, after schools in Toxteth and Manchester, and marks another step in the United Kingdom’s concerted drive towards mediocrity.

Birkenhead is currently run by the Girls’ Day School Trust (GDST), which in charge of 26 all-girls schools in England and Wales. The GDST has found many of its schools under increasing pressure from government, with the state taxing those parents that would sent their children to independent schools more to sink yet more money into our failing state schools.

Given this, it can come as no surprise that the two schools that the GDST has handed over to the government are in poorer areas of the northwest - Birkenhead and Toxteth - while the two schools that they are adding are in wealthier areas of the southeast - Kensington and Tonbridge.

By pursuing their strategy of pressuring independent schools, the people that suffer aren’t the fabulously wealthy, who can afford to pay the spiralling school fees of the major public schools, but the aspirational class that was so feted at the Conservative Party conference. Forcing independent schools in poorer neighbourhoods out of business severely limits the opportunities that children from traditionally-poorer backgrounds have: compounded by the extinction of grammar schools in most areas.

This truth, and others, are lost entirely on the so-called ‘analyst’ on the BBC website, who parades his opinion like nobody’s business.

Have they rediscovered their social conscience or are they just finding new ways to survive in cash-strapped times?

The GDST is a not-for-profit charity. It’s a charitable school. It is much the epitome of a social conscience. The government, particularly this one, is the epitome of a thief.

As it happened the independent schools had little to fear. Far from being savaged, they have been gently seduced.

Gently seduced? They’re having their charitable status revoked, and that’s not savagery? It’s either greater tax revenue or more kids getting a good education, Gordon. Make your choice.

And, of course, the origins of many of today’s top fee-charging schools were rooted in very similar charitable aims. Sometimes those origins seem to have been forgotten.

Forgotten by whom? The BBC? Schools minister Ed Balls? Fellow ex-public schoolboy Lord Adonis? Certainly not the GDST, which remains a non-profit charity, as it always has been.

That is a big difference. It might just help to break the very common misconception that, somehow, educational excellence is something that can only be achieved by financial and academic selection.

Money and ability aren’t important, eh? OK, then walk the walk. Go to a comprehensive school in Birkenhead, down the road from Birkenhead High School, and try to find a kid whose full potential is being realised. Heck, find a pupil that isn’t perpetually under the threat of gun or knife violence in the playground. If you can’t, shut up.

If some of them are now willing to educate all in their local community, irrespective of ability or financial means, then that does look like the start of a revolution. Could it be the beginning of the end for England’s divided school system, which remains one of the most hierarchical in the world?

Perhaps so, but also the beginning of the end for England’s superb public school system, which remains by far the most admired and copied in the world. This ‘revolution’ is not a benign one, but the death of a sort of school that provides hope for children from a certain neighbourhood, and freedom from the low standards and violence that pervades the state sector.

If the government wants to blur the lines between the state and independent schools, whilst maintaining educational standards, there’s a very easy way to achieve that, and that’s by introducing a voucher system. The government would hand out to each parent education vouchers, worth the amount the state spends on schooling, and allow parents to shop around for the best education: with the chance to top up the vouchers with their own money if they choose.

Instead of making it impossible for the poor to go to good schools, it would allow them to choose which school to attend. Instead of having a definite line between the bad state schools and the good independent schools, there would be none at all: the hierarchy would disappear in one fell swoop.

I still don’t think the voucher system is a fantastic way to run an education system (if Eton gets the best results in the country, let all schools be like Eton and privatise them). However, the principled political pragmatist sees the voucher system as a perfectly adequate solution: empowering parents to make choices based on their circumstances, and encouraging schools to improve standards to match those of the existing independent schools.

The alternative is the death of our independent sector by stealth, by the usurpation of their heritage and contribution to communities by the state, and by the statist agenda of the likes of the BBC. That would be a disaster, not the rich that the crusading left want to eat alive, but for the working class that the same supposedly want to help.