Tony Blair, in the 1997 general election campaign, famously made education his top three priorities. He was more emphatic than most, but it is every politician's top priority, and certainly every parent's. Yet there are no aspects of modern societies less well prepared for the information age economy than their education systems. While institutional details vary from country to country, including the amounts spent and the split between private and public provision, everywhere the education system is inflexible, bureaucratic, over-centralised, demoralised and inadequate. Policy-makers, teachers and parents are failing their children, a failure that matters most for those who start out with the fewest economic advantages. The education system is guilty, amongst other things, of fossilising emerging inequalities as a result of its failure to adapt to underlying economic change.