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In some ways, she is perfectly qualified. In the late 1960s, her parents, the famous leftwingers and comprehensive education supporters Tony and Caroline Benn, sent her to Holland Park School in west London, the Mossbourne of its day, but, in keeping with the times, more liberal and less corporate. Comprehensives were still new and fashionable then, and seen as likely to dominate British education for many decades. More recently, the comprehensive ideal has been in retreat, losing ground to a succession of less inclusive forms of state education, and to resurgent private schools. Nevertheless, Benn has sent her own children to an inner-London state primary and secondary. Public education, especially in socially mixed parts of the capital, being a matter of perpetual media and political meddling - the "school wars" of her title - both her children's schools have been the objects of sensationalist and controversial exposés, by Channel 5 and the London Evening Standard. Last year she helped found the Local Schools Network, a pressure group which campaigns for a more equal and uniform state system, and, according to its website, against "coalition plans [which] could mean the beginning of the end of the UK state education system as we have known it".

Benn already finds the status quo - if the ever-shifting world of English education can be said to have one - alarming. With the fluent indignation of the committed activist, she writes: "Most state schools occupy an uncomfortable space between public and private; they are neither business enterprises, nor a robust public service . Driven by league tables, [they] are expected to deliver ever higher standards and improved results without the necessary resources, judged against far more selective or far better resourced schools." Alongside this bracing polemic runs a warmer current of idealism about what state education can achieve: "A good local school is a mix of self-interest and shared interest that transcends, and nullifies, the values of profit and consumption, commerce and customer." When I'm rushing for pick-up at my children's primary, jostling with the other work-fried parents, school life doesn't feel as elevated as that; but from more collaborative school occasions, I know what she means.

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