THE Coalition has declared war on educational inequality, Michael Gove told the Tory conference yesterday. But its decisions to scrap Labour’s schools rebuilding scheme and pass the socially divisive Academies Act can only increase it.

The education secretary’s insistence that young teachers are his ‘heroes and heroines’ was cringe-inducing, and I could have lived without the rewrite of the Monty Python four Yorkshiremen sketch on which he closed.

But there was one thing Gove said that even I agree with, and that is his call for a return to the teaching of straightforward narrative history in British schools.

Simon Schama has been appointed an advisor to this end, he added. My guess is that a lot of lefties will have a problem with this.

Many argue that history is inherently ideological, and therefore cannot be taught in a neutral way. They point to such controversies as the rival functionalist and intentionalist readings of the Holocaust, or the debate between Great Tradition and soft revisionist accounts of the French revolution.

But history at this level is way beyond most kids’ pay grade. In any case, nobody can understand such quarrels without a thorough grounding in kings and battles and dates, of the type I was provided with in a 1970s grammar school.

Schama’s lengthy take on 1789 and all that was way too small-c conservative for my taste. But he is no raving rightwinger, and probably not a Tory. He is openly supportive of Barack Obama, and donated to Oona King’s unsuccessful bid to secure the Labour nomination for mayor of London.

He has real talent as a populariser, and is far too smart to fall foul of the pitfalls of partisanship. I’ll need to see what he comes up with before offering a final verdict, but let us wish him well.