It is often said that one of the hallmarks of the Conservative party is its ruthlessness when it comes to ditching leaders who are regarded as having lost the winning touch.

It is this supposed instinct for survival that did for Lady Thatcher back in 1992. The current bout of turbulence within the party has inevitably led to speculation about whether, if he cannot pacify his critics, Mr Cameron could be heading for the exit door rather sooner than when voters go to the polls in 2015.

I am not sure. He is certainly having a rough time and perhaps the worst aspect of his troubles is that he looks like he is constantly on the back foot and rather reluctant to take on critics of his policies.

What is fascinating is that danger faces him on two flanks. Thatcher had to contend largely with a disgruntled Parliamentary party and notwithstanding the poll tax row, had a generally loyal following out in the constituency associations. Mr Cameron has contrived to upset both MPs and grass roots activists and it is hard to fathom who is more annoyed.

This doubles the jeopardy: MPs harbour grievances over lots of policy issues, many of which are of little interest to their rank and file activists. However, both the EU and gay marriage are agitating both camps which means Cameron is getting flak from all sides. And then there is the lurking threat of UKIP - seen by some as more Conservative than the Conservatives

After coming close to losing control of Kent County Council,  several Conservatives confided that they felt that making Mr Cameron leader had proved a disastrous mistake and they wished  David Davies had got the job.

That, of course, is the beauty of hindsight but their incandescence at being led by someone who they feel has trampled all over traditional Conservative values was palpable. 

Whether all this will lead to the party deciding that it is time to dump DC is anyone's guess. Europe remains a Conservative faultline and always will be.

The difficulty of Cameron's pledge to hold a referendum on the EU is that it is contingent on him winning an outright majority and not many Conservatives see that as happening.

But you do sense that there has been a serious fracture in the relationship between the leader and his party which could ultimately see the party deciding they have had enough.

If the sense that he won't produce a clean win in 2015 grows, the party might just throw their weight behind someone who it thinks could.

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UKIP will become the official opposition at Kent County Council on Thursday - historic for the reason that with 17 members, it has broken the three party stranglehold from a standing start.

Here is the shadow cabinet team:

Roger Latchford: Leader

Peter Wiltshire: Deputy leader

Finance: Jeff Elenor

Mike Baldock: Transport + Environment

Chris Hoare: Corporate and Democratic Services

Hod Birkby: Economic Development

Mo Elenor: Adult Social Care

Adrian Crowther: Education and Health Reform:

Bob Neves: Community Services

:Frank McKenna: Commercial and Traded Services

Adrian Crowther who defected from the Tory group at County Hall and regained his Sheppey seat is an interesting choice for education. He has already spoken out about Conservatives trying to lure him back to the Tory fold.

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What is the future for Kent County Council's locality boards, set up barely two years ago? The answer: they don't have one, at least not in their current format.

An edict has gone out that all future meetings of these boards - one for each district - are suspended until a "review" has been carried out. A review that is certain to conclude they should be scrapped.

This is interesting in as much as they were ostensibly designed to devolve decision-making to local groups of county and district/ borough councillors - in line with the grand "localism" project beloved of Mr Pickles and the DCLG. In reality, they didn't actually take decisions -  leading to complaints they were simply talking shops.

These boards were inevitably packed with Conservatives when set up but clearly that would have had to have changed given the council's new political make-up.

We are sure the two are unrelated.

Unlike many, politicians have to re-apply for their jobs every four or five years and the decision about whether they should be re-appointed is in the hands of voters.

And voters can be rather unpredictable and prone to switch allegiances, as the recent county council election showed rather dramatically.

So, we should not be surprised that a number of Conservative backbenchers in the county voted last night for the 'rebel' amendment on the Queen's Speech.

There is nothing like a bruising mid-term electoral lashing to concentrate the mind and the Kent MPs who backed the amendment no doubt had given careful consideration to the dramatic UKIP surge in the county council election.

So, this was a convenient way of sending a message to the electorate that they are as sceptical about Europe as any UKIP candidate who might be on the ballot paper in 2015.

Their decision to blow a raspberry at Mr Cameron will prove particularly helpful in election literature to post through doors in a couple of years.

Conservative backbenchers in Kent know that the issue of Europe is not going to go away. Those who knocked on doorsteps during the recent election campaign found that Britain's membership of the EU and immigration were often not far from voters' thoughts.

While UKIP is unlikely to win Parliamentary seats at the next election, that is not the point. It is whether UKIP will cost them votes in sufficient numbers to lose them their seats.

Marginal seats like those in the Medway Towns, north Kent and Thanet have switched between Labour and the Conservatives over recent years and if there is one thing that current MPs fear it is that a split in the vote for the right will allow Labour back in.

Whether UKIP's surge will be durable is, of course, open to question.

But if the results of the recent election showed anything, it is that voters are deeply cynical about commitments made for some time in the future - and particularly cynical about promises to do things after the election.

MPs who backed the rebel EU amendment understood this. It might be considered gesture politics but it is inconceivable that they did not make a calculated decision that it was worth putting a marker down now - even if the election is two years away.

UKIP did not win control of any councils and three quarters of people who turned out did not actually vote for them. But it is a measure of the impact it had on the political landscape on Thursday that it has succeeded  in becoming the talking point in the debate about whether the the political map of Britain has been radically redrawn.

No mean achievement for a party dismissed as clowns, loonies and fruitcakes by their opponents.

The Kent County Council election  results and reaction>>>>

Nowhere was their success more shocking or stunning than Kent where against even the most optimistic predictions they came tantalisingly close to depriving the Conservatives of securing control of County Hall for the first time in two decades. From a standing start, they took seat after seat from the Conservatives, who were paralysed with anxiety that their grip on KCC was being loosened. To end up with more seats than Labour and the Liberal Democrats and become the formal opposition was truly staggering.

There are lots of reasons why UKIP did well and it may be that in Kent, sensitivities around issues like immigration and asylum seekers were more pronounced and resonated more with voters than elsewhere. It is telling that the areas where they did particularly well - Thanet and Shepway - are both places which have had deep rooted problems with economic deprivation and have also been areas where the impact of new communities have been seen and felt at first hand.

In fact, while the party did target Thanet, it did not have a concerted campaign in Shepway yet nearly pulled off a clean sweep of all five seats with very little canvassing. Gains in Swale - another area where the recession has hit - were also notable.The exception is the affluent west Kent town of Tunbridge Wells, where it also won seats.

More than that, UKIP has tapped into widespread voter antipathy and disenchantment with mainstream politics and mainstream political parties: its success has a lot to do with people regarding it as anti-establishment; anti-elite and somehow outside the system - a perfect repository for protest votes. But it has also tapped into a major issue that the big parties have spent too long pussy-foting around - Britain's role and future in the EU. The unwilllingnes of the main parties to be explicit (particularly in terms of time scale) about when people might be given a say has been devastating for them.

But after the euphoria of Thursday's results, there comes the cold reality of the consequences of suddenly finding yourself elected to office.

UKIP county councillors will troop into County Hall next week for an induction programme that will remind them that as locally-elected representatives, they will not be able - much as they like -  to spend the next four years banging on about an EU referendum and immigration. They will all be receiving allowances of around £13,000 to represent constituents whose interests may well be rather more parochial but no less important  - the state of their roads, school places, families dealing with difficult social services issues and planning.

The ability of UKIP to build on the momentum that it has will not be based on how loudly local councillors shout about the need for a referendum on Europe. If they want to be more than a flash in the pan and establish a secure position as a genuine political alternative, voters will need to be convinced they can tackle and influence policy in ways that affect - for the better - the 300 different services that Kent County Council provides. It will also be interesting to see how and if the 17-strong group, all newcomers with one or two exceptions, to the world of local government, remain a cohesive unit.

Parties that achieve success quickly and unexpectedly can sometimes find it awkward adjusting to the demands of being elected to public office and it was intriguing hearing in private how some Conservatives at KCC are already speculating over the prospects of "turning" some of the new UKIP councillors and returning them to the Tory fold.

The other challenge, allied to this, is that UKIP's USP - a movement outside the political system - has actually been undermined by their stunning success. They are, in a sense, no longer outsiders looking in at mainstream politics. If they believe the hype and really do consider they are part of a four-party system, then the consequence is that people will at a council level particularly be judging them on what they actually do rather than on what they say.

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For the Conservatives in Kent, the election was a sobering moment. Only once in its history have the Conservatives lost control of County Hall, back in 1993. That they came within a whisker of losing outright control last Thursday was a discomfiting experience, to put it mildy. In one sense, they were not being punished because of their track record over the last four years but were being punished for the perceived failings of the coalition, which is what they had expected.

But I do think that the party has to do more than blame the dismal results on mid-term blues. Senior Conservatives in Kent have been quick to turn their fire on the national leadership, with KCC leader Paul Carter being particularly damning - accusing some in his party at Westminster of acting more like Lib Dems than Conservatives.

Implicit in this is the idea that the party's woes can be dealt with by a lurch to the right. I am not so sure. The received wisdom so far as general elections are concerned is that they are won and lost in the middle ground. Tony Blair won three because he realised that in places like Kent, classic middle England territory, you had to appeal to the centre ground to deliver victory. 

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Labour has insisted that it is satisfied with the progress it has made in Kent but it fell short of its key objective: recapturing all the seats it had lost back in 2009.

For it to have shown it was making real advances, it should have won more and the fact that it has secured too few to even be the official opposition at County Hall is not where it wants or needs to be. Ed Miliband staked a lot by coming to traditional Tory heartland during the campaign but on these results, it seems the party still has a Southern Discomfort issue.

Their one hope may be that over the next four years, there will inevitably be  a handful of by-elections. The Tories need only lose a few seats for the arithmetic to be changed in a way that just might lead to the authority having a different rainbow coalition.

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We expect the jungle drums at County Hall to be beating with news of a Conservative cabinet reshuffle within a few days. The defeat of the well-regarded cabinet member for schools Mike Whiting means there will have to be changes. Education remains one of the key roles and there are many awkward issues looming, not least trying to persuade Michael Gove to back the KCC plans for a new grammar school.

The other gossip surrounds the future of the deputy leader Alex King, who was unable to be at his count after breaking his leg. It could be that his tenure as the reliable second-in-command could be coming to an end. If it is, perhaps the role could go to the Sevenoaks councillor Roger Gough - well-thought of, intelligent and potentially a good foil to the rather direct style of the current leader.

But I also think he'd make a good education cabinet member. And whenever I make these predictions, they usually turn out to be well wide of the mark so you might be advised to disregard them...

 UP-DATED, Thursday May 2.

If I knew who was going to take control of Kent County Council in tomorrow's election, I would, of course, be hurrying down to the bookmakers to place my house on the outcome.

But I don't and neither does anyone else - despite what the politicians are all telling me. There's nothing new or revelatory about that but the battle for Kent County Council's 84 seats is for once, much more unpredictable in 2013 than it was in 2009 when Labour went into meltdown as Gordon Brown's premiership was in its final death throes.

The unpredictability of the outcome has much to do with the high-profile campaign being waged by UKIP, not just in Kent but right across the country.

It is unusual for one party to have such a disproportionate impact on any election but UKIP has, for better or worse, been the dominant feature of this campaign. The media has been criticised for giving them too much publicity and for failing to subject some of their candidates and policies to greater scrutiny.

That may be  valid but so too is the fact that they are - like it or not - a party seeing a popular surge in support, just as the Social Democrats did in the 1980s and the Greens did when they made a breakthrough in the European Parliamentary elections in 1989.

Quite how it will perform on the day is anyone's guess. In Kent, the party has high hopes of making some kind of breakthrough but that could be anything from one seat to half a dozen or more. It could conceivably gain no seats and simply post a lot of 'good' second places.

In Kent, the party that has most to fear from UKIP is the Conservatives although it is true that it is disquieting both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, too.

It is a sign of the Conservatives' concern that recent days have seen one or two Kent MPs and Conservative candidates go on the offensive against the Nigel Farage gang, a tactic that may not be wise given that it has the effect of drawing more attention to a rival you would prefer voters to ignore.

The Conservatives' greatest fear is not just that UKIP will win seats but that its 70-plus candidates could cost them seats they would have expected to win.

That leaves open the tantalising prospect - or nightmare scenario for the current administration - of the Conservatives just failing to reach the 43 seats they need to continue running the council.

I see that as a long shot but given that no-one can tell how the votes will stack up on Friday, it is what makes this election rather more intriguing and interesting than it was back in 2009.

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Even before the ballot boxes are emptied, the political spin doctors will be working out how to put the best complexion on the results. So, what would be a good result for each of the parties in Kent and how might they explain away a poor result?

Conservatives: Retaining control of County Hall with a comfortable, albeit smaller, working majority will be depicted as a good result, given these are mid-term elections. Losing control, or being forced into some kind of joint administration, would be a pretty gruesome result but could be blamed on the national political picture, the recession and the unpopularity of some Conservative policies, notably gay marriage and the EU referendum being held back until 2017.

Labour: A result that sees it recapturing the seats it lost in 2009 and taking a couple more would be a good result and probably enough for the party to claim that it is winning back support in the critical middle England territory. Falling short of that would be awkward but will probably be blamed on voter antipathy to all the mainstream political parties rather than a vote of no confidence in Ed Miliband.

Liberal Democrats: Has made it clear that is has modest aspirations and retaining its seven seats on KCC would probably be portrayed as a decent outcome. Anything that sees their numbers shrink might start hares racing about Nick Clegg's leadership. Likely spin: "We are now part of the government and that is different to being in opposition. Voters have used the election to give us a message."

UKIP: Given the hype and publicity surrounding the campaign, a failure to win any seats would be a disappointing outcome. Breaking through and taking a handful away from the Conservatives would be a good result. Likely spin if no seats won: "We increased our share of the vote; these elections were really a staging post before next year's European elections; we have a solid base of support to build on."

The Green Party: A very good result would be winning a seat somewhere in the county; a good result would be increasing their share of the vote above 2009.

If you are a political party in charge of a council that has just set a budget with savings of £95m, what would be the last thing you might be want to be seen doing a few weeks later?

How about giving a contract to consultants that could be worth £5.4m?

 And on top of that, awarding the contract to a company to help decide how best to achieve £18m savings from services you provide for some of the most vulnerable adults in society?

Savings, incidentally, that you already know are deeply unpopular with voters because you carried out a consultation about them in the Autumn. That is precisely the awkward position that the Conservative administration at County Hall is in. It has set in train a process it probably wishes it could halt until after May 2 but hasn't been able to.

 At its heart is the proposal to appoint what social services chiefs euphamistically describe as a "transformation and efficiency partner"  to advise on how best the £18m savings can be delivered. In other words, consultants from outside the authority and possibly the county who will  be drafted in to identify just what KCC needS to do.

No wonder there is a bit of a stink about it.

 The proposition was the subject of a report tabled to a backbench cross-party committee last week, which was asked to approve a recommendation that the Conservative cabinet go ahead with the appointment of an unnamed company.

There was a brief debate in the public part of the Social Care and Public Health committee before the chairman decided that some comments were straying into territory that might compromise the authority's financial interests.

What we do know is that  in that private debate, opposition to the plan came not from just the usual suspects but from several Conservatives who were, to put it mildly, somewhat concerned about the whole idea.Some asked why it was necessary to bring in outside consultants in the first place and why KCC seemingly lacks the capacity and expertise to deliver a key part of its budget.

Others were unhappy about the fact they felt they were being bounced into endorsing the idea without a proper evaluation or discussion; some were simply horrified that the adminstration was embarking on such a path with the election a few weeks away.

The result was that - highly unusually for this type of committee - a vote was taken, after a motion tabled by the opposition Labour representative Les Christie to recommend that the cabinet not proceed with the appointment. Even more unusually, the proposal was supported by several backbecnh Conservatives with the result that the chairman Cllr Chris Smith was  forced  to use his casting vote to ensure Labour's alternative proposal was defeated.

 What does this tell us? Well, self-evidently there is serious disquiet in the Tory ranks about it all.

 It also tells us that maybe KCC isn't quite sure itself how it will manage to deliver the £18m savings and probably did not at the time it announced them - after all, if it did, why would it now need consultants to do the work for it?

 It might also be said that perhaps KCC, in its rush to cut jobs to save money, did so with a rather misplaced enthusiasm and ended up losing people who took with them years of experience and knowledge.

What happens now? The Conservative cabinet member for adult social care Graham Gibbens is reflecting on the comments of his collegues and weighing up what to do. He is a decent and straight politician and won't be enjoying his present discomfiture.

Either way, KCC has a serious addiction issue so far as consultants are concerned, seemingly believing they are the solution to any number of different problems.

It could do with weaning itself off them.

UP-DATED

PROPOSALS for a shake-up of Kent's often divisive 11-plus came under the spotlight today (Tuesday) when county councillors discussed the outcome of a review by headteachers designed to get a consensus around possible changes.

The review was set up primarily to see if anything can be done to counter the widespread coaching culture that everyone - even the Conservative administration at KCC - now generally acknowledges is far too prevalent in Kent and has skewed the system so much in parts of west Kent that it can seem that only those who actually do have some kind of  private tuition are guaranteed a place.

KCC outlines changes to the eleven plus test>>>

Perhaps we should not be surprised that county councillors were a little pessimistic about the odds of countering the coaching culture, although most commended Kent County Council's efforts to try and level the playing field.

Education director Patrick Leeson said the reforms were not about a "new" test but a "better, more fit for purpose set of assessment materials." 

Cllr Mike Whiting explained that KCC recognised no test could be immune from coaching but "it was the right thing to do to make the test fairer for everyone."

Those most sceptical were the opposition parties. For Labour, Cllr Les Christie said he sympathised with the aims but said the idea that those with the means would find a way to improve the chances of their child passing. "People with the means will find a way round it."

Liberal Democrat leader Cllr Trudy Dean said "unfortunately, there is no holy grail here" and quoted our stroy about the number of places being allocated to children from fee-paying schools (40% in some cases) saying "that is going backwards, not forwards."

At first glance, the proposals are rather modest. In fact, there is very little on the paper setting out KCC's thoughts that deals directly with the issue of coaching.

There are  reasons for this. The most obvious is that whatever else KCC might do with the exam, the idea that it can really be completely tutor proof is a non-starter. KCC has shifted its language slightly on this over recent months, perhaps recognising that it was rather over-optimistic at the outset.

It started off by saying it wanted a test  immune from coaching - to the extent that it was suggested that shops like W H Smith could be banned from selling practice papers - and edged towards a position where it aid it wanted a test that was less susceptible to coaching.

You won't get anything specific in the report about exactly how this objective will be achieved. However, Cllr Mike Whiting, the Conservative cabinet member for education, says the general aim will be to align the test more closely to what primary school children learn on the curriculum as part of the Sats. 

That reflects the valid concern that some elements of the test - noticeably non-verbal reasoning - are not ordinarily taught at state primary schools and an advantage can be secured by those that can afford tutors to instruct them on the techniques and familiarise themselves with the questions that come up.

So, adjusting the test in ways that mean you should not require coaching - which, it should be noted, is explicitly ruled out by KCC - ought to level the playing field a little.

But I suspect not by much.

Such is the determination of some parents to secure grammar places for their children, it is hard to see how this modest change will diminish the thriving commercial coaching industry.

Tutors will simply shift the emphasis of their servics  - and indeed, some already advertise that they also are able to coach children to improve their SATs results.

Fine-tuning the 11-plus to bring it more into line to reflect Sats begs the obvious question: why not rely on the Sats results in the first place - a thought advanced by quite a few headteachers in Kent who took part in the review? The answer, apparently, is that we now have admissions that are governed by a national timetable and it would be impossible to devise a system of offering places not knowing how well pupils had performed in their Sats (not a problem for university allocations though).

The additional problem is that the Sats would become the same kind of focus for pressure on pupils and schools.

 It is hard to see how the problem many grammars now complain about - namely, that pupils who have been over-coached struggle once they get to grammar school  - would necessarily be moderated by any of the changes being suggested.

KCC does deserve some credit for trying to do something about the eleven plus and its belated recognition that far from improving social mobility, the Kent system militates against it.

But it has rather tip-toed timidly around the edges of the issue, which in a way is about all it might have been expected to. 

It is worth remembering that this is KCC's third review of the 11-plus in the last few years.

The first two saw no changes at all, as those wrestling with the seemingly intractable problems of how to create a level playing field for children realised that the only option was the nuclear one – in other words, scrapping it altogether.

Did Kent County Council get value for money from an "infrastructure summit" it hosted in central London which led to a £11,000 bill from the company that organised it on the authority's behalf?

KCC says its £11k "infrastructure summit" was cheap>>>

Of course it did - you only have to read the response to my Freedom of Information request to recognise that it was, at least so far as KCC is concerned, an overwhelming, unalloyed success.

We are told - in the kind of language often used to justify something which has aroused questions - that "the expenditure was appropriate"; that the event was "bona fide" - perish the thought that the county council should organise an event that wasn't - and "outcomes and recommendations continue to be progressed, drawing on the findings."

As to what internal auditors found when questions were asked about how the summit came about, KCC tells us there was "minor breach" of contract regulations.

That breach was nothing at all to do with whether the contract with Westmnister Advisers was er, bona fide, but because "the reason for the single source procurement were not fully documented." Tut tut.

We have to rely on the council's account here because it has chosen not to disclose the full auditor's report but paraphrased its findings (presumably to make them more palatable. And clearly, we might get the wrong end of the stick if we saw the actual report.)

Of course, there are other unconvincing answers and explanations about the summit, the notably weak one being that it was cheaper to stage it in London rather than Kent.

Given KCC is forever extolling the fact that getting to Kent is quicker and easier than ever because of High Speed One, could there have been a better opportunity than to demonstrate the fact to important "movers and shakers" by arranging it somewhere in the county?

And why did KCC bear all the costs when it seems the summit was jointly organised with Essex and East Sussex county councils? Why didn't they share the tab?

And why did KCC agree to a proposal brought to it by a Westminster-based PR company in the first place without asking around to see if it could be done differently? Or even by KCC on its own? (If KCC was convinced that it was such a great idea, you'd have thought it might have come up with it independently without the assistance of a PR company).

We are told that a review after the event "Westminster Advisers prepared a documented event summary and outcomes including recommendations."

Well, that's all fine then. The ends justified the means - although it would be nice to think that the council might carry out rather a more rigourous cost-benefit analysis rather than relying on another firm to draw together "recommendations that are being progressed."

Read the FOI response here:

FOI £11k Summit Bill.pdf (239.67 kb)

Conservatives at County Hall are acutely sensitive to suggestions that grammar schools are increasingly dominated by children who have got there because they are somehow privileged.

The fact the county council has now acknowledged that the eleven plus is skewed towards those who can afford private coaching - and is trying to do something about it - reflects these sensitivities.

Now the authority has agreed to review its controversial decision to scrap discretionary transport subsidies for children who opt for a selective school - or a denominational school - above others nearer to where they live.

An estimated 4,200 families have lost out under the arrangements because their income means they do not any longer qualify.

Whether KCC would have done had it not been faced with one Conservative - Cllr Andrew Bowles, also the leader of Swale Council - breaking rank and publicly denouncing the policy is a moot point. 

I suspect the ruling administration would have faced down a similar Liberal Democrat call for a rethink but felt propelled to act knowing that Cllr Bowles might not be the only one to decide to speak out.

He made the point that other Conservatives have privately expressed, namely that ending transport support has adversely affected precisely the kind of children that Kent ought to be assisting when it comes to going to grammar schools.

A review, of course, is just that and there has been no commitment to a U-turn. The fact there will be an-party working group indicates that the Conservatives want to tie in the other parties to any changes that might be made.

And a review will help neutralise the opposition from contending that nothing is being done, even if it seems unlikely that it will report before the May election, which won't unduly worry the Conservatives.

The issue is complicated by the fact that KCC will also have to address the issue of whether it should bring back some kind of discretionary subsidy for children who choose a church school above others nearer to where they live.

And it is worth noting that in an environment where parents are sold the idea they can choose a school, some may question why discretionary support for transport costs should not available for those who choose a non-selective school above others nearer to where they live.

This anomaly was actually a factor when KCC originally determined that it would end most subsidies and it was suggested it could be legally challenged.

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Even the most fervent believers in transparency and accountability would have to question whether Kent County Council's annual budget meeting represents open democracy at its best. 

The gruelling day-long meeting was singularly lacking in political drama - with the one exception of the debate on grammar school transport - and enlightening debate and there was a distinct impression that county councillors were simply going through the motions.

There was an awful lot of Conservative councillors standing up to say what a good job KCC was doing and equally, a lot of opposition contributions saying they weren't.

Perhaps the format might also benefit from an all-party review.

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After hints that he might enjoy another run against the incumbent MP Helen Grant in Maidstone and Weald, it seems the former Liberal Democrat candidate Peter Carroll, who is now working for the Kent police commissioner Ann Barnes, is to give it a miss.

The constituency party will select its candidate this weekend from a shortlist of three - all men but Mr Carroll is not among them.

It ought not to be that much of a shock that headteachers in Kent, notably from primary schools, feel that coaching for the eleven plus is now so prevalent that they are unfairly skewed towards those that can afford private tutors.

Survey reveals mixed response to planned 11+ changes>>>

Nevertheless, comments made by some of those who responded to Kent County Council's recent consultation over possible changes to the exam aimed at countering coaching underline just how serious a problem it is.

The council carried out its consultation shortly before the end of last year, when many schools were pre-occuppied with other matters.

So that fact that 125 headteachers and others took the time to respond indicates the level of interest in the issue.

What is quite clear from the comments made is that while there is broad support for KCC's efforts to come up with a test that is less susceptible to coaching, many feel the authority has, until now, simply turned a blind eye to the fact that children are not just being privately tutored but that extensive preparation goes on in some of its own schools.

If true, it is frankly staggering that one headteacher even allegedly offers private tuition through his wife to parents anxious about getting a grammar school place.

READ what Kent headteachers said about the eleven plus here:

11+headteacher comments.pdf (1.43 mb)

The comments corroborate the feeling that the race for grammar school places has become so intense that those with the money are at unfair advantage.

Many argued that judgements about whether a child ought to go to a selective school ought to be based on their SATs results or through teacher assessment.

The enduringly divisive nature of the exam was reflected by the fact that there was no clear consensus among headteachers about any of the key proposals put forward by the county council.

In fact, they were pretty evenly split on virtually all of the ideas.

Of particular note were the responses to the question of whether practice papers should be dropped. KCC has spoken of a desire to try somehow to ban their availability commercially, which is probably impossible.

Several rightly pointed out that doing away with practice papers might actually have a perverse effect on those unable to afford private tutors who deserved to have some opportunity to familiarise themselves with the exam.

The county council's belated efforts to tackle the issue of tutoring and coaching are laudable but you get the feeling that whatever alternative education chiefs come up with, it will not ultimately be capable of curtailing the widespread culture of coaching and tuition.

As one headteacher put it: "More affluent parents will continue to pay for extra tutoring and practice papers whatever the nature of the tests."

For another analysis of the survey, see this blog post by the Kent education adviser Peter Read who considers the responses to all the questions KCC asked.

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DID Thanet North MP and uncompromising opponent of gay marriage Roger Gale suggest that same-sex marriage could lead to incest or was somehow comparable to incest?

The MP has issued a statement simmering with indignation about certain press reports saying he did indeed tells the House of Commons as much.

The allegation, he asserted, was "what is known in journalism as a 'lie'". Strong words indeed. 

It is unarguably true that the word "incest" was never actually uttered by the MP. It was a word used by others, notably on Twitter. So, on one level you can understand his anger.

It was the interpretation of his remarks which prompted all sorts of unwelcome headlines and Mr Gale felt forced to issue a second clarification (following the first sent out on Tuesday as the debate raged) today. 

In it, he repeats that his comments about replacing civil partnerships with a civil union were nothing to do with incest but about giving protection to siblings who were not provided with the same law and property rights as those who entered into civil partnerships under the legislation.

Mr Gale says: "I appreciate that sections of the find this disappointing but this has nothing whatsoever to do with sex or incest at all."

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the straight-talking MP rarely leaves anyone in any doubt where he stands on any issue.

When county education chiefs set out their blueprint for Kent's schools for the next five years, the introduction to the extremely lengthy Commissioning Plan acknowledged the education authority was operating in "an increasingly diverse environment."

Some of the consequences of that environment are beginning to be seen, not least in the challenge facing Kent County Council to ensure there are not just enough school places across Kent for children but that there are, in its own words, enough "appropriate places". At the same time as fulfilling that statutory obligation, it retains a general responsibility for the performance of schools in the area - regardless of whether schools have broken free of the supposed shackles of the county council and become academies.

Squaring this circle has its problems and data from the authority shows wide-variations in the intake of Year 7 pupils across the 99 secondary schools. The data was obtained by the well-known Kent education adviser Peter Read.

That there are five - including Kent's first academy, The Marlowe in Ramsage - that took in less than half the 11-year-olds they actually had places for is not quite as shocking as it might appear. Worrying, true, but Kent is no different to any other area in seeing fluctuations in pupil numbers across both the primary and secondary sector.

Education chiefs say that a general surplus - or spare capacity - is not necessarily a bad thing, although if it applied the same calculations to the empty desk data now as it did when it embarked on a programme of closing and merging more than 40 primary schools a few years ago, we might be seeing the same happening in the secondary sector.

The arguably more interesting aspect of the figures is not the under-occuppied schools but the third where more pupils were accepted in Year 7 last year than schools had places for. They include nine academies and 13 grammars and it hardly needs saying they are all among the best performing schools in the county.

There is nothing KCC can do to stop popular over-subscribed academies enlarging as the government, which likes to apply a market forces philosophy to education, has decreed that is what should be permitted: it's a question of supply and demand. This approach marks a return to the Thatcherite ethos in which competition between schools was considered the best way to drive up standards. No politician will ever say it but underlying this approach is a view that if schools can't make the grade, they should wither on the vine.

For KCC, this means trying to provide places while some schools, understandably focused more on their own interests, look to increase their numbers to respond to parental wishes. But the only real area where KCC has direct control is over its maintained schools. It has very little power over academies which is precisely the point (whether you agree with it or not) of the policy. If successful schools expand, continue to be succcessful and siphon away more able children, where does that leave the others? And where does it leave KCC as the commissioning body?

That 13 grammars took in more children, coupled with plans by at least three more to add places next year, should also be a concern. There may be an issue of a shortage of places in west Kent but there are some who suspect something else is going on here.

The relentless quest and obsession among politicians for diversity in the schooling system has over the years, created as many problems as it solves. If the government does genuinely believe that academies and free schools are the answer to declining standards, perhaps the solution is for all schools to become them.

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When Katherine Kerswell was managing director of Kent County Council, she embarked on one of those "re-structuring" exercises with the Orwellian title of "The Change To Keep Succeeding" programme. This was dressed up in all kinds of impenetrable jargon but was basically about cutting away staff and particularly management.

It was not, to put it mildy, terribly popular especially with county councillors, who at one point questioned just how successful the programme could be considered when in an early incarnation, it appeared KCC was to end up with just as many top officers as it had under the old management structure.

Of course, the managing director secured more notoriety when she left KCC after less than two years in the job and picked up a £420,000 pay-off in the process, not exactly what council taxpayers considered value for money. Now she has written an article extolling public sector leaders to do more to be cost-effective in "these austere times".

It's hardly the most revelatory suggestion ever to have been uttered and the irony of it coming from someone who was extraordinarily well remunerated when she quit has not been lost on some.

However, I do agree with one thing she writes - namely that "decision-making that is obscure, unseen or hidden fails the test of a modern democracy. As citizens, we now want 24/7 accountability, and we expect the full disclosure and transparency of those public decisions taken in our name."

Why then, did we have to wait for KCC to fulfill its statutory requirement to publish its annual accounts to find out about her payout - six months after she left?

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Where is Kent's Big Society? It's hard to tell on the strength of the pitiful take-up of Kent County Council's £3m fund available to social entrepeneurs to set up business in the county. Just three loans have been taken up in a year, suggesting there's not much appetite out there for this kind of initiative.

Of course, KCC's loan rate of between 12 and 15% may have something to do with the low take-up.