Along with Alastair Campbell’s partner Fiona Millar, Francis Gilbert is the co-founder of the Local Schools Network – an anti academy front group set up to try to derail school reform. Paul Goodman over at ConservativeHome is a real fan. This morning Gilbert took to BBC Breakfast in a last ditch effort to talk down the Free School project that is seeing the first batch opening their doors this week:

FG: You’ll get a certain type of middle class parent putting their child into this school and then the local state school will take the more socially deprived pupils who don’t have the savvy parents. So you get this kind of segregation which  has led to things like the London riots in our schools already…

BBC: Let me just stop you there. You’re saying segregation in education in London schools led to the London riots..?

FG: It contributed a certain factor because you’ve got the poorest students concentrated in a quarter of our schools in this country and that’s a real problem. So we really need to solve that by bringing all our children together and this free schools programme will contribute more to this social segregation.

No doubt he is fully signed up to the non-reality based community theory that the riots were caused by teenagers having their Educational Maintainence Allowance cut…