In education, more than in most other areas, the Tories have actually got some policies, providing a rough guide as to what Cameron-style Conservatism might actually look like.

According to their education green paper published late last year, the Conservatives would take immediate action to: improve discipline in schools, including abolishing appeals against exclusions; get every child who is capable of doing so reading by the age of six; reform the testing regime in primary schools; deliver more teaching by ability by requiring more setting of pupils; reform school inspections to ensure they are tougher on underperformance; and reward more generously those schools that deliver for the poorest.

Then there are their plans for school supply. The Tories’ green paper proposes to provide over 220,000 new school places to satisfy the demands of parents in the most deprived boroughs who lose their appeal for their first choice school. At the same time, the Conservatives plan to streamline the process for establishing new schools and allow educational charities, philanthropists, existing school federations, not-for-profit trusts, co-operatives and groups of parents to set up schools in the state sector and access equivalent public funding to existing state schools. Funding for deprivation would go direct to the pupils most in need and more resources would be directed to pupils who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

How should Labour respond to the Tory agenda? In political terms there are a number of points we should make. First, we should throw back in the Tories’ face the specious attacks on Labour’s record. For example, their refusal to acknowledge progress in raising standards, as well as being poorly evidenced, is an insult to the hard work of millions of pupils and teachers who have striven hard to improve attainment at key stage 2 and GCSE.

Second, there is a fundamental contradiction in their philosophical approach. At one level they are arguing for a neo-liberal supply-side approach (education spokesman Michael Gove is a firm Tory libertarian). But other proposals are very statist: the Tories are going to be very prescriptive about teaching synthetic phonics and requiring schools to set pupils by ability. And their plans for school inspection are intrusive and reactionary – a reversion to a failed inspection model.

Third, a number of the proposals have not been thought through. Gove bemoans the level of exclusions from schools in deprived areas but he is proposing to make it easier for schools to exclude pupils by abolishing appeals. Abolishing appeals will, furthermore, simply result in cases ending up in the courts. And, given the correlation between being excluded and ending up in the criminal justice system, a harder line on exclusion is hardly likely to fix Cameron’s ‘broken society’.

The plans for reforming testing are also damaging. Abolishing assessments at key stage 1 and focusing just on a reading test at age six is muddled in educational terms. And their proposals to create extra school places will come at the cost of having to scrap dozens of new schools planned as part of Building Schools for the Future.

But the Tory plans also present Labour with a challenge. The Conservatives argue that the school system is holding back rather than enhancing social mobility and that they rather than Labour would do most to help disadvantaged pupils by opening up the supply of school places – particularly in deprived areas.

Labour can point to solid progress in closing the attainment gap between the most and least deprived but there is still a huge mountain to climb. On this issue above all others we should not let the Tories have the monopoly on radical thinking. I have argued elsewhere that the government should directly fund secondary schools, in part, according to the prior attainment of their pupil intake which would both incentivise schools to take a more balanced mix of students and aid social cohesion.

In addition, Labour should make three further reforms. First, pupils from deprived or disadvantaged backgrounds should be entitled to a new education credit – to be spent by agreement between parents, the pupil and the school on providing extra one-to-one support either in school, after school or with an approved tutor. Just as middle-class parents often choose to top up their formal schooling with extra coaching, this would extend similar opportunities across the board.

Second, we need more innovation and competition to ensure all parents and students have access to good schooling – but not the Tories’ unregulated free-for-all. Thus an independent regulator could oversee a system whereby, in areas where the overall performance of schools is poor and/or where a high proportion of parents don’t currently get their first preference of school, the supply of school places is opened up to new school providers. Where things are working well, let schools get on with their job and intervene only where there is market failure.

Third, competitive pressures should be balanced by strong incentives for schools to collaborate. It doesn’t have to be either competition or collaboration. Collaboration can help schools become more competitive. Action to improve school behaviour, provide a broad curriculum, deliver high-class professional development, foster parental engagement, develop adult learning and address the wider Every Child Matters agenda requires partnership working. Where there are strong local school partnerships the government should route the millions it spends on specialist strategies and support through those partnerships rather than local authorities and consultants.

The Tories’ plans are wrong-headed and half-baked and we should say so. But they should also act as a spur for us to develop our own radical but practical alternatives.