To begin with, private companies are already allowed to run state schools for profit and have been since Labour passed the 2002 Education Act. I get tired of repeating this, but the first Secretary of State to allow a for-profit company to run a state school was Ed Balls. In 2007, he permitted EdisonLearning, a profit-making education management organisation (EMO), to enter into a management contract with Turin Grove School, a failing, local authority-run comprehensive in Edmonton. (I first blogged about this during the 2010 general election campaign when Balls shameless attacked Michael Gove for wanting to allow for-profits to run taxpayer-funded schools, glossing over the fact that he'd done precisely that three years earlier.)

The Independent repeats the canard that Gove's plans to do this were "vetoed" by the Liberal Democrats – not true since it's already happened under the present government. IES Breckland, one of the free schools to open last September, is owned by a charitable trust but run by IES, a commercial EMO based in Sweden. I blogged about this when the Observer published an equally misleading "exclusive" 18 months ago.

It follows that the substance of the Independent story, namely, that the Conservatives have a "plan" to allow this and said "plan" will be included in the party's next manifesto, cannot be true. Why would the Conservatives include a proposal in their next manifesto to allow something that has been allowed since the previous government passed an Act of Parliament over 10 years ago?

If the author of the Independent's "exclusive" knew a little bit more about this complex area of public policy, he might have picked up on the fact that for-profits have not hitherto been authorised to set up and own taxpayer-funded schools, just to run them. Is it conceivable that a "plan" to allow this might be included in the next Tory manifesto?

Alas, the answer is no again. Why? Because that, too, was allowed by Labour's 2002 Education Act, it's just that no government has been bold enough to try it yet. For that reason, any reference to for-profit EMOs is unlikely to be included in the next Conservative manifesto. It would be a gift to Labour since it would enable them to claim that the Tories want to "privatise" state education. They'll claim that anyway, of course (Stephen Twigg has already said as much on Twitter, following up the Indy story), but the claim will be more plausible if there's anything in the manifesto about profit-making companies running schools. As I say, if the Tories win the next election and want to encourage for-profits to set up, own and run taxpayer-funded schools, they can do that without having to change the law. Why include anything about it in the manifesto?

For what it's worth, I don't think the Conservatives will do this if they win a majority in 2015 – at least, not on a large scale. I think they should – and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that such a policy would drive up standards – but I don't think that whoever succeeds Michael Gove would be bold enough. He's about as brave as they come and he hasn't done it. What chance of his successor doing it?

* There's a story in the paper this morning about a report published by Christine Gilbert, the former head of Ofsted, accusing academies and free schools of cherry-picking middle-class children to the detriment of those from less affluent backgrounds. (You can read the report here.) I'm sceptical about this. The reason the average number of children on free school meals (FSM) is lower in academies and free schools than the national average – 15 per cent and 9.4 per cent respectively, compared to a national average of 16.7% – isn't because said schools are engaging in "covert selection", but because the schools themselves are so popular with middle-class parents that the percentage of their applicants on FSM is below average. To substantiate a charge of "cherry-picking", Gilbert would have to compare the percentage of children on FSM admitted by academies and free schools with the percentage among their applicants and that data isn't available. (Gilbert argues that it should be available, but that's another matter.) For what it's worth, my free school has bent over backwards to encourage children from the local housing estates to apply and I'm happy to report that the percentage of children on FSM is approximately 28 per cent, well above the national average.