Why do so few comprehensive schools - even those with a legitimate claim to the title - include the adjective in their school sign or letterhead? Is it because hostile media have made “comprehensive” equate to something vaguely second-rate? In short, has the word itself outlived its usefulness? Does it still express adequately what its original proponents hoped for it? Consider.

The “comprehensive” ideal was born in a different, more generously spirited post-war age. Linked to a wish for social justice, comprehensive stood for the ideal that everyone would send their children to the same local secondary school where there would be the full ability range, where equal values would be accorded to different sorts of achievement and attainment, and the curriculum would reflect them.

For those in the rural areas and market towns of so many counties, the comprehensive is now a successful reality. The flourishing local secondary school is a place where everyone, whatever their place on the social spectrum, sends their teenagers. Everybody wants for other people’s children the same secondary schooling opportunities that they want for their own. They delight in the achievements and life stories of local children “made good”. Nobody would dream of turning back the clock.

By contrast, in large towns, small cities and especially the great conurbations where two-thirds of our pupils live, the comprehensive ideal has been an illusion - a cruel deception where all concerned have tended to collude in a game of the emperor’s clothes. Asked what type of school they attend, pupils reply “a comp”. Two of the present education ministers attended self-styled comprehensive schools.

Yet, in London and the other great conurbations the comprehensive school has rarely existed. Instead, there is a steep pecking order from “super selective” through a range of selective, comprehensive plus, comprehensive, comprehensive minus, secondary modern and secondary modern minus schools. The top of the range has an elite of pupils drawn from the best 11-year-old performers in standardised tests, while the bottom is heavily weighted with the worst performers, to whom are added other pupils excluded by those higher up the school ladder.

In the past 20 years, the distance between the top and the bottom schools has elongated through the exercise of parental preference along with the national curriculum, published results, league tables and inspections. The best-placed schools find it easier to attract and retain staff. More recently, the extra money and prestige which goes with school status (grant-maintained, city technology college, specialist, beacon) has stretched the difference even further.

The impact has been less, but the same pecking-order tendency is developing in large (even medium-sized) towns and small cities. In any case, cities have changed since the comprehensive pioneers began their campaign. Now there are large minority ethnic communities with different languages, faiths and cultures living uneasily with a white population which is often poor and disaffected. The complexion of the family has also changed. Adolescence, littered with greater than ever risks, starts earlier and ends later. What Anthony Giddens dubs a “runaway world” is a shrinking uncertain place - nowhere more so than in the big city.

In this context, a system of individual competing schools alone cannot do nearly all that is needed, but it can and must be the base for relationships, for learning, and wise, dependable advice to pupils. To achieve what is needed, however, independence needs to be combined in a variety of ways with interdependence.

“Collegial” expresses better than comprehensive what would be a future ideal. Imagine a partnership (not unlike the relationship of an Oxford or Cambridge college to the university) of six or so autonomous schools, each different - single-sex, co-educational, denominational, selective (where they exist). Why not invite major independent schools to join too? For the staff, continuous professional development could be “collegiate” and there would be an end, at least within the collegiate, to the present debilitating practice of staff poaching.

The collegiate in practice would help overcome the problems of shortage subject coverage, too. Collegiate leadership would be on a “rotating dean” basis, thus avoiding the pitfall of the super head.

Modest timetable alignment would ensure three essentials. First, some key staff, such as heads of department, being free at the same time each week, and all staff sharing the five professional development days. Second, three or four agreed collegiate weeks or days would allow intensive in-depth shared learning for pupils. Third, the time before and after school would form the basis of the collegiate curriculum making the best use of advances in the learning and communication technologies and the city learning centres to provide interactive video live lessons with local coaching and a state-of-the-art intranet and e-learning.

At 11, choice of secondary education will involve both a school and a collegiate. Teenagers find it easy to commit their loyalty to a range of communities, such as orchestras, sports teams and youth clubs: so collegiate and school allegiances would be no difficulty for them.

Why not also an international flavour to the collegiate to reflect the true nature of the large inner-cities, to raise the horizons of pupils on the estates, on the periphery and to underline the need for a broadening international element to the curriculum? And should the universities join in with associate collegiate staff with strong professional development and access links?

But will it happen? Ironically, the separate building blocks are available in the Government’s expanding menu of specialist, advanced and academies.

This time the vested interests lined up against the collegiate will be no less formidable than they were for the comprehensive. Most potent will be the competitive individualism which is poisoning our schools.

Appeals to goodwill and idealism, while essential, will not be enough. We shall need inducements - inspections of the collegiate, not schools, and funding related to the collegiate - at first modestly and then considerably to promote real collegiality. The practical first steps from loose federations to tight collegiality will need to be taken by brave pioneers.

In Birmingham, the 10 Catholic secondary schools have been doing something like this for 10 years and recently the Excellence in Cities experience has prompted three more groups of five to six Birmingham schools each to launch, on what they agree, offers a real opportunity to provide a glimpse of what secondary education might be like in the 21st century.

What is now urgently needed is the leadership and collective will to create a shared collegiate framework rather than escalators which allow some schools to descend as others rise.

Professor Tim Brighouse was chief education officer of Birmingham LEA from 1993 until September 2002