Just what, exactly, does the Labour party intend in offering the title “community” to most of the schools in England and Wales? The proposal was, of course, all part of a quick fix on nomenclature. A sleight of hand was needed on grant-maintained schools under which they were abolished, yet not quite abolished, and “foundation schools” seemed an acceptable compromise title. It was unnecessary to disturb the status of aided schools, so that particular can of worms was left unopened and unchanged; but a new title was necessary for all other schools: “community” had a contemporary Anthony GiddensAmatai Etzioni ring about it, so why not?

It has to be remembered that the conventional meanings of these various words have no relationship to what they are being used to signify, namely the various arrangements under which state schools are formally governed and owned. Community schools will be owned by local councils, aided ones by churches, foundation ones by charitable governing bodies - in their case, random collections of self-perpetuating locals whose predecessors were installed by the local head with ministerial approval as governors of grant-maintained schools in the first place. The nomenclature is purely administrative; it tells you nothing about the quality or the atmosphere or the ambience of the school.

Are these new titles simply politically convenient verbal reshuffling? Now that words are primarily selected for their public relations effect, invented titles of this kind have a habit of taking on a momentum, for good or ill, of their own. A “trust” now connotes a health service institution which does not engender trust. Our leading private schools have done a rather better PR job for over a century in describing themselves as public schools. The Hadow Committee in the 1920s found itself in much the same position as the Labour party today, casting around for a contemporary handle to attach to the new school it had invented to replace the old elementary code. It happened upon the word “modern”, which sounded good, briefly, until the nation’s secondary modern schools were given a firm thumbs-down by parents in favour of comprehensive schools. If people are cynical about the party battle over education, it is because, so often, they have been fed with verbal hype. New or revived words, especially in education, should be accompanied by intellectual substance.

And the community school did once mean something substantial; it has an honourable provenance and pedigree. One of its most distinguished founders was Henry Morris, secretary of the Cambridgeshire education committee, who could see how children were being retarded by substandard rural elementary schools, their curriculum in the ideological embrace of the established Church and their finances squeezed by the local squirearchy. He put together a working group of bishops and vice-chancellors which paved the way for a secular religious syllabus. After harassing American millionaires for capital, he helped to surround Cambridge with new village community colleges, designed by world-famous architects.

His disciple, Stuart Mason, embellished the vision in Leicestershire after the Second World War.

Henry Morris would have been as horrified by today’s league-table national curriculum as he was by the intellectual poverty of the rural church school. To him, coming to Cambridgeshire from the trenches of the First World War, education had to be about personal development; about discovery of literature, the arts, music and beauty; about mobilising the potential for growth of the whole community, young and old. If Labour really wants to call most schools community schools, that is a noble and worthy aspiration; but it should now put some flesh on the bones of what it believes are the responsibilities of the school to the community in the 21st century.

Not that the present Labour plan is particularly prescriptive. It allows all schools a choice. They can become individualistic, atomised “foundation” schools, employing their own teachers and owning their own buildings or “community” schools where the local council does the formal owning and employing. They can clone themselves on Impington or the London Oratory. This element of laissez-faire is in danger of implying that there is no cultural middle ground between community responsibility and the competitive rat race. Yet grappling with that dilemma is atthe heart of the whole schooling process; teachers face it in the classroom every day.

Parents also understand it. Few parents want to favour their more talented offspring over their other children. Just as all people are equal in the eyes of God, so it is with parents and their children. The solution today is neither manic league-table obsession nor flight from reality intoartistic fantasy. It must be a determination to eschew rampant individualism andharness the idealism of the young who understand global interdependence better than their elders; and to assert the comprehensive principle that the competitive instinct and community solidarity can run side by side.

So Labour must get beyond the double message in its grant-maintained compromise. A patchwork quilt of London Oratory lookalikes and village college clones is not compatible with its firm pledge to uphold the comprehensive principle and turn its back on the old 11-plus meritocracy. No school is, or ought to want to be, an island; the bell is currently tolling for them all.

The responsibilities of all schools (including “public” ones) to the whole community need to be spelt out much more clearly before the next election.

Christopher Price is former chair of the House of Commons select committee on education.