Nope, in as much as I grew up at all was Herts/Essex borders, now am on the Essex edge of London.
Yes of course I means close schools that fall below some rock bottom standard. Frankly I'd burn them to the ground, salt the soil, and sow cobalt isotopes rendering the site unusable for millennia.
But given the cost of radiocobalt and school buildings, I'd content myself with merely sacking everyone involved.
You wouldn't have to do this much to inspire what Air Marshal Harris referred to as a "healthy terror".
Of course one has to make allowance for the quality of the input, for there are kids for whom any GCSE's at all represent a triumph.
Success would of course be rewarded, with money. Good money. You want the UK not to be overtaken by Nigeria, you're going to have to pay.
Of course this is impossible.
For a start this is not revenue neutral, and the Brits already resent paying as much for their kids education as to receive Sky Sports. Indeed enduring the torment of helping their kids learn to read would seriously impact their ability to watch premiership matches of teams they don't even support.
Second you can't shut schools. No matter how close to physically falling down, a level of wretchedness that looks more like malice than incompetence and open drug dealing in the playground.
The only criterion the British people will accept for shutting a school is to save money.
Even then they won't accept it if the school is near them.
Possibly the only way we could pull this off is to have daytime TV presenters talk of the risk of Cobalmite being found in schools we need to shut down. We could have the standard geeky media scientist trying to say that Cobalmite doesn't actually exist. He would of course be shot to pieces by an empathetic wholistic homeopathic healer who would point out that Captain Kirk said it existed, and so it must be a threat to our kids. Can the scientist prove it doesn't exist ?
I sound a bit cyinical don't I ?
You should have been at the lunch meeting I was at, where me & my partner were the token Brits. One advanced maths programme at Oxford is considering affirmitive action so that there are any British kids on it at all.