Understanding coalition education policy means understanding the mind of Michael Gove - which could be dangerous.

In Star Trek, Dr Spock's "Vulcan mind meld" could reach into people's thoughts. He read people's thoughts by laying his hands on their head, a useful technique, but one that opened him to psychic danger.

Trying to read Gove's thoughts presents similar problems - all that dark psychic energy flowing through a mind meld with Gove might reveal his plans but will damage our heads in the process.

As a lightweight alternative to peering into the dark recesses of Gove's mind, I suggest we examine Lord Nash, one of his ministers.

Nash may be a little-known third-in-command in Gove's department, but he is quite central to Goveism.

He was made a lord this year just to get him a minister's job. Nash has never been elected but was selected by Gove because he is at the crossroads of Tory education meets.

One road is marked "Money," the other "Tory pals," the third signposted "Privatisation" and the fourth "Tory think tanks."

Nash made his cash from investment firm Sovereign Capital. His government appointment shows in the most direct way that Gove wants to put schools into the hands of the private equity men. 

Nash and his wife Caroline have donated £182,000 to the Tories since 2006, showing that Gove wants Tory funders in charge of our kids.

At Sovereign Capital, Nash specialised in backing privatisation, funding firms that often performed poorly on government contracts.

This shows Gove wants privatisers in charge of schools, even men who ran crappy, botched privatisations.

Nash runs a charity directly involved in schools, which has recruited unsuccessful schools staff from other Tory-linked charities, showing that Gove wants the "big society" in our classrooms - where the "big society" means incompetent Tory busybodies.

Sovereign Capital had a serious education and training portfolio. Nash's companies got a lot of public money. Many performed badly.

Sovereign owns the Greenwich School of Management, a private higher education college offering two-year business and tourism degrees. Under the coalition, Greenwich's business has boomed.

The coalition has increased the number of private colleges getting funding from state-backed student loans - especially Greenwich which gets £22.6 million a year, almost a quarter of the total going to private universities.

But performance was poor. Last September government inspectors from the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) found Greenwich failing two out of three standards.

Inspectors said its "student learning opportunities do not meet UK expectations" and that it "requires improvement."

The QAA is in charge of "safeguarding standards and improving the quality of UK higher education."

Having failed to safeguard educational standards in his own college, Nash is now in charge of British education.

Nash's Sovereign Capital also owned a Midlands training company called ESG.

It ran employment schemes under the last Labour government. These schemes were inspected by Oftsted five times between 2007 and 2009 and never received a single "good" mark.

Many of Ofsted's judgements on the most important standards are damning. Inspectors found "achievement and standards are inadequate," with a  "low rate for job outcomes," that "job entry rates are low," that they had an "insufficiently responsive jobsearch," "slow progress in implementing quality assurance arrangements" and "some poor learning resources" - and so on.

A key education minister used to own a firm that was slammed by Ofsted.

This poor performance did not stop Nash's firm winning a £69m contract delivering the Tories' Work Programme in the Midlands in 2011.

ESG promptly stumbled, failing to meet a 5.5 per cent minimum target for getting people into jobs.

ESG was also given a contract for "mandatory work activity." A Tory donor's firm was paid millions to force the unemployed to work for free.

So when Gove had Nash made into a lord so he could become a minister, he wanted a Tory-funding businessman who profited from poorly performing educational privatisation in charge of schools.

When Nash became a minister, he gave up his shareholding in Sovereign Capital. He clearly did so reluctantly, as early press reports suggested he would merely "step away" from his business interests, suggesting some kind of "blind trust."

It looks like civil servants persuaded him that this would have been a completely unconvincing way to hide his financial interest.

Instead Nash has set up a charity called Future Academies to run free schools and academies.

It is an impossible conflict of interest. Department for Education officials will find it very hard to criticise schools run by the minister's own charity.

But the schools certainly need criticising, as Nash is substituting amateurish Tory ideologues for actual teachers.

Last month the head of Future Academies "free" primary school, the Pimlico Academy, in London resigned a month after the school opened.

The 27-year-old head, Annaliese Briggs, had no teaching qualifications. But she had been a "researcher" at Tory think tank Civitas, writing lightweight right-wing fluff.

This amateurishness pervades Nash's schools charity. His wife Caroline is in charge of the curriculum at its schools.

The charity claims: "Caroline is able to ensure that what is taught in Future schools is rigorous and coherent."

She has never been a teacher either, but she was a stockbroker.

Nash isn't the first Tory funder who promoted a business model that made him rich.

Lord Ashworth persuaded the Tories to make the privatisation of hospital cleaning a key policy in the 1980s. Ashworth then built his fortune on contracted-out cleaning.

When Nash became minister, he gave up his shareholding in Sovereign Capital. But he remains a rich man and he will be well-placed to return to investing in the educational privatisation he is now promoting when he leaves office.