Education policies

What has the new government done so far, and what is it planning to do? The list is already a depressing one:

• expansion of the academies programme;
• creation of 'free schools';
• drastic budget cuts;
• scrapping of the new primary curriculum, school sports partnerships, diplomas, QCDA and the schools rebuilding programme;
• fewer places in higher education and vastly increased tuition fees.

It was then revealed that the number of schools which had actually applied for academy status was only 153 (The Guardian 29 July 2010). Of these, just 32 opened as academies in September (The Independent 2 September 2010).

Hostility

Meanwhile, the problems with academies - and the widespread hostility to them - showed no signs of abating.

Shireland Collegiate Academy in Sandwell - a school which, before it became an academy, inspectors had rated as 'outstanding' and whose head had been knighted for services to education - was now classified as 'inadequate'. ATL general secretary Mary Bousted commented:

This shows up the idea that changing a school's status to academy - simply changing its name, divorcing it from its local authority and separating it from its local community of schools - will automatically lead to improvements is a fallacy, and it will be shown to be one at great cost over the next few years. (The Guardian 28 May 2010)

Children's charity Barnardo's warned that unfair admissions practices were resulting in schools having intakes that did not reflect their neighbourhoods, and that the expansion in the number of academies and the creation of parent-led 'free schools' risked widening the gap. It recommended the use of ability bands to achieve a truly comprehensive mix.

Martin Narey, Barnardo's chief executive, said:

Secondary school admissions fail to ensure a level playing field for all children. Instead we are seeing impenetrable clusters of privilege forming around the most popular schools. Allowing such practice to persist - and almost certainly expand as increasing numbers of schools take control of their own admissions - will only sustain the achievement gap in education and undermine the prospects of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable children. (The Guardian 27 August 2010)

First, there is little evidence of real general success by academies, and what there is has been hotly contested. Second, the initial tranche of schools that Gove and Cameron are seeking to improve has already been judged as outstanding while under local authority control, and probably don't really need their standards being driven up a further minuscule amount. (Beadle 2010)

By implementing a system that requires education to be funded by the state, but controlled by an ever-increasing number of voluntary sector sponsors, they destroy the unions' ability to negotiate pay and conditions centrally and, in doing so, make it virtually impossible to retain any cohesive national pay agreement. (Beadle 2010)

Many parents of SEN children aspire to schools in their local communities where their children can get high-quality SEN support. But local authorities already have very little access to academies to monitor outcomes, or the curriculum, which could lead to SEN children having ... a much poorer experience. They may also miss out on local networks that share expertise between mainstream and special schools. (quoted in Millar 2010)

Free schools

Gove was also determined to press ahead with the creation of thousands of 'free schools', a policy he had made much of during the election campaign.

However, his propensity for exaggeration was as pronounced in relation to free schools as it had been in the case of academies. In June he claimed that 700 of the schools would be open in 2011. Three months later he was forced to admit that the actual number was 16. Almost half would be faith schools: three Christian, two Jewish, one Hindu and one Sikh. (The Guardian 6 September 2010)

Writing in The Guardian, Simon Jenkins pointed out that the free schools policy - creating schools which were not 'under local authority control' - was just another version of the 'dreary abuse of local democracy' which had been pursued by Thatcher and Blair:

Transient private corporations or parents' groups cannot realistically stand proxy for a community, let alone for a town or city ...

The key to the politics of education in Britain lies not in governance but in admissions. All else is euphemism. 'White flight' may be called parental choice. Catchment areas may be derided as postcode lotteries. But the one really creditable effort of British education since the war has been the battle for some equality of opportunity within the state education sector, even if in big cities it has not always worked.

If Cameron and Gove really mean to reverse this, to revert to 11-plus selection and educational segregation, they had better say so, and face the political music. (Jenkins 2010a)

The vision the Conservatives sold to the public during the election campaign was of parents and public-spirited individuals running schools as they run baby and toddler groups, Scout groups and Rotary clubs. But it won't be like that. DIY schools will need expert management help, and private companies are the obvious candidates to provide it. (Wilby 2010)

Once, a profit-making school was unthinkable, and one that received state funds even more so. But for private capital, it is a win-win situation: a guaranteed income stream from the government and the likelihood of state rescue if everything goes wrong. And the last 30 years suggest that what private capital wants, it usually gets in the end. (Wilby 2010)

Yet three Muslim girls' schools (in London, Lancaster and Leicester) were already forcing pupils as young as eleven to wear the niqab or burka as part of the school uniform, a practice which Ed Husain, co-director of the counter-extremist think-tank Quilliam, described as belonging to 'another century and another world' (NSS 2010). They were currently private schools, but, as Terry Sanderson pointed out, there would be 'nothing to stop them applying for academy or free school status in the future' (NSS 2010).

In November, a consultation document suggested that the government would allow the conversion of pet shops, funeral parlours and hair salons could be converted into free schools. Gove apparently regarded conversion as a cheap alternative to new buildings: 'We want to ensure that the spirit of innovation can flourish and our education system is open for business in terms of raising standards,' he said (The Guardian 15 November 2010).

Sweden

The free schools policy was based largely on the Swedish model. But, as research by Dr Susanne Wiborg at ULIE revealed, Sweden's free schools had not been the unqualified success which Gove claimed. The schools - set up mainly by middle-class parents in affluent urban areas - had increased social segregation. Furthermore, their pupils had done no better than other children in A Level equivalent exams and were no more likely to participate in higher education.

Now, 17 years after the neo-liberal reforms were first enacted, it appears that they have not managed to bring about decisive changes ... into the Swedish education system. Despite almost 1000 new independent schools and 150,000 students attending them, researchers ... claim that the outcome in terms of achievement induced only slightly higher pupil attainment, but also higher costs and greater segregation. (Wiborg 2010:282-3)

Many others agreed. Clyde Chitty (2010:277) warned that academies and free schools would do 'irreparable damage to the education system of this country'.

Sadly, the leaders of the Liberal Democrat party were apparently happy to turn a blind eye to 'the privatizing zeal of their Conservative colleagues', despite the fact that at their annual conference in September members of the party voted overwhelmingly for a motion describing free schools as 'socially divisive, likely to depress education outcomes and an inefficient use of resources in an age of austerity' (The Guardian 18 August 2010).

The free schools plan will certainly be costly: surplus school places will be a burden on local authorities' budgets and the planning which will be required to allocate student places will be complex and expensive.

Drastic budget cuts

The new government warned that education would not be exempt from the savage cuts in public expenditure it was planning. A month after coming to power, ministers announced a £359m programme of education cuts (The Guardian 7 June 2010).

But worse was to come. By the beginning of July the government was talking about cuts of up to £3.5bn in the schools budget as part of the most drastic public spending squeeze since the second world war (The Guardian 5 July 2010).

Pupil premium

Desperate to have something positive to say, Clegg announced in October that he had persuaded the Treasury to find £7bn for a 'pupil premium' scheme, under which schools would be given extra funding for children from disadvantaged homes. He insisted that this would be new money (The Guardian 16 October 2010).

But a week later, Gove admitted that he had had to make cuts elsewhere in the education budget to fund the premium. Some schools would face a budget cut in order to make the extra payment to schools taking pupils from the poorest homes (The Guardian 24 October 2010).

Curriculum matters

Primary curriculum

The new primary curriculum, proposed by Sir Jim Rose and due to be implemented in September 2011, was abandoned, along with planned initiatives in personal, social and health education, citizenship and RE. The government reckoned these decisions would save £7m (The Guardian 7 June 2010).

One of the few things the new government was determined not to scrap was the hated SATs. A quarter of all primary schools had boycotted the summer's tests, but schools minister Nick Gibb defended the tests and confirmed that they would stay. 'Externally-validated tests give parents and professionals valuable information to gauge the standards of our primary schools and their pupils and play a vital role in accountability', he said (The Guardian 3 August 2010).

Another policy which showed no sign of being scrapped was Gove's intention to force teachers to use 'synthetic phonics' to teach reading.

In August, Dylan William, professor of educational assessment at ULIE, became one of a long line of experts to condemn the proposal:

Phonics is important in learning to read, but no skilled reader uses phonics. An overemphasis on phonics will not address the problem. We are just beginning to discover that reading is one of the most complex skills. It also requires knowledge of language, speaking and listening skills. (The Guardian 3 August 2010)

Gove announced that he would abolish Labour's £162m a year school sports partnerships scheme, but there were protests from schools, parents and British Olympic stars (The Guardian 1 December 2010).

Cameron ordered a rethink of the controversial decision and Gove was forced to announce a temporary U-turn: money would be found to keep 'key elements' of the scheme going until the 2012 London Olympics (The Guardian 17 December 2010).

Diplomas

Another casualty of Gove's axe was Labour's flagship 'academic' diplomas. The government said it would save £22.2m by abandoning the academic diplomas being developed in humanities, science and languages, and by reducing support for existing vocational diplomas in other subjects (The Guardian 7 June 2010).

Instead, it announced that state schools would now be allowed to offer iGCSE qualifications in key subjects and that the results would be included in school performance tables 'as soon as possible' (DfE press release 7 June 2010).

In September, Gove announced that he intended to combat the 'decline in exam standards' by offering an English baccalaureate qualification to students who passed GCSE in English, maths, one science, one foreign language and one humanity (The Guardian 6 September 2010).

QCDA scrapped

Gove confirmed that he was scrapping the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, which had been created in 2008 when the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority was split into the QCDA and Ofqual, the watchdog for exam standards. The agency would continue to work on national tests and exam administration for the time being, he said, but it would stop work on qualifications and curriculum, saving £8m (BBC News 27 May 2010).

The decision to scrap the QCDA worried many, because its job was to give independent advice, based on its members' experience as curriculum developers and former teachers, and sometimes even to challenge politicians. Curriculum planning was now to become the responsibility of the Department, with a panel of government-appointed 'experts' offering advice.

Writing in The Guardian, Mike Baker commented: 'So, we have the prospect of the planned new national curriculum being shaped by advice from the education secretary's hand-picked committee of experts and then implemented by his own department. Not much room for dissent or argument there' (Baker 2010).

One of the first to be mentioned as a possible government advisor was Niall Ferguson, whom Gove suggested might help rewrite the history curriculum. The suggestion was controversial because, with his right-wing Eurocentric vision of western ascendancy, Ferguson was viewed by some as an apologist for imperialism (The Guardian 30 May 2010).

Celebrities

Back in February, Cameron had invited TV presenter Carol Vorderman to head a task force to review the teaching of maths.

In November Gove announced that he had appointed another TV presenter - Simon Schama - to help rewrite the history syllabus. James Vernon, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, commented:

It is symptomatic of how dominant market models of education have become that the minister has chosen Schama as his adviser. Neither Schama, nor Niall Ferguson, also apparently considered by Gove, has any experience of teaching in schools, indeed, like me, both are fugitives from British higher education. Nor are they even scholarly experts in the British history Gove holds so dear ... It is the popularity of their TV shows that has commended them to Gove. Expertise is now a matter of television ratings. (Vernon 2010)

Free school meals

New Labour's intention had been to extend free school meals to half a million children from low-income families. But Gove announced that the extension of the pilot schemes would be abandoned. Just three existing schemes would be allowed to continue to assess the case for increasing eligibility (The Guardian 7 June 2010).

Doctors, teaching unions and child poverty campaigners urged him to rethink his decision. They pointed out that healthier school meals had been shown to improve classroom behaviour and academic attainment (The Guardian 29 June 2010).

The decision was particularly regrettable in the light of a study of more than four thousand 10-16 year olds in England, led by Dr Gavin Sandercock, lecturer in clinical physiology at the University of Essex. This revealed that more than a quarter of boys and almost forty per cent of girls went without breakfast some or all of the time and that these children were more likely than their classmates to be inactive, unfit and obese (The Guardian 16 August 2010).

Building Schools for the Future

The biggest budget cuts affected the schools rebuilding programme.

Within days of coming to power, the government began a review of New Labour's ambitious Building Schools for the Future project. Plans for the rebuilding or refurbishment of hundreds of secondary schools were put on hold. The Department insisted that no firm decision had yet been made, but it was clear that there would be a concerted drive to make savings from the £8.5bn annual budget for new schools, and that some of the money would be used to fund Gove's 'free schools' (The Guardian (14 May 2010).

In early July Gove finally cancelled Building Schools for the Future. He suspended plans for 715 new schools and cut funding for school swimming pools (The Guardian 5 July 2010).

He faced mounting anger from parents and teachers, and even from Tory MPs, two of whom demanded to know why new schools in their constituencies would not now be built.

To make matters worse, some schools which had been told their new buildings could go ahead now learned that they would not. In Sandwell, one of the most deprived parts of the country, there was anger over nine cancelled schemes. The deputy leader of the council warned of a 'two-tier system' with some children attending schools in desperate need of renovation. Education department officials confessed they could not explain how a series of errors had been made which resulted in parents being wrongly told that their school projects would go ahead. 'We don't have an answer on that', a spokesman said (The Guardian 8 July 2010).

Hundreds of parents and teachers gathered outside parliament to protest at the cuts (The Guardian 19 July 2010). Gove was attacked by MPs, teachers and councils for the erroneous list of cancelled building projects and was forced to apologise in the Commons (The Guardian 29 July 2010).

In addition to the scrapping of new school building projects, Gove also cancelled Labour's £235m Playbuilder scheme. Launched in 2008, the scheme would have seen the creation of 3,500 children's community playgrounds across England (The Guardian 11 August 2010).

In October it became clear that even those building projects which were going ahead - affecting 600 schools - were facing budget cuts of forty per cent (The Guardian 22 October 2010).

Higher education

Fewer places

Higher education did not escape the new government's axe, either. New Labour had promised 20,000 additional university places for 2010, but the coalition government cut this to 8,000 and threatened to fine universities if student numbers rose above this figure. The university admissions service UCAS said applications were 11.6 per cent higher than in 2009 and estimated that 170,000 students would not get places at university in 2010 (The Guardian 16 July 2010).

State school pupils from the poorest backgrounds faced another hurdle in applying for university places, when the first awards of the new A* grade at A Level were made. Sir Martin Harris, director of the government's Office for Fair Access, warned that the new grade could strengthen private schools' grip on elite universities (The Guardian 2 August 2010). His anxiety was justified: according to the Independent Schools Council, 18 per cent of entries from independent schools were awarded an A*, compared with a national average of 8 per cent (The Guardian 28 August 2010).

In his first major speech on universities, Vince Cable outlined plans to abolish tuition fees and replace them with a graduate tax which students would pay when they finished their degrees. He said the plan - which he insisted was only an option - would inevitably result in some students paying more (The Guardian 15 July 2010).

Browne Review

In November 2009 Lord Browne had been asked by the New Labour government to lead an independent panel

to review the funding of higher education and make recommendations to ensure that teaching at our HEIs [higher education institutions] is sustainably financed, that the quality of that teaching is world class and that our HEIs remain accessible to anyone who has the talent to succeed. (Browne 2010:2)

The report was based on six principles:

• more investment should be available for higher education;
• student choice should be increased;
• everyone who has the potential should be able to benefit from higher education;
• no one should have to pay until they start to work;
• when payments are made they should be affordable; and
• part time students should be treated the same as full time students for the costs of learning. (Browne 2010:4-5)

Tuition fees

During the general election campaign, Liberal Democrat candidates had toured university campuses telling students that the party would abolish tuition fees, and all Liberal Democrat MPs had signed a public declaration pledging themselves to vote against any rise in the fees.

Education minister Sarah Teather had repeatedly campaigned against tuition fees - even making them the subject of her maiden speech in the House of Commons in November 2003. And her leader, Nick Clegg, had appeared in a party election broadcast lambasting the other two parties for their 'broken promises'.

Yet by November, Vince Cable was proposing not just a rise but a tripling of fees to £9000 a year. The Liberal Democrat party was torn apart by the issue.

In the event, when it came to the debate on 9 December, some Liberal Democrat MPs (including Clegg, Cable and Teather) voted for the increase, some voted against, and others abstained. The measure was approved by just 21 votes.

Thousands of university students and school pupils took to the streets to protest. They were angry not just at the massive rise in fees, but also at the sheer dishonesty of the Liberal Democrats. One school leaver told Nick Cohen that he and his friends had been so convinced that Clegg and Cable were honourable men that they had not only voted Liberal but campaigned for them too: 'I believed them when they said they were the party for young people,' he said. 'I really believed them' (Cohen 2010).

After the vote, opinion polls suggested that support for the Liberal Democrats had fallen from 23 per cent in May to around 8 per cent, their lowest showing for decades.

Education maintenance allowance

In the run up to the election, Gove had denied that he would scrap the £30 a week education maintenance allowance (EMA) paid to 16-19 year olds from poorer families who stayed in education. He had told The Guardian: 'Ed Balls keeps saying that we are committed to scrapping the EMA. I have never said this. We won't.'

Yet in October's comprehensive spending review he reneged on that promise: EMA was scrapped (The Guardian 25 October 2010).

Education White Paper

The government's education white paper The Importance of Teaching was published on 24 November. It declared that:

what is needed most of all is decisive action to free our teachers from constraint and improve their professional status and authority, raise the standards set by our curriculum and qualifications to match the best in the world and, having freed schools from external control, hold them effectively to account for the results they achieve. (DfE 2010:8)

• Teaching and leadership;
• Behaviour;
• Curriculum, assessment and qualifications;
• The new school system;
• Accountability;
• School improvement; and
• School Funding.

All schools, including special schools and pupil referral units, would be allowed to become academies. To address unfair variations in funding between schools, the long-term goal was a 'national funding formula' under which money would go directly from Whitehall to schools, rather than through the local authorities (DfE 2010:82).

The government would expect head teachers to take a strong stand against bullying - 'particularly prejudice-based racist, sexist and homophobic bullying' (DfE 2010:32). Teachers would be given the right to search pupils for harmful items, and allegations against teachers would not automatically result in their suspension (DfE 2010:34). Heads would have the right to exclude disruptive children 'and to be confident that their authority in taking these difficult decisions will not be undermined' (DfE 2010:32).

The government would no longer fund graduates who did not have at least a 2:2 degree (DfE 2010:20). The Teach First programme would be expanded, with members of other professions and former members of the armed forces encouraged to become teachers (DfE 2010:22).

Pupils would be prevented from taking large numbers of A Level resits, and the focus of the GCSE would be on the final exam. An English baccalaureate would 'encourage schools to offer a broad set of academic subjects to age 16' (DfE 2010:44).

Interestingly, Finland was frequently quoted in the white paper as one of the countries which had been the government's 'inspiration'. Yet not once did the paper acknowledge that Finland's schools were almost entirely comprehensive and unstreamed.

Neither did it explain how it would 'free our teachers from constraint' and our 'schools from external control', while at the same time forcing them to use a particular method to teach reading.

But those weren't the only concerns.

Peter Mortimore, former director of the University of London Institute of Education, was disturbed by the white paper's tacit acceptance of privatisation:

The concept of privatisation is not discussed in the white paper, but can be detected in its subtext - with frequent references to 'new providers', 'private sector organisations' and 'a new market of school improvement services'. Yet where is the evidence that a market-led system, run by hedge-fund managers and their ilk, will create an education system to equal Finland's? (Mortimore 2010)

The truth is that the entire curriculum is juju. Nobody knows its purpose. It is a miasma of archaism, bogus assumption, bland assertion and inertia. Nobody assesses what is a sensible way of spending a day, week or term. Nobody thrashes out the appropriate balance of vocational and educational, preferring to leave politicians to decide on the basis of 'what was good enough for me'. Almost everything taught to children is forgotten. The waste of money, time and talent must be stupendous. Yet we sail happily on, gazing over the stern and marvelling at the wake trailing behind. (Jenkins 2010b)

Coalition?

At the start of this chapter I put the word 'coalition' in inverted commas because it seemed to me that this was effectively a right-wing Tory government propped up by leading Liberal Democrats who were totally out of touch with their grassroots members. Nothing I have seen or heard in the past seven months has persuaded me to remove those inverted commas.

And sadly, Labour politicians are in no position to criticise, since the Tories' policies on academies, free schools and university tuition fees are no more than extensions of New Labour's - albeit on a grand scale.

In conclusion

This history has focused on the long struggle to create for England's children an education system which values them all. It has, in many ways, been a sad story.

In the 19th century there was hostility to the very idea of mass education and, when that argument was eventually won, the system which evolved was based on the entrenched class divisions of English society.

In the first half of the 20th century the divisions continued, only now they were presented as being based on theories of intelligence rather than on social class.

By the middle of the century these theories had been shown to be spurious, and for a brief spell - in the 1960s and early 1970s - it looked as though, finally, England might get a truly comprehensive public education service.

But since 1976 (when Callaghan gave his Ruskin College speech and started the 'Great Debate') the trend has been back to division and elitism.

Thatcher and Major sought to replace public service with market forces.

Blair created more division with academies and faith schools, and micromanaged the teaching process itself.

Under Gordon Brown, Ed Balls tried to take a holistic view of the needs of children but refused to undo the damage done by his predecessors.

And now we have Cameron and Gove, determined to destroy the local authorities and break up England's schools. Will a recognisable state system of education even exist five years from now?

Stewart Ranson, emeritus professor at Warwick University, comments:

Over the past 20 years the neo-liberal agenda of choice and competition in schools has undermined public education. When the present contradictions finally implode, the nation will need a Royal Commission that leads a national conversation to rebuild education based on justice. Education should not depend on power and wealth, but on recognising that extending all the capabilities of all children is the nation's first public good. (Ranson 2010:158)

References

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