Investment in schools works, but you need strings attached

The Oli De Botton Education Column

Last week the Office for National Statistics claimed that Labour’s investment in education over the past 12 years had led to virtually no ‘productivity gains‘. For all the money spent (over £30 billion) on teachers, teaching assistants, buildings and national programmes, we have only added an extra 2 GCSEs for each pupil.

Now of course this is just one report, replete with a complex and probably inappropriate statistical model. And although it would be wrong to reduce all educational success to exam results, 2 GCSEs per head is a considerable improvement. This is especially true when you consider that increases have been concentrated in the toughest schools and when standards were slipping before hand. However, we need to be more exacting in our analysis if we want to make a bigger impact in the future.

Some of the investment could have brought us more return for learners. The money spent on Building Schools for the Future, for example, has not always done enough to change learning and teaching practice. New buildings could have been the catalyst for ambitious school wide visions about inclusive and personalised learning, but in some cases have just papered over problems. We also could have been more creative with our designs so that more classrooms were set-up to accommodate skilled based and vocational learning.

Even on some of our more ‘reformist’ policies, there weren’t enough strings attached. On Academies, for example, we sought too little time investment from sponsors and we missed an opportunity to demand that all private schools become sponsors in order to keep their charitable status. These measures would have secured more expertise and could have begun to chip away at the private/state school divide.

So our years of investment have produced results and we have definitely made progress. But we have sometimes learned the hard way how difficult it is to achieve real and lasting change at the frontline.