Newsnight on education: What did it really achieve?

By Jim Sweetman / @Jimbo9848

Billed as the first big pre-election policy debate, Jeremy Paxman’s excursion into the world of maintained education – something which he clearly does not know a lot about – was a bit of a disappointment. In iconic terms, the appearance of a polystyrene food container in front of the presenter Justin Rowlat which might or might not have contained some kind of burger was only matched by the political commentator being sat in a Victorian Ragged School exhibit and educational spending being represented on an abacus. Considering how much of the debate centred round the modernisation of the school system, it would have been a good idea to show what modernisation looked like.

A BBC poll provided some spurious objectivity. Basically, about a third of people thought that education had quite a good record under Labour since 1997 and two-thirds thought something else. However, a lot of people thought that life would not be better under the Conservatives for schools. Given that about one third of the population have been involved in schools as parents or pupils during that time you could argue that these are creditable figures. Then, there was a Monty Pythonesque intervention about international standards and the fact we are now less literate than the Belgians.

Jeremy Paxman raked up some old stories mostly about ‘company bosses’ (do chairmen, managing directors and chief executives still describe themselves in this way?) who find themselves employing people who can’t read or write properly, can’t add up and can’t be bothered to turn up at work on time. It is hard to say whether these apocryphal executives actually exist but if they do they should surely have realised that the people who they used to employ in manual, and unskilled tasks have now got a couple of GCSEs and gone to college. They are currently accessing a different and lower level of the achievement strata.

Conservative policy was represented as giving headteachers the freedom to expel pupils (as if they didn’t have that already) and to ban mobile phones (which have huge potential for learning according to most experts) while allowing groups of parents to open Swedish Free schools. There is something about Swedish and Free which does not sit easily with Conservative Party values and there seemed to be a fair bit of evidence to show that these schools were not actually much good. Undeterred, Michael Gove said what he really meant were the American charter schools which appear, from an outsider’s point of view, to achieve success by being situated in gentrifying areas and by setting entry and support requirements which only the most aspirational and middle-class parents can meet. Where they are successful, they are in the business of creaming off but no-one wanted to talk about selection. Michael Gove also got a bit confused in saying that he wants his free schools to have curriculum autonomy while the rest of the system does lots of English, mathematics and imperial history.

The token teacher didn’t do too badly and he stood up to the token industrialist, Claude Littner, who got where he got to by almost being Alan Sugar. The token headteacher, William Atkinson, made the point that if you let anybody and everybody set up their own schools it was going to cost you a lot more money rather than less and it didn’t make much sense in an era of dwindling resources.

Jeremy Paxman got a bit grumpy at this point and did the bad teacher bit by telling everyone to be quiet so he could speak and Michael Gove made a dodgy joke about people being congratulated by King Herod for their child protection policies.

Then, there was a section about ‘what is education really all about?’ The not unexpected conclusion was that it was about giving young people opportunities and the capacity to learn as they went into adulthood. The point of this diversion was to allow Terence Kealey from the University of Buckingham to have a quick snipe about cultural transmission and how the English in Victorian times were more literate than anyone else in the world without a maintained school system. It looked as if Prince Charles was about to turn up and congratulate the public school chaps for putting the oiks in their place but unfortunately that was the end of the programme.

Just at the close, Ed Balls managed a neat summary confirming that Labour would spend more this year, more next year and more the year after that, whereas the Conservatives would simply spend less and less apparently sustaining teachers in classrooms by cutting every other bit of support imaginable.

All in all, it wasn’t a very good debate. If it had been an English lesson, Jeremy Paxman would have got a middling grade as chair for having an ill-conceived idea of the topic, asking bizarre questions and not controlling the panel – but then it was only a couple of weeks ago in the Guardian when he denied that he was part of the ‘establishment’ and refused to answer questions about whether he sends his children to private schools. That is his choice but maybe he could be better informed. I still don’t know why the burger was there, so perhaps Jamie Oliver should present the next big education debate.