Big government is vital for getting the three Rs in place

The Oli De Botton Education Column

I want to stand up for big government. I want to do this because without top down central proscription and national programmes, we would not have made the progress we have done on literacy and numeracy over the past 12 years. And to be clear, I am not suggesting we nationalise our industries, or even that we try to micro-manage more of the education system. I am saying that if we care about fairer life chances for all pupils, we need to keep some things centrally planned and delivered.

In the first few years of New Labour, we introduced a national literacy strategy – big government par excellence. The centre told teachers what to do and when to do it. Advisors, employed by Whitehall, went around the country supporting and challenging practitioners to help kids read, write and count. We also measured and monitored progress with targets, tests and strict accountability regimes. Since then we have introduced programmes like ‘every child a reader‘, ‘every child counts‘ and one-to-one catch up tuition – all managed by our big government.

And the results? Not scores of teachers leaving the profession, or parents worrying about a lack of creativity, but instead great improvements in standards. By 2007, 10 and 14 year olds in England were significantly above average compared to the rest of the world – reversing historic trends. In Scotland where there was no central strategy, no attempt to drive up standards from the centre, achievement in the basics has gone the other way.

Now David Cameron and his ‘progressive’ sidekick Michael Gove think government is the problem, not the answer. We are told that in order to transform our schools we need the voluntary sector, parents and community groups to come on board and run schools. But let’s be serious for a moment. Even if all these organisations were skilled up enough to bring more diversity and excellence to the system, that would be nowhere near sufficient to deliver the outcomes we need. In practice, sometimes you need big government and national programmes to cajole and judge and assess in order to guarantee the things we care about.