Tory education: Lessons from history

By Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848

Do you remember when the Conservative Party was last running education? It is worth looking back in the run up to another election to what was happening back in 1996 and early 1997.

The UK spending on education was just under 5% of GDP, it is now nearer 6%. There were 12,000 fewer teachers and 100,000 fewer classroom assistants. Classrooms were more crowdedIt was reckoned that 30% of primary school classes contained more than thirty children. The local authorities were expressing despair about the state of their buildings. The Funding Agency for Schools which ran the grant-maintained system was looking into Private Finance Initiatives rather than public spending as a solution.

With an election in the offing, John Major kissed Gillian Shephard, his Education Secretary, on stage at the Tory Conference to show they were in full agreement on corporal punishment. The House of Commons backbench education committee, dominated by Conservative MPs, was trying to establish the right to beat children at school in spite of the fact that European legislation would not allow it. The eccentric MP Dr Rhodes Boyson, who had once been a head teacher and was nicknamed the “Minister for Flogging“, was able to support electronic tagging, more corporal punishment and expulsions for 10 to 15-year-olds. 12,000 students were excluded from schools in 1996 and black boys were more likely to be excluded than their white counterparts.

The political agenda was dominated by selection. Conservative plans in the autumn of 1996 included a white paper proposal that would allow grant-maintained schools (which had been allowed to break free of local authority accountability) to select 20% of their intake by ability. One of the Conservatives’ pre-election promises was a grammar school in every town which would take the brightest 20% of the local population. Presumably one reason why they lost the next election was because they were typically creating three secondary modern schools in the process.

Some odd things happened. Because these GM schools were outside local authority regulation and allowed to select their intake by ability they set their own – unregulated and different – admission tests. And, because they were selective, they drew an intake came from outside their localities, excluding local children and damaging neighbouring comprehensives in the process. Elsewhere, the Assisted Places Scheme which since 1981 had sent 70,000 pupils into private education was doubling in size from around 5000 pupils per year to 10,000. Another election pledge was to extend it to primary age children.

There was a lot of talk about vouchers and credits. There would be credits for anyone over 16 in education, to ensure that some people would have to pay, and an elaborate and complicated process was being sorted out for nursery vouchers. Nursery vouchers were piloted in Norfolk and even the Conservative local authority reckoned that the £1 million it cost to operate the system could have provided 300 extra school places.

There was a major spat about the teaching of reading in London boroughs. A report which was generally considered to be fair, and which acknowledged the difficulties London primary schools faced, was worked over by Chris Woodhead of OFSTED and John Major so that the published version was extremely critical of the London boroughs. It was a political intervention designed to subvert education in London in advance of the election. Chris Woodhead was causing trouble elsewhere with the continuing fallout from the 1995 BBC Panorama programme which claimed that 15,000 teachers were incompetent and there were questions being asked about his right-wing think tank pamphlets and the influence of Downing Street and the Highgrove set on what was meant to be an impartial process of school inspection.

There was also talk of a new information superhighway. Tony Blair did a neat deal with British Telecom who offered in advance of the election to agree to link schools and colleges free of charge in return for a monopoly. Michael Heseltine was stung into agreeing to use lottery money to do the same thing. That debate barely seems relevant today. It is another sign of how much things have changed but, as any teacher will tell you, it is important to remember the lessons of the past.