Education in the firing line

By Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848

Everyone knew that education was going to be one of the first targets in the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition’s attempts to make £6 billion a year of public savings. The onslaught is already under way with a leaked e-mail from David Bell, the top departmental civil servant in the new Department for Education, instructing a whole range of educational organisations and quangos to make no new announcements, sign any contracts or publish policy documents. The Building Schools for the Future work has also been put on hold.

The re-badging of what was previously known as The Department for Children, Schools and Families as simply the Department for Education along with the abolition of its rainbow logo might be seen as sensible rationalisation in hard times but Michael Gove is not a supporter of Children’s Trusts, of Children and Young People’s Plans or, in the wider context, of Pupil Voice in schools. Initiatives to encourage healthy eating and more exercise, breakfast and after-school clubs and sports and leisure strategies now look marginal. The declared intention to refocus on teaching and learning is not the same as declaring that every child matters, and this Conservative notion of education sounds rather like something which is done to people rather than engaged with.

Thus far, the rhetoric has been about raising standards, but parental choice and improving discipline have moved up the list of priorities. Parental choice means new schools opened by parents and charities and, with a nod in the direction of the Liberal Democrat partner, smaller class sizes. It means allowing any successful school to be allowed to turn itself into an academy – by September 2010 according to the Conservative election pledge.

There is a devious ploy at work here. The Liberal Democrat commitment for £2.5 billion of additional expenditure as part of the so-called pupil premium to reduce class sizes and limit inequalities can now be diverted into opening new semi-private schools which, incidentally, have smaller classes.

The coalition is creaking here, already. It is unclear what the role of local authorities will be in respect of the new academies. Both the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives supported the expansion of the programme, but the Liberal Democrat manifesto argued for local authority control while the Conservative Party has talked about cutting schools free from local authority shackles and bureaucracy. Headteachers may say they want to be cut free but, of course, they do not want to run their own bus services, make special arrangements to cope with disabilities, fund the continuing professional development of their teachers or have responsibility for excluded pupils. They want someone else to do that! Locally, Labour has to interrogate the cracks in these proposals.

It is worth noting that these new policies will not be cheap in an era of financial restraint. Nationally, there is not a shortage of primary school places which is where these new schools are most likely to emerge. And, anywhere where the school system is being rationalised as in, for example, moving from three tiers with middle schools to a primary and secondary model it will be all too easy for schools threatened with closure to stay open and disrupt the reorganisation programme. Surplus places in schools are likely to become a significant problem. Also, the secondary schools now queuing up to become academies remember the generous funding of the grant-maintained sector in the early 1990s, but if they get more funding and new schools get more funding then the bog standard moderately achieving comprehensive is going to take a significant hit.