The ideology behind cutbacks in education

By Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848

Ask the man in the street about what is happening to schools and education and the likely response is that the front-line services are being preserved by the coalition, waste is not being tolerated and backroom economies are being made. It is not the whole picture. In this post-election honeymoon period, the knives are out to release the funding for new free schools and academies and to support the entrepreneurial end of education. The educational endeavour is being quietly, but specifically, restructured on ideological grounds.

So, last week’s apparently liberating news was that the International GCSE (IGCSE) would now be available to all schools. There is nothing specifically wrong with this certification except that it is more formal and rather narrower than the existing GCSE and it adds to the plethora of certifications at 16+ in an area where economies of provision would be helpful. However, the sting in the tail was that the requirement to give students an opportunity to study the new diplomas in all areas (known as lines) was removed. There were recognised problems with this requirement which would have involved some students travelling from school to college or from school to school. Outside cities that looked difficult and expensive to manage but what it means now is that snobby schools can simply cherry pick the diplomas (like ICT, Business Studies and Media) and teach them as quasi A-levels while packing off the more disadvantaged pupils to college courses. The sensible expectation for all children to follow a mix of academic and vocational courses will be thwarted once more. Despite the fact that we live in the 21st-century and are undergoing a revolution in how we deal with information and knowledge, the coalition, some schools and, for that matter, some parents still think that some knowledge is high status. At the same time they believe other knowledge is low status while assuming, in daily life and from a position of ignorance, that working people are simply out to con them.

We have also heard that the curriculum will be cut, reversing years of Labour bureaucracy and overlooking the fact that it was a Tory invention. The gut reaction is that it was due for a revision but in terms of dragging it into the 21st-century rather than taking it back to the 19th. Last week, the coalition was talking again about the facts we need to know – mostly famous events in British imperial history and characters in classic novels – and still stuck in taxonomies of knowledge rather than the skills that children need to set their questions, investigate and explore, evaluate, and share. At this stage, the new curriculum appears to be designed to equip children to read the Daily Mail.

Daily Mail readers are getting their own pat on the back for knowing that all this stuff about computers in schools is froth and we ought to get back to basics. A key grant, The Harnessing Technology Grant, last week had a chunk of money removed to help fund new schools and this week was further cut. It is a ring-fenced driver in financing technology in schools, including establishing broadband connections and learning platforms. BECTA, the quango that advised on this spending has already been axed so there is no one left to stand up for educational technology.

The school building programme (Building Schools for the Future) has also been cut. Almost any project that simply involved the modernisation of an existing school (and there were hundreds under way) has been stopped in its tracks. There will be renegotiations over planned academy rebuilds but the subtext here is that there will be less support for the use of academies to address school failure and more finance for outstanding schools which want new buildings. The architectural divides in education are being widened along with the social ones.

This liking for social division is evident in the £4 million expansion of the Teach First programme which brings top graduates from high status universities into teaching in challenging schools for a year after graduation. In some ways, Teach First has been a great success. The numbers have expanded and the teachers who are supernumerary to the staffing ratios in the schools where they teach provide a useful additional resource. Some of them go on to stay in teaching so it also draws some high-quality graduates into the profession. However, it raises questions about the future of teacher training in general and whether numbers can be sustained in the longer term. The programme is also being encouraged to develop an additional stage where its graduates (known as ambassadors) can move into school leadership and establish, as there are plans already in hand for, their own free schools. A scheme that encouraged graduates from top universities to work as nursing auxiliaries and to support the NHS for a year would be fine but offering them the chance to be surgeons is something that should worry the patients!

The same divide surfaces in new regulations which will give headteachers the right to search pupils for drugs and legal highs, alcohol, fireworks, pornography, iPods and mobile phones. There is no question that there is a lot of disaffection among older pupils in secondary schools and too much disruption but it is hard to see how this addresses the issue. Successful schools welcome pupil involvement and prefer peer regulation rather than increasing the stigmatising and marginalisation of those pupils who already achieve no significant outcome from ten or more years of formal education.

This coincidence of the architectural, the structural and the social is a worrying trend. It leads to exclusiveness, free schools and academies pretending to be grammar schools and the attitudes of the Harper Valley PTA. It makes prejudiced assumptions about knowledge and technology, marginalises poor schools in disadvantaged areas and excludes many disaffected pupils within them. While Ed Balls talks about school dinners, Diane Abbott defends the indefensible, David Miliband chips away at charitable status and Ed Miliband offers to refund tuition fees there is an insidious ideological revolution taking place in the DFE.