Back to school

By Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848

Michael Gove was going to hit the ground running as education secretary in the new coalition. He was quick to change the name of the department and to close down half its website but those were the easy wins and only last month at least one survey was finding him to be the lowest performer in a low performing cabinet. So, what went wrong and what happened to all these essential reforms?

The Academies Bill which was rushed through parliament like emergency legislation has been an unmitigated disaster. The notion that high performing schools could suddenly become academies set free from local authority control and OFSTED inspection made good copy for the right-wing press but didn’t make much sense to anyone else. Even on the department’s optimistic figures only thirty schools have taken the plunge and fewer than 150 are likely to be established by Christmas (there are 25,000 schools). The main reason is that, in practice, local authorities have a light touch where successful schools are concerned. The bureaucracy, regulation and the form filling which schools sometimes complain about stems almost entirely from central government requests. And, of course, because these schools are successful they have fewer worries about OFSTED inspection anyway.

Bribery didn’t help either. Despite the mantra that massive cuts in public spending were inevitable, secondary schools which enquired about academy status in the summer were telephoned by DFE civil servants and offered cash to oil the decision-making wheels. It says much for the values of the maintained system that so many refused. However, there is still confusion and many schools are still waiting to see which way the wind blows. If their neighbourhood schools seek to change status they may feel compelled to follow suit. That makes governors and head teachers edgy and causes unrest and uncertainty in schools which is just what you need to lower standards at the start of a new school year.

There is more troubling uncertainty over the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme and the infamous lists which were issued almost ten times before the department finally got them right. Many cities and schools were disappointed which will be good for Labour in next year’s local elections but, worse, a whole set of decisions were left in the air. Again, bad off-the-cuff leadership simply created resentment over the schemes which were suddenly cut and uncertainty over the future of many others. If the investment in new schools was simply unaffordable why not suspend the programme pending a proper detailed review? The answer of course is that that would not have grabbed the headlines in quite the same way.

The free school debacle was another attempt to get some column inches. Letting parents and other groups open their own schools sounds like loosening up a restrictive market but, as with the academies, the need for this was assumed and not researched. The American experience shows that in areas which are gentrifying (like some London suburbs are) a new private school which requires applications and peddles implicit admission criteria relating to parental support, discipline and exclusion will attract a particular class of parents who don’t want to be associated with the ‘old’ residents and culture. Of course, these schools cause damage to existing schools which are struggling to improve but it is possible to see the parental point of view while recognising its selfishness.

However, going on to legislate in favour of selfishness also opens the doors to religious extremists, creationists and cranks. It has also had the effect of stopping sensible school reorganisation in its tracks because any proposal to close even the smallest and uneconomic primary school is likely to be challenged on emotional grounds. That connects to another problem which Mr Gove appears to have overlooked. Academies which can expand willy-nilly and free schools create school places and surplus school places are one of the biggest areas of financial waste in all of education. Again, cost-cutting in one area is matched by a complete failure to appreciate the cost implications in another.

Some of the other trumpeted changes have simply fallen flat on their faces. The abolition of the GTC (General Teaching Council) is going to take much longer than planned and the department has now realised that some of its work will have to be done by someone else so that is on the back burner. The new primary curriculum was abolished so now no one is quite sure whether the old one still applies and QCDA which was the curriculum development agency is busy winding itself up. Expecting teachers to improve standards with half a curriculum is no way forward.

However, that will not stop Michael Gove. Still out of control, the department is proposing a white paper in October on the future of education before it has made up its mind about the curriculum, national testing and vocational education. Why? Simply because it wants to look busy and forward-looking as the Comprehensive Spending Review slashes education budgets and it wants to be able to divert attention from that by looking tough on discipline, school detentions and exclusion where talk is cheap.

Last but not least is the ‘Pupil Premium’, the Lib Dem consolation prize intended to support the most disadvantaged pupils; the 20% who leave education without any discernible qualification. The coalition want it to be different from other support and go on about it being more focused and targeted but they haven’t got a delivery mechanism so, in its first year, it will be distributed on the same basis as support for disadvantaged schools has been provided in the past. It isn’t really surprising that in the rush to introduce this new premium no one has yet worked out how to deliver it, let alone how much it is worth and how much it will cost overall and in that respect it is looking very much the part for one of Michael Gove’s reforms.