White Paper: Black Future

By Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848

When the last Labour government confirmed the need for targets and key stage testing as progress measures and maintained the role of OFSTED to make it clear that standards were the first priority, it didn’t listen to teachers and it scored a spectacular own goal. It used measures like GCSE performances (where the awarding process was actually structured in such a way as to limit improvement) and key stage testing (where the assessment was hopelessly insecure) as the basis for its targets and was then surprised that the anticipated improvement was slower than expected.

It allowed OFSTED to define a successful school in terms of its demographics rather than its performance and to be so led by data that quality was lost sight of and then, to top it all, it got lost in bureaucracy trying to put things right by a succession of funding initiatives and paper requirements.

Against that background and in spite of it, schools improved. Most maintained schools are now highly effective organisations with the loyal support of their parents and communities. The buildings have improved, they are more secure and the quality of new teachers, of teaching and learning in the classroom, and of senior leadership has never been higher. Of course there are problems in some places because schools cannot entirely compensate for deprived and impoverished communities – whatever one might hope – and in such places they sometimes struggle. But, in overall terms, and like the National Health Service, education is appreciated by users but constantly sniped at by those who have minimal experience of schools or who are ideologically opposed to them.

With the Liberal Democrats, a party which naturally supported maintained education in opposition and with various pre-election pledges to maintain funding, schools should have been safe from the ravages of the coalition but they are not. They are perceived as not working effectively because standards haven’t risen fast enough and that has allowed Michael Gove to introduce a raft of changes which are going to allow schools to sink or swim and then to profit at the expense of their neighbours, against a background of limited opportunities and a reduction in support. This week’s education White Paper is an insidious ideological attack on the notion of education for everyone.

That purpose is hidden behind the unsubstantiated assertion that somehow schools are being held back by politically motivated local authorities, a curriculum with insufficient stretch, lazy teachers, poor discipline and easy examinations. The seductive message is that if headteachers are given the freedom to lead, if the local authorities are left with buses and special educational needs, if Simon Schama rewrites history, no one does modular exams and everyone has blazers and ties then everything will be fine.

This looks good to readers of the right-wing press and might not look threatening to many school governors partly because the current crop of headteachers have been extremely well-trained to national standards, the local authorities have increasingly delegated responsibilities to schools and it is time the curriculum was brought into the 21st-century. But look underneath this and what do you find? The schools being talked about here are in middle-class or aspiring areas. They are already successful in Ofsted terms and, as part of this deal, they can become academies and get additional funding taken from the local authority pot. They are encouraged to expand at the expense of other neighbourhood schools and they will soon be funded on a per capita basis so they will then have more to invest. The expansion can be implicitly selective even if that is only by the capacity of aspiring parents to drive their children to the school and they will not have to worry about extending foreign languages to all because after a lifetime of parental support interspersed with French holidays and exchanges the students will cope.

It is the school down the road – probably by the housing estate – which is going to take the hit. Without any agreement on admissions and numbers, this school will rapidly fall into a cycle of decline with decreasing funding. Its attempts to create a relevant vocational curriculum for the 70% of pupils in the school who are never going to achieve the Gove baccalaureate will go to the scrapheap along with diplomas. And, just to underline where the power lies, the middle-class school will soon be able to pay its teachers more and to poach the best teachers from its underfunded neighbour. Ofsted will frequently step in with hobnailed boots and threats and, once the school is completely on the skids, its more prosperous neighbour can offer a philanthropic federation and, essentially, take it over including introducing its blazers and ties.

In some ways, that is what Michael Gove wants but, of course, what he really wants a little further down the line is for the successful school to end up as a grammar school and the housing estate school to be a secondary modern. That is the ideological thrust as well as the inevitable outcome.

There are a lot of schools down roads by housing estates currently doing a good job for their students and communities and they are all under threat to varying degrees. Will they be saved by the Pupil Premium, new money which will follow poor pupils directly? No one knows yet at what level this will be pitched let alone how it will be delivered. If it goes to the benefit of every pupil currently entitled to free school meals it won’t be a lot of money. However, it might be reasonable to assume that it will come into schools at about the same time that the housing estate school is being federated and it will then be absorbed in the budget of the larger new school to, in the words of Michael Gove, improve the life chances of the poorest young people. Unfortunately, this will include failing an attractive range of non-modular GCSE examinations.

Meanwhile, the school up the road can also become a Training School with a significant and funded role in initial teacher training. Then, it can recruit ex-service personnel to become teachers and use them to introduce more discipline to control the disaffected pupils who don’t have any more vocational courses to keep them interested and probably think that Simon Schama is a range of hair products.

The White Paper may be white but the future is increasingly dark.