Letting the ideology show

By Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848

The coalition plans for an English Baccalaureate and new school League Tables reveal their real plans for schools.

One of the cleverer things (if that is the right word) about the coalition’s white paper on education is that the ideology is concealed beneath a sedimentary layer of waffle about giving schools and headteachers more autonomy. The running implication is that schools are currently buried under centralised control and bureaucracy. Only Michael Gove can set them free.

However, the freedoms are double-edged. So, schools will be free to set detention without notice but they will also have to pay the legal costs when some parent challenges their right to do it on the basis of child protection and human rights. They will soon be free to tear up pay and conditions documents and walk into another legal minefield without local authority support. If they are a free school they will be able to appoint unqualified staff as if that could possibly be a good thing. They will be free to choose what to teach except that they will have to teach a curriculum written by celebrity historians and committees of scientists and mathematicians who know precious little about learning let alone teaching. They will be free to make other changes but parents will also be free to oppose them and slimmed down governing bodies which are able to reconstitute themselves with more powers mean that headteachers will only be free if they do what that governing body wants.

That is a peculiar notion of freedom and autonomy which also finds expression in the establishment of free schools which are anything but in terms of cost, and in the traditional rules and the limited subject choices which they propose to introduce.

However, underneath this froth, concealed ideologies can often be spotted at the margins of policy where they surface almost accidentally and, last week, the English Baccalaureate showed what the coalition is really all about. In its white paper manifestation, the baccalaureate is bad enough. It is education policy rooted in snobbishness and gossip and under-researched. The assertion is that schools and, therefore, students have started taking lots of easy examination subjects so as to make sure that the school gets five good GCSE grades for more pupils. So, the argument goes, measuring them against their performance in difficult subjects will show which schools and pupils are genuinely doing well.

The argument about easy subjects is simply tosh. GCSE Chinese and Polish look like easy subjects because a lot of the people who sit the examinations do well in them. Neither is an easy examination, they are simply being taken by native speakers who value accreditation in their native tongue. A high percentage of pupils are also successful in Greek and Latin because only able pupils get entered in the subjects so they look easy too. There is a question mark over whether separate sciences are more difficult than combined sciences but the percentages of students who pass the different subjects are different for all sorts of reasons. Selective Grammar schools, for example, have tended to study separate sciences by tradition and, therefore, those examinations are, typically, taken by more able pupils. It is worth mentioning that there is nothing intrinsically good about separate sciences, the world of work and research is moving in the other direction. Then there is another discussion to be had about music and art where the disposition of the brain seems to play a part.

The coalition cannot face this sort of difficult debate so, although headteachers have lots of freedoms, the performance of their school is going to be measured by the English Baccalaureate, or EBacc, where they will be expected to enter students for GCSE English, mathematics, science, history or geography and an ancient language or a modern language so long as it is French, Greek or Hindi. There will be League Tables to show how schools perform against this new measure.

Of course, headteachers are free not to do this and they are also free to watch their schools plummet down these tables and be vilified in the right-wing press so they will feel compelled to fall into line. They will then have to put their efforts into achieving the best score possible against this new measure. So, vocational subjects, work-related learning, the expressive arts, technology, ICT and PE will all take a hit and the students who cannot make the grade will receive less support and will fail more spectacularly. Currently, around 20% of the school population leave school without any discernible certification. Under these plans, the figures are bound to rise.

Some people argue that this is a good way of levering standards, as if standards are somehow bound up with these unreformed GCSEs and some peculiar notion of an academic education where exploring science in one way has higher status than exploring it in another and where theory trumps practice and rote learning beats understanding. There’s no evidence for this and any enthusiasm for the change does not come from universities or employers.

However, schools are resourceful. Although they have been pushed to develop vocational education for the last ten years and asked to deliver sex education, citizenship, ICT, personal social and health education and religious education they can backpedal on that. Within a few years, they can recruit modern language specialists, of whom there is currently a severe shortage, revamp their curriculum models and move back up the tables.

That isn’t really what is wanted from the ideological perspective. What the coalition wants is to put a divide between the schools which deliver this kind of curriculum to high ability pupils and those which do not. It has nothing to do with aspiration but it has a lot to do with selection.

And, where does this ideological petticoat slip out from under the free school skirt? The answer came out last week. In 2011, the Department of Education will publish a retrospective league table ranking schools against these subjects in 2010. If your child chose technology or business education instead of history or geography, he or she simply doesn’t count. In the end, the league table will rank schools by whether they provided history, geography, and languages to all pupils and surprise, surprise it will turn out that the schools which do this are grammar schools and that will show that grammar schools are obviously best for everyone who gets into one – another false assertion.

These new topsy-turvy League Tables will be presented to parents as a guide to quality and choice and the schools will be permitted to expand at the expense of other local schools and, as always, that will involve selection because parents have to ask about admittance and provide transport to get there. And, if they are oversubscribed, it might even be fair for the schools to introduce a small test for applicants. Given the age of the students, it could easily be called the 11+.