Labour must recapture its reforming zeal

By Wes Streeting / @wesstreeting

Under the new admissions code, due to be published by the Department for Education, schools look set to be given the power to reserve places for children from low income backgrounds – so long as they are academies or free schools. The proposals have inevitably drawn criticism from education campaigners like Fiona Millar, who rightly argue that there should be a single admissions code for all state funded schools. But these proposals also tell us something about this government’s increasingly provider-centred approach to public service reform.

On a superficial level, the idea of enabling schools to reserve places for pupils from low income families – who are entitled to free school meals – is an attractive one. We know that school admissions have been increasingly open to manipulation by wealthier families who, with the best of intentions for their children, move into the catchment areas of the highest performing state schools. In my own London Borough of Redbridge, the high quality of our schooling is a large contributing factor to our rising population.

But the government’s proposals have more to do with propping up their flagship free schools and academies than creating equal opportunities for all. The ability to reserve places will be an optional enabling measure, rather than a statutory obligation. Should they choose to do so, academy and free school providers could stand to gain financially through the pupil premium, at the expense of local authority maintained schools. It would not be the first time that theg overnment has sought plaudits from progressive voices by leaking a policy rich with good intentions, but poor in terms of implementation and impact.

Teaching unions, charities and campaigners are lining up to demand that the admissions code should apply to all state funded schools, be they academies, free schools or local authority maintained schools. But Labour should be asking the government more challenging questions about its approach to public service reform. New Labour’s approach, though placing too much faith in market forces, was essentially about placing greater power in the hands of public service users – from parents to patients. This government’s approach to reform is top down and centred around providers. For all their talk of parent power and localism, the first free school to get the green light in Redbridge was instigated by E-Act, followed by a sham consultation with local residents and negotiations conducted almost entirely between the company and officials in Whitehall. The local authority had not role whatsoever.

If the government is serious about giving more power to parents, why not use the money being spent on new free schools and academies to allow the most successful state schools to expand? The current pressure on school places in many parts of the country, particularly inner cities, means that parents are rarely given a real choice about where to send their children and often find that even their preferences count for very little. Instead of placing the ability to reserve places for children from low income families in the hands of governing bodies, why not give the power to those parents by guaranteeing that their children will receive a place at their first or second choice school?

As their ‘reform’ agenda rumbles on, the Tory-led government will increasingly try to paint Labour as opponents of change and improvements to services. We cannot let that happen. The temptation to oppose government policies simply because they are bad must be resisted. We need to recapture our reforming zeal and point with pride to our radical record of reform in government and begin to construct a narrative for the next election that contrasts a Labour agenda for citizen power, localism and a real choice for all against the Tory agenda of top down privatisation. That does not mean we have to return to the worst excesses of marketisation, endless targets and top down reorganisations that came to characterise some of our reforms in government.

Establishing a single over-arching aim for public service reform that focuses a more strategic state, built on the bedrock of localism and greater people power, on narrowing the gap between the opportunities available to the richest and the poorest families would be a good start to building our alternative.