The schools of the future

By Jim Sweetman

The new school year starts in a couple of weeks and it will be impossible not to notice the impact of the latest round of swingeing cuts to services and support. The financial cuts are going to bite much more deeply into teachers pay and conditions, the provision of teaching assistants, and extended services including music tuition and outdoor pursuits.

However, there are other significant changes to the education landscape which, in the longer run, could do more damage. We are beginning to see the full force of the coalition’s ideological attack on a maintained system of education which is free to everyone, provides a common entitlement and offers the chance to develop each person to his or her full potential.

The academy sector is a good example. An uncontroversial change for many commentators, academy status is a reward for good performance accompanied by a £25,000 bonus, or possibly a bribe, for changing status and decoupling local authorities and, implicitly, local politicians from education.

One significant feature about academies is that they do not have to follow the national curriculum. That could have been a real asset in many disadvantaged areas where the disaffection among the young which contributed to the recent rioting has been encouraged by a 5-16 curriculum which appears to have minimal relevance to either their lives or their prospects. When you talk about the curriculum outcomes of GCSEs as a gateway to further education, it is worth remembering that about 20% of students each year have no discernible qualification when they leave school and another 20% or more fail to cross the further education entry hurdle of five good passes. It goes without saying that these students are found in pockets of social disadvantage. Unfortunately, the indications are that the academies will aspire to be more academic than the predecessor schools were and will be tailored less to the needs of their students. In ideological terms, although there are many good schools in this sector, they are a key driver in fragmenting educational opportunity and may override local needs.

The free schools do the same. The first cohort of the new schools will be opening in odd premises with small numbers and lots of media razzmatazz. Philosophically, it has never been made clear whether they are meant to be trailblazers for new ideas, for example offering wraparound childcare, or backward looking institutions based on someone’s nostalgic idea of what schools used to be like. Sadly, it looks as if the latter view is likely to dominate. Uniforms which mimic the independent sector are a clear hint that the timetable, policies and strategies will do the same.

Another trend is the development of what have come to be known as school chains. These are groups of schools which operate with a central administration, a shared ethos and prospectus and a common curriculum. Although they can be geographically widespread, the organisation reflects the way that a local education authority used to operate with its own Inspectorate and support teams.

From a management perspective, such schools make some sense and some of them have excellent track records but one has to be careful about how others have been used to promote evangelism and fundamentalism. There is something worrying about the way a school can change its status in this way often by giving staff and parents very little choice but the justification is that since we have always had religious schools in England this is simply a broadening of the sector. However, if the effect is to diversify education in the name of choice, it is worth thinking about who has the choices.

Along with the shakeup of the school system, there are other pressures. The main accountability measures for schools are still key stage two SAT tests and examination passes in secondary schools but the way they are being used is changing. Schools which do not meet the floor targets set by government are liable to lose their rights to self-determination and can be compelled into federations with other, allegedly, more successful schools.

Accountability is not unreasonable but pernicious outcomes in education can damage children and their prospects. The key stage two tests are notoriously unreliable except in areas where education outcomes are seen as obviously measurable. That makes mathematics testing appear fatuously reliable, science look dull and English is reduced to spelling tests and fill in the gap tasks. The tests, as even the government’s adviser Lord Bew has recognised, do not reflect good learning and in small schools, where one or two pupils can skew the percentages, they do not reflect school progress or achievement. Now, a bad year can threaten the status of a school and a change in social demographics over a couple of years could finish it off.

In secondary schools, performance standards are tightly linked to how wealthy and socially advantaged the parents are. Education can make a difference but it is a myth that a common system imposed nationally can cure social ills. That requires long-term systematic community intervention and the need for that has increased (and the funding has been reduced) as global economics, local housing policies and the aspirations of the more privileged have created deeper sinks of disadvantage. The great majority of underperforming secondary schools as defined by these measures are actually well supported by parents who recognise them as oases of calm and safety in challenging communities. The last thing they need is to be taken over by some outside group or organisation without any understanding of the day-to-day problems they face.

The coalition is currently stacking the odds against these schools in other small ways. Modular examinations which give students a chance to achieve as they learn are being quietly abolished in favour of the traditional final exam which, as everyone knows, benefits the swots from supported homes with a quiet place to learn and keep notes, internet access for crib sheets and a shared family understanding of what is required. It seems perverse to give the children who currently are the most advantaged an additional bonus.

Also, the introduction of the so-called English baccalaureate or Ebacc which is a measure of a school’s performance at GCSE English, mathematics, science, humanities and a foreign language has been done with the ideological intention of creating a new divide between what might be termed academic education and the advances in vocational education of the past twenty years.

Courses in ICT, technology, business and employment related opportunities are devalued by this measure which, however you look at it, asserts that the old-fashioned subjects are best. We are now moving into a situation where schools are going to change their curriculum frameworks to chase grades in this limited range of subjects whatever the impact is on students more generally.

The coincidence of structural changes, shifts in ownership and control, accountability and performance measures reflects a new ideology. And, for those who think that this is simply a root and branch review of education as Michael Gove would argue, it is interesting to note that the coalition is including Latin and Greek as it excludes ICT…