Since James Callaghan launched a “great debate” about the future of education at Ruskin College in 1976, successive governments have made a thorough mess of our schools.
In their new book, About Our Schools, Tim Brighouse and Mick Waters date “the age of markets, centralisation and managerialism” to the speech, but I think it’s fairer to Callaghan to date the sharp turn rightwards from the arrival of Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street in 1979.
Brighouse, once Birmingham’s chief education officer, and Waters, a former director of curriculum at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, think it’s been pretty well a total disaster for schools. They’re right. Where I part company from them is the defeatism of their solution.
Schools became collateral damage in the war waged by central government on local government. In 1979, local education authorities (LEAs) ran schools. In 2010 LEAs were finally abolished. No one noticed because the government was running schools, having taken control of the purse strings, and it has further tightened its grip since then.
This left schools at the mercy of transient education secretaries, most of whom had their eyes on greater prizes than education. When they go to conferences, they arrive just in time to make their own speech and leave as soon as they have finished it. Mark Carlisle, Thatcher’s first education secretary, never expected the job, telling Brighouse and Waters: “I had no direct personal knowledge of the state sector, either as a politician, pupil or parent.”
So when national government took over from local government, all the fashionable management nostrums were flung at schools, all at once, as successive governments were seduced by the late Frank Dobson’s sarcastic syllogism: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done.”
Every so often, some minor matter would catch the eye of the current education secretary. No fewer than three, all Conservative as it happens, thought not enough Latin was taught in schools. They harrumphed and a few precious resources dribbled away as teachers scurried around trying to look as though they were doing something about it. One of these three, Michael Gove, then worked himself into a state about history teaching not being sufficiently patriotic.
Much more seriously, local schools were told to compete with each other, rather than collaborate as they had done in the soft old LEA days. Labour and Conservative governments went in the same direction on schools, though Labour funded them rather better. A market-led model of privileged schools, to be cosseted and given extra money, was created by Kenneth Baker in 1986 in the form of City Technology Colleges, rebranded in 2000 by David Blunkett as City Academies (later just academies).
Blunkett decreed that academies were to get their running costs direct from the government, bypassing the local authority, so that they could be fully independent. This would “allow them the flexibility to be innovative and creative in their curriculum, staffing and governance.”
About that time I published a book called The Great City Academy Fraud, in which I wrote: “Now, if such independence is a good thing, every school should have it. Why was it confined to academies?” Why indeed, Gove may have thought—every school should have these freedoms; and he rushed to give them out, amid cries from Labour grandees that this was never what they had intended.
Under Labour, academy chains—now called multi-academy trusts, or MATs—developed. Right now, academies and free schools make up 79 per cent of secondary schools and 38 per cent of primary schools, but in April 2021 the then education secretary, Gavin Williamson, signalled the endgame: “I want to see us break away from our current pick-and-mix structure of the school system and move towards a single model. One that is built on a foundation of strong multi-academy trusts.”
He added: “We know that schools benefit from being in a strong family of schools, in other words a multi-academy trust. MATs are powerful vehicles for improving schools—by sharing expertise, working collaboratively and driving improvements. It is living proof of the old adage, a problem shared is a problem halved.”
That, of course, is exactly why LEAs banded schools together. A series of politicians, from Baker to Blunkett to Gove, deliberately smashed that system up, and took decades to realise they needed something to replace it.
Brighouse regrets “the failure of myself and my contemporary education officers to persuade national governments that we in LEAs could be trusted to deliver improvements.” But he and Waters are political realists: “Given national government’s distrust of local government, we think that the MAT model—suitably reformed and developed—is the best way.”
But a local family of schools is better and more democratic than a remote academy trust, sometimes run by a church or religious zealot and sometimes by a business mogul. The old LEA model is dead, but why can we not have strong local organisations which are democratically accountable?
If people are no longer putting themselves up to be local councillors, and no longer bothering to vote in council elections, it is largely because councils do not seem to make a difference. But if there is one thing people care about, it is the education of their children. They are willing to put time, effort and thought into it—witness the thousands of unpaid school governors.
Many committed, knowledgeable people would want to be on directly elected bodies—let us call them local education councils (LECs)—whose job was to spend the education budget wisely and efficiently, to run the local school system, to ensure that every local school was successful and well run and allowed children to succeed, and which had real power to achieve this.
