Education and health have been the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of New Labour public service reform. The government has poured impressive sums into schools and the NHS, while submitting both to the rigours of inspection and "choice." But an interesting difference in the direction of reform has begun to appear. While government has slowly come to recognise that the priority for the NHS should be prevention, to reduce reliance on medical services, the opposite is true of education.
Nurseries and schools now carry an enormous burden of progressive ambition. Whether the problem is rising obesity, anti-social behaviour, falling social mobility, low voter turnout or racism, the government's instinct is to look to schools to fix it. Over the last six months, ministers have announced plans or mooted proposals to introduce Saturday schooling, to further improve school lunches, promote cookery classes and give more space to history—especially British history—in the curriculum. And this against a background of plans to establish Sure Start childcare centres in "every community" in England, increase state funding for early-years education (by 2010, every child over two will be entitled to 15 hours of free nursery care a week), dramatically extend after-school activities for older children, and open school playgrounds and other facilities up for local community use.
What we are seeing here is the convergence of a number of distinct developments. One has been the move of mothers into the workplace—a move actively encouraged by the government. The number of mothers in work has risen steadily since the 1970s, which has meant increased demand for subsidised early-years and after-school childcare.
At the same time, mounting academic evidence suggests that life chances are affected by events very early on in life. In its youth, New Labour made much of the importance of improving lifelong access to education, allowing people who had not grasped at opportunity early on to get a second chance later in life. But with studies showing that early-years (and even pre-natal) experience are crucial in shaping character and capacity, nursery care and schools have become the new frontier not only of the "welfare state" but the "opportunity state."
A third development has been a growing concern with tackling social exclusion or, what tends to be the same phenomenon, "problem" families and children. Social exclusion has, as Blair admitted in a speech to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in September, proved more intractable than Labour envisaged. Here again, school can make an enormous difference—as the IPPR's recent report, "Freedom's Orphans," shows, kids who attend structured after-hours activities in school do better than those who hang out at home, on the street or even in a youth club.
One final development might be added here. As church attendance has fallen, and many neighbourhood facilities closed or declined, so schools, especially primary schools, have arguably come to play an increasingly important role in sustaining community ties and local networks. Women, in particular, generate social capital in the process of attending PTA meetings, running primary school jumble sales and quiz nights, or chatting at the school gates or toddler drop-in. If government wants, as it does, to increase community bonds, schools look like a good place to begin. It is this thinking that has in part prompted moves to turn schools into something closer to community centres, offering not only education for children, but classes for adults, facilities for community groups, a playground for families at the weekend and in some cases a place where children and parents can make contact with a doctor, police officer and other public servants. Once, life revolved around church and chapel. Now it is being organised around nursery and school.
What should we make of this? By and large, the new expectations being placed on schools represent a reasonable reaction to the developments outlined above. Failure to provide better support for parents with young children looks in retrospect like one of the great shortcomings of the 20th-century welfare state. Yet there are risks. First, there is a danger of imposing too much of a burden on the schools system. Finding people with the skills to lead a large inner-city comprehensive has been hard enough. As schools take on new roles, the task becomes more difficult still. We should be thinking about ways of making the burden of leading schools easier, by better supporting headteachers, but also by making secondary schools smaller. There has been an almost unnoticed creep in the size of British schools. The number with more than 1,500 pupils has more than doubled in a decade, from 120 to 279. Yet evidence from the US, where there is much greater experimentation with small schools, suggests that small schools produce better outcomes.
Second, we have to look to options beyond school. Parents with "at risk" children need more support, whether in the form of parenting classes, training or help getting off drugs—though no one in government quarrels with that. It is arguable, however, that less attention has been given to the role of communities—or at least that we know less about how to build up a locality's capacity to help disadvantaged children. As sociologists like Robert Sampson have shown, the main thing that distinguishes poor areas with low rates of youth delinquency and crime from poor areas with high rates is that the latter lack friendship networks and active civic groups, and allow teenagers to hang out unsupervised. Informal support is arguably particularly important for at-risk children, because their parents tend to be distrustful of any official institutions. We need to extend schools, but not at the expense of building this extra-institutional civic capacity.
