Daily Mail, July 15 2002

Once upon a time, Chancellors of the Exchequer were merely keepers of the public purse. So far as the spending ministries were concerned, the role of the Treasury was to dole out taxpayers’ booty for departments of state to spend as they saw fit.

No longer. Gordon Brown has ripped up that script and written himself a new one.

As Chancellor, he bestrides the political stage like a colossus. His record as steward of the nation’s finances is largely unchallenged. He arouses widespread admiration for his intellect and the integrity of his beliefs.

Today, he is expected to dish out untold largesse to rapturous spending ministers, particularly the Education Secretary Estelle Morris. Labour backbenchers are sighing with relief. Now at last, they think, the Chancellor is riding to the rescue of the beleaguered public services with his pockets stuffed with money.

In fact, the more cash Brown hands out, the more muscle he puts behind his own agenda to change the face of British society. For crucially, he is controlling how the money is spent to an unprecedented degree.

Brown knows better than most that money doesn’t produce reform. In education, for example, spending has risen threefold in real terms over the past 40 years. Yet skills in reading among one in five adults and in numeracy among nearly half of all adults are still below the standard expected of 11 year-olds.

The Chancellor is rightly concerned lest all the extra money disappears into a series of black holes with no discernible improvements. So the government is unleashing a battery of ‘reforms’ to which funds will be tied through ever more numerous targets and performance indicators.

This whole approach, however, is doomed to fail because the ideological aim of the strategy itself is fundamentally flawed.

That aim is no less than the old Labour dream of redistributing wealth and achievement between rich and poor. In a private speech two months ago, Brown delivered a tirade against elitism, private education and the privilege of birth: the rhetoric, in short, of class war that Tony Blair has tried so hard to excise from his party.

It is perfectly true that poorer people are now much less able to get to university, and less likely to escape backgrounds of deprivation. That should indeed worry all of us who have the interests of the whole of society at heart and feel an obligation to the most vulnerable.

But what the government refuses to face is that its own strategy of egalitarian social engineering is a major factor behind the stagnation of the poor. Nowhere is this more starkly demonstrated than in education policy.

In a meritocracy, where ability is rewarded, education is the route out of disadvantage. But since this also creates losers, egalitarians are hostile to meritocracy and want instead to impose equality of outcomes.

This means that - however they may rant against privilege — they are actually against rewarding ability. Instead, they squash poor, able people into universal mediocrity in which they are trapped (while themselves taking care to live in areas with good schools, or paying for private tuition on the side).

Labour’s deepest core belief is in equality of outcomes. So it is incorrigibly wedded to that engine of egalitarian social engineering, the comprehensive school.

This has in fact been a disaster for the poor. Some 25 per cent of comprehensives get worse results than secondary moderns in our remaining selective areas. In Northern Ireland’s selective system - now threatened by Sinn Fein’s policy of revolutionary nihilism — more poor children get five good GCSEs and go to university than in mainland Britain.

The government has now acknowledged that the comprehensive school has failed. Yet it will not replace it. Instead, it will introduce inequalities within the comprehensive system through increasing ’specialist’ schools.

These do better than ‘bog-standard’ comprehensives, not least because they probably attract children from higher-motivated families. But what happens if a child is not interested in art or music or technology? How many develop such an aptitude at age 11 anyway? This is a means of further restricting choice for children who need, above all, a school that is excellent all round.

The damage done by egalitarianism has also all but destroyed what children are being taught, with the government eroding knowledge still further and replacing it with ’skills’.

At 14-plus, the curriculum is now poised to abandon compulsory modern languages and geography for lessons in tourism, manufacturing and leisure. The government is undermining teaching itself through its batty desire for children to ‘take ownership of their learning’, part of the rubric of the ‘child-centred’ education orthodoxy which has abandoned generations of children to drown in their own ignorance.

Similarly, the Department for Anti-Education has proposed that ‘thinking skills’ be taught independently of subjects, even though pupils only learn to think by engaging with knowledge. This, we are told, will help pupils ‘form rich images of problem situations in multiple modalities’-the kind of gobbledegook we can expect to be the norm once the government has destroyed altogether people’s ability to think.

The result of all this educational vandalism is to kick away the ladder of opportunity for the poor. To conceal this wickedness, the government is rigging all the benchmarks to give the illusion of progress.

The literacy strategy is deeply flawed, with teachers delivering a catastrophic confusion of methods to teach reading. The strategy’s ’success’ is bogus; there is widespread cheating in the SATS, so it is hardly surprising that achievement among new secondary school pupils appears to take a dive.

At GCSE and A-level there is rampant grade inflation. Who can doubt the growing worthlessness of exams when, despite the fact that 45 per cent achieve grade C maths at GCSE, a study of 400 trainee teachers showed that 42 per cent of them could not multiply eight minutes 25 seconds by eight?

There are now more A-level passes in business, communication or media studies than physics or history. Now children are to be bribed to stay on at school after 16. What is the point if they are merely going to do media studies? And what is to stop them just taking the money and running?

A really radical strategy to raise education standards would look very different. It would free schools from destructive local authority control and allow them to be genuinely diverse; abolish teacher training institutions that do untold ideological damage; withdraw political control from the exam system, so that teachers with a love of their subject can once again set syllabuses that educate and inspire; and introduce vouchers so that poor people can make the same choices for their children’s education as the rich.

Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown well understand that their project is worthless if education founders. But they have yet to grasp that their noble ideal of making education a lifeline for the poor is being destroyed, not by class war but by doctrines rampant in the education world and which lie at the heart of Labour ideology.