Daily Mail, 9 July 2004

When this Labour government first came to office, the promise that it said mattered more than anything else was to raise education standards. ‘Education, education, education’ was Tony Blair’s formula for ending poverty and disadvantage, destroying welfare dependency and improving the life chances of hundreds of thousands of children.

Seven years on, and what do we find? The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition reduced to squabbling over whether one in three or one in four children leaves primary school illiterate and innumerate.

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. What an extraordinary state of affairs, when our political leaders score points off each other by claiming rival rates of illiteracy and innumeracy that would shame many third world countries. What an indictment of a key government promise that has failed.

Yesterday, we were treated to Labour’s latest wheeze for education when Education Secretary Charles Clarke announced his unfortunately titled ‘five-year plan’ for more city academies and the expansion of over-subscribed schools.

These proposals are a tacit admission that after all the song and dance it has made about improving education standards, the government has failed. Not that you would have guessed this from the Prime Minister’s bullish presentation.

Yes, he acknowledged, the number of illiterate and innumerate primary schoolchildren was a scandal — but it was one he was putting right and the Tories had a cheek even to mention it. But it is surely Mr Blair who is guilty of the most bare-faced cheek. For there is something quite grotesque about boasting of a rise in education standards, when at least a full quarter of 11 year-olds still can’t read, write or count properly — and this in one of the most advanced industrialised democracies in the world.

Furthermore, it was actually the Tories who introduced the idea of literacy and numeracy hours — an idea almost derailed altogether in the early years of the Labour government and which ended up emasculated by the Education Department’s ineptitude, with the indifferent results we can now see.

Not only that, the improvement claimed by Mr Blair is itself deeply suspect, since in 1999, after disappointing results in school tests, the government actually lowered the pass mark. It is therefore impossible to say how much of this claimed improvement is real.

What we can say is that the government massaged the statistics to give the misleading impression of improvement, just as has happened over many years with GCSE and A-level grades. And then it has the gall to accuse the Tories of cheek!

The truth is that education standards across the board have continued to plummet. This dire situation was not created by this government. But its policies have exacerbated the problem — in particular, the blizzard of initiatives, targets and red tape it unleashed upon the teaching profession which pulled the hapless schools first one way and then another.

Sensitive to this charge, and terrified in particular by the likely appeal of the Tories’ policy of radical decentralisation and parental choice, Mr Clarke yesterday promised ‘freedom and independence’ for schools. But like so many New Labour policies, the spin is once again far greater than the substance. For it will not give schools much independence at all.

Yes, the more successful will be able to control their own budgets and bypass local authorities. But we have travelled down this road before, when the Tories introduced grant-maintained schools. That idea, which offered some respite from destructive local council interference, was fought tooth and nail by the Labour party. Now, lo and behold, in its desperation the Labour government is bringing it back.

But although such budgetary freedom is welcome, this will not give schools the independence they need. Local councils will still be sitting in judgment over their performance. And most important of all, these ‘independent’ state schools will still be forced to conform to the single most destructive ideological shibboleth of all — the refusal to entertain selection of pupils by merit.

Perhaps more than anything else, this fixation with the comprehensive idea and the total taboo on selection by merit has been the principal driver behind declining education standards. It was the abolition of the Eleven-Plus which removed the benchmark for primary schools and allowed them to introduce unrigorous ‘child-centred’ doctrines — an indulgence which left children unable to cope at secondary school.

Comprehensive teachers, faced with the impossible job of teaching children who couldn’t keep up, were all too vulnerable to educational fads which seemed to offer a way of achieving the impossible goal of equal results for unequally qualified children.

The outcome was that, to mask the accelerating disaster in schools, standards at GCSE and A-level were progressively lowered, and in due course university standards fell too. This was further exacerbated by the government’s obsession with giving more and more young people degree qualifications, which in turn became more and more meaningless and served to collapse education standards still further.

The government refuses to acknowledge this catastrophe. It refuses to admit that the reason so many 11 year-olds are illiterate and innumerate is directly related to its dogma that ‘all must have prizes’. Instead, it sneers at such concerns as ‘elitist’.

And as Mr Clarke demonstrated yesterday, it is still set on exactly the same anti-meritocratic course. Repeating the meaningless mantra that quality education must no longer be the ‘prerogative of the few’, it is refusing to allow its ‘independent’ state schools to do the one thing that would raise standards throughout the system — select pupils by merit.

Mr Blair believes that specialist schools amount to a radical reworking of the comprehensive idea. But although some specialist schools do escape the spiral of demoralisation, it is simply perverse to refuse to allow them to specialise in a curriculum tailored for the more able. Ministers say that selection discriminates against less academic children. But the truth is that selective systems raise standards across the board, and the abolition of the grammar schools has been the single greatest block on the advancement of disadvantaged children.

The government is also refusing to give parents real choice by allowing them to use state or private money to buy places at schools in either the state or private sector. But it is only by giving parents such financial leverage that the supply of different types of school will increase, thus providing the real alternatives that would drive up standards.

When it comes to what children are actually taught, the situation is even worse. For Mr Clarke has indicated that he will back the vacuous diploma being proposed by the Tomlinson committee as a replacement for GCSE and A-level — a move which is all about providing qualifications for all, however meaningless, and giving the appearance of more widespread achievement while actually emptying education of content still further.

Mr Clarke says his proposals amount to a ‘step-change’ in education. In fact, they are no more than a half-baked plan for giving the appearance of repairing the educational vandalism of the past half-century while actually continuing to wreak the same destruction.

After all this time, the government has not only failed to get education right, but is hiding behind tired platitudes and yet another round of dubious initiatives. It imagines it will win plaudits by claiming to reinvent the educational wheel. But the terrible truth is that most workable parts were stripped long ago from the school bus, and for all the government’s ever more frantic scheme it will not get it moving again.

Posted by melanie at July 13, 2004