Daily Mail, October 24 2005

The education White Paper, which is being published tomorrow, has clearly been the subject of a titanic battle within the Government.

Over the weekend, we learned that the Prime Minister’s wish to give independence to state schools by enabling them to opt out of local authority control had been the target of a Cabinet revolt led by the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott.

This followed earlier reports that the proposal was being resisted by the Education Secretary Ruth Kelly herself, with yet further elements being opposed by the Treasury and Education Department officials.

After eight years in government, Mr Blair is still struggling to produce the education policy he wants. This is because, despite the claim that New Labour decisively broke with its class-war past, education is Labour’s real Clause Four. Thus Mr Blair’s dinosaur deputy is still spitting primeval resentment against the middle classes, elitism and the public school ethos.

One-size-fits-all schooling remains totemic for the Labour Party in the cause of equality of outcomes — and to hell with the fact that this has wrecked the education of millions of pupils and the life chances of the most disadvantaged, who depend utterly upon school and who have been systematically abandoned to mediocrity and worse.

If the leaks are true, the White Paper should be applauded for taking on the implacable alliance of educationists, MPs, lobbyists and civil servants responsible for this betrayal.

For example, it appears that it will repudiate mixed-ability teaching — the doctrine that took an axe to both achievement and order in the classroom by preventing teachers from tailoring lessons to the needs of their pupils — and will demand that schools restore the grouping of pupils by ability.

But as ever with this Government, the reality is likely to be less than the spin. The warring factions may be going to the barricades over a proposal which owes more to symbolism than substance. The independence being offered to state schools may be merely illusory.

There is no doubting Mr Blair’s long-standing — and long-thwarted — desire to remove from schools the dead hand of local government. But he intends to retain, and even extend, central government control by telling them what to do.

Look at the proposal to introduce ability tests at age 11 so that comprehensive schools recruit a proper cross-section of ability and don’t end up either as the preserve of better-off families or the very poor.

The Government says it wants to end the current dodge of school selection by house price. And yes, it is invidious that the better off have been able to play the system by moving into the catchment area of good schools, while paying lip-service to the comprehensive ideal.

But the problems of schooling are not simply caused by this imbalance in the intake of comprehensive schools. They have been caused by the comprehensive school itself which intrinsically collapses achievement into mediocrity in the cause of producing equality of outcomes, penalising merit on the basis that the most important thing is not to hurt anyone’s feelings if they don’t succeed.

It is this which, more than anything else, has driven our education system off the rails. Yet the Government still remains wedded to this ideology.

Thus it still refuses to give schools the independence to become academically selective. All they will be able to do is to improve upon the sole type of school permitted by the Government.

Parents’ choice of school will still be tightly controlled by Whitehall. Indeed, the Government is said to be proposing that pupils should be bussed out of their neighbourhood to ensure that schools obtain a better academic and social mix — although Ruth Kelly insisted yesterday that no one would be forced to go to schools they didn’t want to attend.

It is hard to square this pious assertion with her reported intention to ensure that every school takes pupils from the full range of ability. This must surely mean that some children will indeed be forced to travel farther afield to find a school with spare places in the appropriate ability band.

Far from extending choice, this will mean that while some children are bussed to better schools, others will be forced to travel miles away to inferior ones. This would be grossly unfair to individual pupils, and would represent an oppressive use of state power.

It is also particularly obnoxious given that so many Labour ministers, including Mr Blair himself, have played the system for years by transporting their own offspring across London to avoid sending them to the local sink school — even though, according to what they are now saying, it is only by forcing middle-class children into such sink schools that they will improve.

As a further egregious example of such double standards, the London Oratory, the Catholic comprehensive to which the Prime Minister sent his two sons despite its location on the other side of London, has been given special dispensation to flout the Government’s own rules and continue using selection interviews.

These are ostensibly to assess applicants’ commitment to Roman Catholicism but are suspected of being used to favour promising candidates. While there is nothing wrong with the Oratory being able to select whomever it likes, it is surely invidious to allow this one school to do so while preventing others from doing the same.

There is more than a whiff in all this of the old Soviet nomenklatura, who provided themselves with a luxury lifestyle while inflicting an equality of misery on the unfortunate proletariat in whose name the revolution had taken place.

If Ms Kelly really wanted to give the poor the same power as the better-off, she would introduce a voucher system to enable all parents to buy education in the school of their choice — both in the state and the private sector — as happens in several European countries where it has created true variety in school provision.

Instead of expanding choice in this way, she is proposing to move pupils around within the limited alternatives that exist at present. The Government is thus merely rearranging the pieces of the jigsaw to produce a pattern that it prefers. But it is its use of education in this way as a form of social engineering that lies at the core of our education meltdown.

The fact is that school independence and parental choice will always be fought tooth and nail by this alliance of educationists and political ideologues.

This is because such developments would not only remove their power to re-shape society, but more pertinently still would threaten their livelihoods as parents voted with their feet against the manifold incompetence of failing schools.

But it is only if parents are given this supremely mind-focusing power to hold educational feet to the fire that there is any prospect of challenging the destructive and idiotic educational fads that have hollowed out British education and left so many children stranded.

Ultimately, this is a failure of prime ministerial will properly to confront the lethal ideology that passes for radicalism on the Left.

Whatever proposals finally make it, therefore, into tomorrow’s White Paper, our education system is likely to continue to crumble — and with it the future health and prosperity of this country.

Posted by melanie at October 24, 2005