Daily Mail, 18 January 2006

The double crisis at the Education Department was last night threatening to engulf the Government altogether. The unresolved scandal over sex offenders who had been cleared to teach in schools appears to have brought to a head the separate crisis over the Government’s bitterly contested education reforms.

Apparently paralysed by this double blow, the Education Secretary Ruth Kelly has been unable to head off the revolt by her colleagues against school reforms that they think threaten to undermine the shibboleth of equality and favour the middle classes.

Yesterday it emerged that no fewer than three senior ministers have joined John Prescott in opposing her forthcoming Schools Bill.

But the ironic truth is that the Bill would actually do very little to benefit anyone, because it fails to address the root causes of school failure.

Despite the fact that ministers spent £840 million on measures to improve struggling schools last year and another £160 million on replacing failing comprehensives with city academies, according to last week’s report by the National Audit Office no fewer than one million children are still being taught in poorly performing schools.

The situation is dire. Employers and universities are having to provide remedial education in English and maths. Pupils can no longer cope with reading whole books because they are given only short extracts to study in English lessons.

They often know next to nothing about the nation’s history; they are turning away in droves from learning foreign languages or the harder sciences; a full quarter of 11 year-olds still can’t read, write or count properly. And one reason teachers can’t get this right is that — astoundingly — they themselves often lack the knowledge even of the basics.

The government’s literacy strategy still isn’t teaching children how to read properly, and the improvement provided by the much-vaunted specialist city academies is very small.

The fact is that after eight years of government, Labour’s education policy still isn’t working. Not only has it failed to address the root causes of this calamity, it has actually made them worse.

Our education system has been driven off the rails by two barmy ideas which have fused into an unshakeable educational orthodoxy.

The first was the ‘all must have prizes’ approach which ordained that everyone had to be seen to achieve the same as everyone else. The second was ‘child-centred’ education which tore up the idea that teachers were the transmitters of knowledge and let children drive the process instead — the equivalent of sending them off to find their way from one end of a continent to the other without any maps to guide them.

These two doctrines combined around the abolition of the grammar schools. Not only did this impose the disastrous comprehensive one-size-fits-all model, but the abolition of the Eleven-Plus removed the benchmark for primary schools to aim at and thus allowed them to introduce the unrigorous ‘child-centred’ approach which left children unable to cope at secondary school.

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

To conceal this accelerating disaster, standards at GCSE and A-level were progressively lowered, and in due course university standards fell too.

All this was made infinitely worse by the Government’s own educational hang-ups – which are now on such conspicuous display among Ms Kelly’s mutinous colleagues.

Driven by the obsession with equality, education policy has promoted a dizzying and wholly unsustainable rise in degree qualifications. These in turn became more and more meaningless, turned GCSE and A-level into a national joke and served to collapse education standards still further.

Ministers made all this worse still by reinforcing the assault on the meaning of education itself through promoting such lunacies as ‘learnacy’, blurring the distinction between education and skills and progressively replacing knowledge on the National Curriculum by propaganda.

This disaster has been caused by a wholesale collapse of integrity and rigour throughout the education world. It is not, at root, a problem of school organisation, local authority control or a flawed literacy strategy. These are merely symptoms of a culture that has turned rotten at its core.

How to rescue such a corrupted culture is a very difficult problem indeed. The problem trap for politicians is that while they may genuinely want to get hold of this system and shake some common sense into it, state control of education has been at the very root of the disaster.

It was the attempt by politicians to use the education system to create a different kind of society which drove the whole show off the road by using schools for social engineering.

The best way to nurse education back to health is to make school teachers accountable to parents rather than to council officials or Whitehall. It is parents who have the capacity to stop the rubbish being taught because they have a vested interest in their children being properly educated.

The way to empower parents is through vouchers which they can spend at schools of their choice in both the state and private sectors. As experiments in the US have shown, this is the most effective way to empower the poor and to raise school standards virtually overnight.

The Tories, who dipped a toe in this water at the last election, have however now abruptly pulled it out. Instead, they have settled for a policy which bears a striking resemblance to Labour’s own. David Cameron has ruled out the return of grammar schools; like Labour, the Tories will limit schools’ ability to select pupils to ten per cent of their intake. The only difference is that they would allow this small proportion to be selected by ability rather than the Government’s strangulated formulation of ‘aptitude’, and want more stress on ‘setting’.

This is a terrible missed opportunity. To be fair, the Tories have not ruled out more radical reform. Some are still interested in pursuing vouchers, and they have the right idea about transferring teacher training from the colleges which have done so much of the damage to a school-based system.

But they are in danger of creating an enormous contradiction between their stated desire to offer a fresh agenda for the public services based on ‘trusting the people’ and independence for schools, and their desire to use the top-down powers of central government even more aggressively.

The Tories have to decide whether they are reactionaries maintaining the failed status quo in the delivery of education, or radicals who will redraw the boundaries between the state and education and other public services.

The state’s role in education is surely to provide the means by which children are most likely to realise their potential. This means a return to a meritocracy, the only system of social justice. And as in other European countries, allowing an element of selection is essential to meet the needs of the most able and drive up standards across the board.

Education is all about the transmission of a culture. Politicians should not be telling schools what to teach or how to teach it. Their duty is surely to help create the culture to be transmitted in the first place.

The problem has been that for the past half century, the British elite has lost heart in the British national project. It was this that opened the way for destructive ideologies and idiotic ideas.

The current crisis in the Education Department may end Ms Kelly’s career and might even seal Mr Blair’s own fate. The tragedy is that despite all this drama, the chances of Britain’s ailing education system being properly reformed remain as remote as ever.

Posted by melanie at January 18, 2006