How might ‘Stability is the Change’ work for Labour’s Education policies?

Teach again, teach better? #2

The morning of last week’s election announcement I was teaching a Year Four class. Just after registration, the deputy head told me that X would be coming to class late as her family had been made homeless the evening before. Staff were giving her uniform and breakfast before seeing if she was felt ok to join the class.

I’m sure that things like this happened before 2010. Of course they did. But talk to any teacher in any school in almost any area, and it feels like these situations are multiplying and worsening. An evil trinity of fourteen years of austerity, four of pandemic-fuelled predicaments, and three cost-of-living crises are hitting families like never before. I am as desperate as anyone for a change in government; it’s time to jettison the wicked incompetence that has targeted our poorest and most vulnerable citizens.

Sometime in the mid-90s, I remember DJ Andy Kershaw wondering – yes aloud on the radio -  how many of his listeners had ever had sex under a Labour Government. I, along with a generation of people around my age, certainly hadn’t. I was also teaching in Islington at the time, and waiting impatiently for the changes a new government might bring. Ofsted had just come in, our school was piloting the literacy hour and these new things called SATs were just revealing some uncomfortable truths about primary school standards.

I was reminded of those times on a school lunch break, reading reviews of  Karl Pike’s new book Getting over New Labour . Pike argues that we need to understand recent and current Labour leaders partly by their interpretation of the New Labour Years. There has certainly been a post-Corbyn swing from silence (and sometimes shame) to partial pride. Witness, for instance, responses to new evidence of the long-term impact of New Labour’s flagship Sure Start programme. However, in comparison to its record on the early years, child poverty and children in general, New Labour’s school performance is far more contested. Despite the boosterism of many involved (and in particular the poorly-evidenced claims about the impact of so-called ‘deliverology’), Rob Coe’s robust analysis shows that education standards barely rose at all between 1995 and 2012. SATs and GCSE scores improved (SATs rises in the 1990s were largely down to factors beyond New Labour’s emerging policies), but looking at international tests over time, we largely see standstill. In the context of huge increases in school spending over this time, it feels reasonable to claim that school reform under New Labour was a productivity disaster. Lots more investment for very little return. This is not to blame teachers or schools; primary schools I visited in 2010 felt hugely different to and improved from the 1990s versions I had taught in. However, as a bigger picture, whatever New Labour did with all that new money has to be chalked up as a systemic failure.

What might this mean to (Newer?) Labour’s approach to education? Their manifesto and, more importantly, their plans for the first year or so, will of course be framed largely by a response to the last fourteen years, rather than the thirteen that preceded Tory rule. Overall, my summary of Tory school reform is that it has been a bit of a damp squib. For all the bluster about radicalism and transformation, and in particular, for all the changes to curricula and school structures, school standards (with the possible exception of phonics) have barely risen and achievement gaps have barely narrowed. In a weird way, given reductions to real-term school spending (and in the broader contexts of Special Education Needs and mental health crises), this could be seen as a productivity success. Again, intuitively, as I compare primary schools now to 2010, they overall seem like better places to learn. Improved behaviour, fewer children slipping through basic skills nets, and just a more serious and systematic approach to improving teaching and learning. However, these apparent gains are not yet showing up in (admittedly pandemic-scarred) results.

So far, Labour’s education pronouncements have been cautious; the ‘6,500 teachers’ commitment might have some totemic ‘retail’ value but is a blunt, unstrategic way to spend the windfall VAT receipts from private school fees. Similarly, free school breakfasts for all signal a commitment to wraparound care; but almost every school in areas of poverty seem to have these in place already.

There are many educators and commentators hovering around the Labour machine who are pleading for more radical changes to education policy, protesting about the general conservatism of their approach, or proposing particular ideas, most of them inevitably with pound signs attached. I largely hope they remain disappointed. Of course, I have my own blog jukebox of things they should do (for instance, a serious reinvestment in arts education, a sustained focus on mentoring and tutoring for academically struggling 14-19-year-olds, and a possible extension to a 3-year post-16 phase). But what schools need more than anything - apart maybe from more money, a topic I’ll come back to another time-  is some stability.  As my headteacher asserted when I was teaching during the pandemic, what our schools and our system need for recovery is a little bit of patience from education leaders and policymakers.

If we are to go with the grain of the ‘stability is the change’ concept that Keir Starmer introduced a couple of weeks ago, here are four principles that might guide such an approach:

1. A precautionary principle around any new intervention where, if it increases teacher workload, it is probably not worth doing. Last month’s announcement on Relationships and Sex Education was an example of how not to do this – a total timewaster of an announcement, with total disregard for evidence or workload.

2. A post-election preparedness to cut current expensive programmes and time-consuming priorities to remove some of the clutter from our over-complex system (I have some specific ideas here, but don’t yet want to lose friends and alienate people). Wes Streeting’s efforts to ‘get rid of stupid stuff’ within the NHS could be worth replicating across our school system.

3. A commitment to national government becoming a ‘space creator’ in education; create space for every school, federation or MAT to design and deliver their own mission that complements whatever is nationally prescribed. This is especially true for curriculum (remember folks, the national curriculum was never supposed to be the whole of a school’s curriculum). But if national government policies and priorities are to stop expanding to fill more than all the time available, this will require a radical rethink of our whole accountability system, as well as ministers who can resist the temptation to tinker.

4. A genuinely ‘localist turn’, so that, set within the context of the overaching missions, power is devolved from the Department of Education to localities (especially combined authorities). Power not just to implement nationally-set priorities, but to set and deliver local ambitions for children and young people. This could partly be achieved by moving (almost) all DfE hiring/firing/scrutiny powers over MATs and academies. It might also require investment in area-based partnerships to create coordinated, coherent approaches to school improvement, and the possible reintroduction of Children’s Trusts to support a collaborative approach to supporting our most vulnerable children.

‘Stability is the change’ may seem a little dull and unambitious but, regardless of whether it stems from deep-seated beliefs of more expedient electoral calculations, it may be just what schools need. It also aligns with another significant difference between now and 1997. Then, education was high in voters’ priorities. Now, looking at IPSOS Mori data, it is close to the bottom. In recent polling from the Edge Foundation, only ‘access to good pensions’ scored lower than education from a choice of fifteen priorities. This might not be a bad thing for schools. Voter-driven neglect may be benign if it renders a flurry of new Whitehall-driven initativitis less likely.

Back in 2000, I met the then Number 10 adviser Andrew Adonis who described a few possible policy changes as ‘second and third term issues’. Those wanting radical education change might be wise to take a similar attitude. Three to five years of patient, school-led recovery can create a foundation for longer-term change – to assessment, national curricula and possibly to the whole, flawed neoliberal architecture of our school system.

X did choose to come back to my Year Four class that morning; as I watched her focus seriously on her reading comprehension task, I could only imagine her emotions. But I also saw how the stability of a calm classroom, with children getting on with it and with her, might be just what she desired – a welcome contrast to the turmoil of her home life. Beyond education, a new government must above all attack the scandal of child poverty to make a real difference to children like X. For economically traumatised lives like hers, some stability would be the most welcome change of all.