Trevor Fisher argues that centralisation and political interference are responsible for many of the country’s current educational travails
THE latest international comparisons of educational performance, produced at the end of 2007, are a stark comment on British educational inadequacy. And it’s especially bad news for a governmental elite which has made international comparisons the hallmark of its drive to produce a world-class educational system. After two decades of political centralisation, the latest international comparisons raise the stark question: is the writing on the wall for British education?
International surveys carried out by the Organisation for Economic Development reveal serious failings in primary reading and science, maths and reading at secondary level. They have come after a period of massive financial investment in education by both Conservative and Labour governments and intensive central interference in schools, colleges and universities. The 2006 surveys, now published, makes it clear that Britain is slipping down the league tables, particularly in reading, where 10-year-olds have fallen from third to nineteenth. Inevitably the question has to be asked, is this because educational policy over the past 20 years has been heading in the wrong direction? Are the chickens now coming home to roost?
Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s years in power, successive administrations have taken more and more control over education, particularly in schools. In universities, similar policies of control have been employed, with the added factor of worsening student-teacher ratios as expansion has been instigated without comparable increased funding. Employers increasingly complain that British graduates lack even basic skills compared to foreign students. However, it is in schools and colleges that the Government’s policy of increased intervention has been driven through with the most serious consequences.
The shift away from the traditional non interference in schooling to command-style policies began in 1988, with Tory Secretary of State Kenneth Baker driving through an Education Act which took control of what was taught in state schools – independent schools have never been affected by Government controls – via an imposed national curriculum. It began a 20-year process of political interference in state schooling which combined draconian central political demands with a market economy in which institutions had to compete against each other on the basis of published performance in tests and exams. The theory was that institutions would improve performance to survive in a dog-eat-dog world. This theory is now very much in question.
The 1988 Act was followed in 1992 by the setting up of the Ofsted inspectorate by John Major’s Tory Government. Unlike the previous system of inspectors, Ofsted appeared to be based on the assumption that teachers were the cause of low performance and bullying them through published reports on brief four-yearly inspections would drive up achievement. Major decreed the publication of GCSE league tables and primary league tables of SATS results. However, it was only when Labour won power in 1997 that what leading education journalist Warwick Mansell calls “hyper-accountability” – centralised political interference – began to impact on the actual practice of teaching. The Conservatives had confined themselves to structural changes, particularly in exams where in 1984 Sir Keith Joseph had decreed the merger of O Level and CSE to create the GCSE exam. Labour continued this tradition by imposing exam reforms. However, it went much further than the Conservatives in setting out how teachers should teach.
In 1998, David Blunkett, then Secretary of State for Education, produced a national literacy strategy for state primaries, This was followed a year later by a similar scheme for maths. In 2001, secondary education received its own lesson plans for Key Stage 3. The Blunkett approach introduced targets involving a system of centrally imposed performance objectives.
This was particularly bearing on head teachers, who had to demonstrate they were meeting those objectives. The system actually resembled the centrally planned policies of the old Soviet Union as part of a drive across all public services to reduce quality measures to simple mathematical scores. Politically, the system was justified as value for money while standards were said to have improved. But quantity is not the same as quality and teaching to the test is now widely regarded as masking real deterioration in educational performance despite improved test and exam results.
In the weeks after the publication of the international comparisons, the press highlighted other issues suggesting serious educational problems. In November, The Times reported that, despite Government efforts, the leading public schools were increasing their share of the entry to the top universities. As the public schools are not subject to the same centralised control mechanisms as state schools, have more money and can focus on university entry in ways state schools cannot, it is likely that they will establish predominance over entry to elite universities. John Denham, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, should understand that, if educational policy continues as it has done for the past two decades, his plans for increasing working-class access to the top universities are likely to fail.
A Conservative Party report published just after Christmas showed that the middle classes were increasing their hold over high performing schools and thus examination success and university entry. Their figures suggested that only were the children of the richest 10 per cent out-performing the children of the poorest 10 per cent but that, following years of only marginal increases in the divide between, the gap had increased
10 per cent in Tony Blair’s final year in office.
It is folly to believe that the Tory policy, embraced by Labour, of building academies in the poorest areas will work. As Professor Alan Smithers, the distinguished educationalist and director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research has pointed out, if academies perform well, the middle classes will colonise them. This problem is central to the dogma of parental choice embraced by both Labour and the Tories.
The overall picture of education in Britain is increasingly bleak. Since the days of Thatcher, a Westminster consensus has dominated educational policy and it is not working. Centralisation and political control does not produce increased performance on an international level. Twenty years after a poor international performance in maths led to the Thatcherite reforms of 1988, the latest international surveys show Britain slipping back after temporary successes in the 1990s.
Meanwhile, social inequality is increasing, social mobility is declining and the working class is increasingly less well served as the comprehensive ideal is undermined. If Labour is serious about delivering a world-class education system and equal opportunities, particularly for the working class, it must break with that Westminster consensus. Gordon Brown and his Government need to confront to a stark reality: education faces a deepening crisis. The writing should be on the wall for the centralised systems imposed by Westminster.
Trevor Fisher is the head of A-level history and general studies at a Midlands college
