The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

by Robin Alexander

Politics at its worst and best

The politics of fear versus the politics of hate. That is how the protagonists themselves have portrayed the EU referendum campaign, and they are right. As for the politics of truth, they’ve been all but silenced by the shameful alliance of bloated ego and rabble-rousing tabloid. The impressionable were impressed, the thoughtful were frustrated, and on that fragile, divisive and dangerous basis the nation has been asked to vote.

And then MP Jo Cox was murdered, and out of that unspeakable act of physical violence – which some have gone as far as attributing directly to the verbal violence of the referendum campaign – came a reminder of another kind of politics: of reason, hope, compassion, inclusivity, selflessness, courage, inspiration and love. The extraordinary and heartfelt public response to Jo Cox’s death bore witness not only to her truly exceptional qualities and achievements but also to how deeply people yearned for a political discourse that appealed to humanity’s best rather than its worst.

What has this to do with primary education? Everything. Most schools espouse a vision of human relations which is diametrically opposed to the divisive and inflammatory rhetoric to which we’ve been treated during the past few months. Somehow they must hold the line against that rhetoric’s malign pervasiveness and champion with children the possibility of a more generous and inclusive world.  Most schools – at least we hope this is so – make the quest for truth and understanding paramount in their shaping of children’s curriculum experiences, yet myths, lies and obfuscation have been rather more prominent of late in the public sphere.  Where teachers consciously strive to foster and enact something different they confirm the finding of the Cambridge Primary Review (final report, p 488) that ‘primary schools may be the one point of stability and positive values in a world where everything else is changing and uncertain. For many, schools are the centre that holds when things fall apart.’

But there’s another educational resonance, with education policy rather than practice. For the divisive and mendacious rhetoric of some prominent figures in the referendum campaign is very much of a piece with what they or their colleagues have used in relation to education. The Michael Gove who compared experts warning against Brexit to the Nazis who organised a smear campaign against Albert Einstein is the same Michael Gove who as England’s Secretary of State for Education called those who dared to disagree with him ‘Enemies of promise … Marxists hell-bent on destroying our schools’.

Nazis? Marxists? This ideological promiscuity is less significant than the calculated attempt to isolate and divide that such name-calling betokens, and in these two instances, which are by no means unique, accusations of smear might more properly be levelled at Gove himself. Indeed, this ploy, which – in case Labour are inclined to be sanctimonious we might recall was regularly used by them to undermine the Cambridge Primary Review – is seen by some politicians as a legitimate weapon for deployment in relation to the EU, education, migration, or any other policy issue on which they set their sights. Its true enemy, of course, is not ‘promise’ but truth.

While Gove’s successor uses less colourful language, she has shown a similar preference for ideology over truth, most notably perhaps in her airy insistence that every school must be an academy regardless of the absence of convincing and replicable evidence to support her claim that this will deliver school and system improvement. Beyond this case are numerous others where if research delivers inconvenient truths it is ignored or rubbished and its purveyors are abused.

Indeed so pervasive and corrosive were these tendencies during the last decade that the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review opened with a chapter entitled ‘The Review and other discourses’ which contrasted the serious search for evidence with the discourses of dichotomy, derision and myth by which education administrations too frequently advance their preferred causes, and then  warned readers of the probability that what they were about to read would itself be a target of these tendencies (it was). Then, 500 pages later and after presenting its main evidence and findings, the report linked the questionable government handling of many key education issues that its evidence had exposed to the much wider democratic deficit chronicled in the Rowntree Trust’s 2004-6 Power enquiry into the condition of British democracy. The Cambridge report said (pp 481-2):

The prosecution of policy relating to primary education does not stand apart from the trends characterised by … the Power enquiry. Indeed, it convincingly exemplifies many of them: centralisation, secrecy and the ‘quiet authoritarianism’ of the new centres of power; the disenfranchising of local voice; the rise of unelected and unaccountable groups and individuals taking key decisions behind closed doors; the ‘empty rituals’ of consultation; the replacement of professional dialogue by the monologic discourse of power; the politicisation of the entire educational enterprise so that it becomes impossible to debate ideas or evidence which are not deemed to be ‘on message’, or which are ‘not invented here’; and,  latterly coming to light, financial corruption.

The Review and its witnesses have highlighted variations on this larger theme of democratic deficit, many of them centering on the nature and quality of the information on which both sound decision-making and effective education depend: the less than complete reliability of official information, particularly in the crucial domain of standards; its lack of independence; the creation and/or dogged perpetuation of educational myths in order to underwrite an exaggerated account of political progress; the key role of the media in shaping the information that reaches government as well as the information that flows from it; the reluctance of decision-makers to countenance or come to grips with alternative information on which better policies could be founded; the use of misinformation to marginalise or discredit ideas running on other than approved lines, and evidence from other than approved sources.

In light of this catalogue of embedded and wilful failure to do what democracy, evidence and good sense demand (and little has changed since these words were written), there is something almost ludicrously disingenuous about the pleas we have heard during the past week for people to stop demonising politicians, as if this is merely an unfortunate but curable habit the public has carelessly slipped into.  If politicians believe they should be trusted and respected they should first ask what has caused trust and respect to be so seriously eroded. Expenses claims for moats and duck houses are the more entertaining end of a continuum whose darker reaches include, sadly, some aspects of education policy, notably in the areas of curriculum, assessment, inspection and systemic school reform.

Which brings us back to Jo Cox. Her husband Brendan told reporters that

She feared for our political culture, not just here in the UK but around the world, detailing her belief that the tone of the debate has echoes of the 1930s, with the public feeling insecure, and politicians willing to exploit that sense. He added: ‘I think she was very worried that the language was coarsening, that people were being driven to take more extreme positions, that people didn’t work with each other as individuals and on issues, it was all much too tribal and unthinking.’

Just so: Gove, Johnson, Farage, Sun and Daily Mail take note. But in yesterday’s Guardian Gaby Hinsliff wrote:

She wasn’t just admirable, she was formidable … Cox knew it wasn’t enough just to wring your hands, it’s what you do that counts. When the shock of her death wears off, Westminster will have to remember that. It’s not enough just to talk about standing up for something better, resisting cheap shots, draining the hatred from politics. It’s what you do about it that counts.

The days of automatic respect for the political class are long gone. Respect now must be earned, and by deeds rather than words. Jo Cox’s remarkable example, whether in Batley, Westminster, Darfur or Syria, is the best possible place to start.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

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We need to talk about structures

It has been a seductive slogan, for several reasons. But ‘standards, not structures,’ the oft-invoked rallying cry of those who want to cast themselves as fair-minded pragmatists in the now-very-inflamed academies debate, has been an error, I think. For, as has been becoming clearer in recent days, last week’s white paper spelling out the policy of forcing schools towards academy status has at last pushed serious questions about the detail of the academies policy to the fore, and we do need to talk about structures.

The phrase ‘standards, not structures’ – first made popular during Tony Blair’s first term in office – is an attempt to take what is seen as ideology out of the debate as to how state-funded schools should be run. Instead of viewing one type of organisational arrangement – local authority versus academy – as superior and then defending it to the end, the argument goes that we should be agnostic on that. Instead, we should worry only about the quality of education provided to pupils; acknowledge the obvious truth that good practice, or not, exists on either side of this ideological debate; and then move on. In terms of what kind of organisational structure we have in English education, basically we should join the majority of the public and not care: what happens in the classroom is all that matters.

As I say, this argument, set out in those terms, is very powerful. My perception is that ‘standards, not structures’ is used principally, and to a certain extent very effectively, as a weapon against ministers who have been seen to favour academies as an end in themselves. It is very difficult to argue that this is not their position, when a white paper has been published which says all schools are to be turned into academies, but when there is no clear research evidence in favour of the policy. (My last blog discussed this, and it will be set out in detail in my forthcoming research review for the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, especially in relation to primary schools.)

‘Standards, not structures’, was deployed again in Sunday’s Observer newspaper by David Blunkett, who introduced the original academies policy back in 2000. Here, in a well-argued analysis of many of the central problems of this extraordinary white paper, Blunkett said it was part of an ‘ideological agenda that put the structure of our school system before classroom standards’.

He’s right, of course. A government which really cared above all about the quality of what went on in schools, took seriously all the evidence it had and genuinely put children rather than politics first, as the white paper claims to do, would not be proceeding in this manner. Before pushing thousands of schools through a costly and energy-diverting change such as this, it would want to know for sure that improvement would follow. If you want a further insight into the fragility of the evidence base, by the way, just consider Nicky Morgan’s first response when asked about it on last Thursday’s BBC Question Time. The main piece of evidence she could muster on academy quality was a set of statistics embracing changing Ofsted grades for all schools, academies or not.

So the implementation of this policy is, of course, ideological. But that does not mean that arguments about it should stop at a consideration of supposedly ideology-neutral statistics. In fact, we do need to consider arguments away from pure ‘standards’ questions, too.

A personal view is that the obsession over, say, whether school test and exam results are better on the academy or non-academy side, or whether either is improving Ofsted results faster, though important, has obscured real debate about the detail of the really quite fundamental structural changes schools go through in moving to academy status.

And I find myself increasingly thinking about structures – is this the best way of setting up our schools system, irrespective of often small movements in data? – when fielding calls from whistleblowers as I do when writing news stories about the academies system. I would highlight a few structural issues now.

Structure of control

The academies policy, of course, originated under Labour as the suggested answer to usually long-standing problems in inner-city secondary schools. Where institutions had struggled for many years, if not decades, the thinking was that something bold and new had to be tried. The answer was to give great influence to an outside sponsor who, initially usually in response to a promise to donate £2 million, would be given effective control over the school, with only the Secretary of State, overseeing matters from Whitehall, as a democratic backstop.

This was controversial, as it took schools away from local democratic influence and gave great power to sometimes controversial individuals who might have been seen by the ministers backing the scheme to be dynamic. However, if there were worries about an over-concentration of power, they might have been viewed by ministers as a price worth paying in the hope of finally bringing about improvement.

Fast forward to 2016, though, and this, effectively, is the model being proposed for every state-funded school in England by 2022. Academy trusts can be set up with a very small number of ‘members’ – sometimes, only three – at the apex of their governance structures. They can appoint and dismiss the other governors.

It is true that academy trusts can be set up in a much more democratic manner. Yet some of the larger current multi-academy trusts clearly are run as described above, with a small number of individuals having great power. This is made possible because the essential overarching philosophy of the way they are set up has not changed from the original scheme under Labour.

This is not just an abstract debate, either, in my experience. In recent years, as a journalist contacted by people raising concerns, I’ve heard about: a prominent couple running an academy chain, who have particular views as to what should be in the curriculum, imposing that curriculum on schools despite opposition from professionally-trained teachers; an American firm which is influential in running a school ensuring that ‘its’ curriculum is taught in that school; and high remuneration packages finding their way to two individuals who are both among only three or four controlling ‘members’ of the academy chain paying their salaries. This looks to me to suggest an over-concentration of power with regard to taxpayer-funded bodies, serving many pupils.

A key structural question might, then, be: is the original architecture of academy governance, set up for the very particular circumstances of a small number of secondary schools which had struggled, now right for all English  primary and secondary schools?

Autonomy for individual schools

This is probably a key one for school governing bodies considering how to react. The white paper effectively spells the end of the settlement between local authorities and individual institutions, ironically  set up by the Conservatives in 1988, whereby autonomy was given to headteachers and governing bodies, but with the local authority influencing in the background.

Now, the favoured multi-academy trusts can run a whole chain of schools in a top-down manner if they choose. Schools contemplating joining one would be well advised to try to pin down MATs on precisely what freedoms they might be allowed if they join them.

Complaints when things go wrong

It’s a fast-solidifying view of mine that worrying about ‘standards, not structures’, is fine so long as all is well in an institution. It is when things start to go wrong that there are problems. For, over the past four years I’ve been contacted by many people concerned about various goings-on within academies. These include staff bullying, inappropriate spending, the ‘gaming’ of Ofsted inspections, pupils going missing from the system and institutionalised exam cheating.

A refrain of many of these whistleblowers has been concern as to who academies are accountable to. In theory, central government, through the Education Funding Agency and Department for Education, investigates. But we have often found that these remote Whitehall agencies, who, after all, now have thousands of institutions to oversee, are not interested. Nor, by the way, generally is the new intermediate tier of academy oversight, the Regional Schools Commissioner.  To be sure, local authorities, a natural first port of call for a whistleblower in the past, are far from perfect. Yet the ability of an individual to complain, for example, to their local councillor about a particular issue with a local authority school, will be lost in a move to an all-academy system. The general concept of an appeal to a truly local body outside of the instititution itself has fallen by the wayside. The white paper promises that local authorities will focus on protecting, for example, the needs of ‘vulnerable’ children. But without real power, how are they to do this?

These are just a few structural issues. I could mention more, such as questions about the merits of teacher pay and conditions deregulation – is it really best for the taxpayer to have a kind of ‘race to the top’ going on in terms of academy chief executive pay, with salaries in the range of £200-£400,000 now not unheard-of? – the now-well-discussed removal of parents from academy governance structures or the fact that much education law can now be formulated privately, away from the Parliamentary gaze, in the form of academy funding agreements with the Secretary of State.

The bigger issue is that all of these structural changes, which may centre on the de-democratisation and deregulation of state schooling, are important. They should not be seen as subservient to questions about often small changes in test and exam results, for example, or Ofsted outcomes. The country needs to ask itself whether these structural reforms are really in the best interest of pupils. In making this whole issue much more contentious, by proclaiming that all schools are to be forced into the status, ministers  may actually have done this debate a favour. At least now these questions might get more attention.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007). His CPRT research report on recent systemic reforms in the primary sector will be published next term. This blog, a sequel to the one posted on 4 March, was prompted by the publication on 17 March of the White Paper ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’.

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Democracy and education: winners and losers

The 2015 General Election, like all the others before it, produced both winners and losers. But for a majority of the electorate, democracy and education were nowhere to be spotted in the winners’ enclosure. So, who were the winners?

On the morning of Friday 8th May, just under 11.5 million happy voters, slightly less than a quarter of the electorate, were satisfied with the outcome, having scooped first prize. It had, however, been obtained in a most bizarre fashion. While we were all expecting a protracted period of horse-trading once all the ballots were counted, to find out who would be governing us for the next five years, one man stepped out, proudly sporting a sparkling blue rosette. Against all the odds, Dave’s Conservative Party had obtained an outright majority and the bookmakers had made a killing.

Surely, apart from the surprise nature of the victory, this was more than the pundits simply getting it wrong. The electorate had delivered its verdict. The people had expressed their preference with apparent conviction. It wasn’t until all the results were painstakingly unpacked and subjected to careful analysis that the full impact was acknowledged. In addition to many of the other parties involved, politics, democracy and education all took a fall and now face an uncertain future.

On a turnout of 66.1 percent with less than a quarter of the votes cast determining the eventual winner, there is little wonder that many people are now questioning the strength and robustness of that unforeseen victory and asking some searching questions about the electoral process itself.

How just is it that so many people cast a vote that counted for nothing? How can 1.5 million votes deliver 56 seats in one part of the country when 3.8 and 1.1 million votes cast for two other parties gain just one seat each elsewhere? Something is surely wrong with a system that turns 40,000 votes into one seat for the winners while 3.8 million votes are required by one of the losers to achieve the same result.

This time, first-past-the-post has dealt a severe blow to politics and democracy. In the most dramatic fashion this system has rendered the principle of one-person one-vote utterly worthless. Doubtless, there will be those who will cling to the notion that there is no case to answer. Over time, they may argue, such idiosyncratic outcomes even out. However, I have a feeling this argument will no longer stand up to scrutiny and that double standards in politics are set to be challenged. If they are, then education might belatedly become a winner.

But first, to consider how broken politics is and as an indication of why our democracy is threatened, one of the first actions of the newly appointed Business Secretary, Sajid Javid, has been to set out the government’s intention to tackle strikes in the public sector. The plan is to make it illegal to call a strike unless 40 percent of those eligible to vote do so and unless 50 percent of those votes are cast in favour of the action. On this basis, the new government would not be legal. Yes of course, more than 40 percent of those eligible to vote did so (66.1 percent precisely), but with just 36.9 percent of these voting Conservative, they are an eye-watering 13.1 percent short of the 50 percent threshold government wishes to establish as a minimum requirement for victory in public sector strike ballots.

So what of the assertion that this government is legitimate? Have the Tories obtained a clear mandate to continue with the questionable reforms to education of the last administration? What about the changes already in the pipeline for education in this parliament?

By the standard they wish to set in public sector union activity, they do not have a mandate to press ahead with their agenda for education reforms over the next five years. Following this election, our democracy is the poorer and politics are in disarray. In my view, the election has created more of a worst-case scenario for the electorate as a whole than a coalition or minority government would have done. The impact on education threatens to be especially damaging because the government has a working majority (albeit small) and the party in opposition is in disarray, caught up in infighting over its new leadership and direction.

Just two days before the general election, Robin Alexander’s CPRT blog surveyed recent education policy and warned that ‘At this election …  those voters for whom education matters would do well to pay greater attention to each party’s record than to their manifesto promises.’ Unfortunately, that did not happen and we now have five years in which to fret and watch as Tory manifesto promises unfold. In relation to the condition of England’s education system itself, Robin declared that the ‘unity, coherence, consistency and equity’ which are a system’s basic requirements no longer apply because the ‘checks and balances vital to education in a democracy have been swept away, and without local mediation schools have little protection from ministers’ caprice, megalomania or what NAHT’s Russell Hobby calls their “crazy schemes”’.

In relation to Conservative plans for education funding, Sam Fredman explains why the PM’s pledge to maintain ‘flat-cash’ per pupil will actually amount to a 10 percent cut for the service over the next five years. The planned cuts to welfare and social care budgets will have the effect of weakening the impact of the vital Pupil Premium, thus worsening the plight of the most vulnerable children in our society. Conservative voters knew about this and may well have agreed with David Cameron. But, what of the 76 percent of the electorate that did not vote for him? Is this what they want to happen?

There are concerns about other areas of the new government’s policy. What about promising to create more free schools and the push for academies when, according to the Education Select Committee, the evidence does not show that these types of schools produce results any better than their local authority counterparts?

And what plans are there to address the shortage of teachers and their training? Are we all happy to accept the current uncoordinated system? The fractured system of provision, including School Direct, fast-tracking and employing unqualified teachers, takes place in a policy vacuum. More worrying still is the fact that there are no plans currently to bring this vital strategic element of the service back under central control.

Another area in disarray is pupil assessment, a CPRT priority and recurrent focus of its activity. Current proposals for the reform of the examination system and testing arrangements are widely opposed by professionals and parents alike. Calls for a thorough review of this area are ignored and our young people remain among the most tested in the world. Worryingly, the net result of this is to narrow both teaching and the curriculum, to de-motivate pupils and deny them access to the kind of education experiences they need in a fast-changing world requiring diverse attitudes, skills and competencies as well as the ability to access and evaluate humanity’s expanding store of knowledge.

I cannot cover all areas of education that require new thinking. My concern is that politicians are out of step with the needs and expectations of a modern society, the democratic process is severely damaged and the negative consequences for education are considerable. Yet the latest announcement from Nicky Morgan on her return to office as Secretary of State for Education shows where we are heading. Naming and shaming, it seems, is still very much the order of the day. Zero tolerance of failure, we are assured, will turn the situation around. The SoS is clear about what must be done to bring failing schools to heel: ‘Mrs Morgan told the BBC that results show that students do better in academies.’ But let us not get bogged down in the  debate about what constitutes evidence in education reform. Politicians of all shades simply know what’s best.

These are potentially dark days for education. Lies will continue to be peddled by those pulling the levers of power, supported by a largely lazy media. The voices of professionals will continue to be ignored. Parents and young people will be denied their right to equal partnership in deciding the future direction of education. Creeping privatisation will continue the slow but steady dismantling of the system most of us dearly want to see revived and valued for reasons other than profit.

But it doesn’t have to come to this. We should press for our elected representatives to reform the voting system, as increasing numbers are calling for. Our democracy can be revived. Democratic accountability would not be threatened under a different voting system.

However, it could take several more electoral cycles before politicians are willing to support such a far-reaching change. In the meantime, education is far too important to be compromised by the randomness of the electoral process and government belief that the system can survive its interminable tinkering. So while we wait for electoral reform, we should set up a National Education Commission to oversee the governance of education. The campaign at www.ordinaryvoices.org.uk calls for this to happen.

It is time to do more than urge successive governments to consider what is best for the future of the system. Through coordinated action of the kind I am calling for we can positively shape that future and ensure that state education is a winner.

John Mountford is a retired primary school headteacher and former Ofsted inspector. He has a nine year old grandson, on whose behalf he campaigns through the website Ordinary Voices for the foundation of a National Education Commission to wrest the governance of education from political control. 

As with all CPRT blogs, the views expressed above are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Trust as a whole.

Contact

Cambridge Primary Review Trust - Email: administrator@cprtrust.org.uk