The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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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.

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And the octopus won

I held an election at the school recently. It happened just the day before a similar event took place nationally. The two candidates were an octopus (plastic) and a clown (wooden). This was not intended as a reflection on national politics, they were simply the toys that came to hand as I raced out of the classroom and down to the hall for assembly.

This term the theme for assemblies has been fairness. As I lined the pupils up with their voting slips in front of a cardboard ballot box, I explained that we had gone back in time 200 years. Lord Sam (Year 6) and Duke Timothy (Year 5) were to be in charge of this election and would decide who was to vote. The young aristos very much enjoyed turning away all the pupils, except their two wealthy land-owning mates (Cameron, Year 5, and Freddie, Year 4). And so we carried on, conducting elections right through till 1969 when finally everyone was allowed to vote.

The children, particularly the girls, were refreshingly indignant about the denial of their democratic rights. But what was more interesting was the way they became embroiled in the contest. Who was going to win? Was it going to be the octopus or the clown? Factions quickly developed. Arguments erupted in the corners of the hall. Some were passionate in their advocacy of a particular toy. Some came close to tears when a friend rebelled and voted for the opposition. Yet no policies had been discussed. No one knew what the octopus or the clown stood for despite this being an election to decide the leadership of the school.

You get my point, I’m sure. It was reinforced after the general election when the children told me gleefully that Sats were to be abolished. Yes, I said, but did they know that they were to be replaced with more and harder ‘exams’? They didn’t know and they were, for once, silent. I suspect they would also be silent if they read the Conservative manifesto. In a few bleak words the government outlines its priorities for primary education: ‘Every 11-year-old to know their times tables off by heart and be able to perform long division and complex multiplication. They should be able to read a book and write a short story with accurate punctuation, spelling and grammar.’ That the potential achievements of an 11-year-old should be so stale, flat and unprofitable is heart breaking.

I assume no child was involved in drawing up these priorities. What self-respecting young person would sign up to such dreary targets? A very different set of aims emerges when young people are consulted. The Cambridge Primary Review listened carefully to its many ‘prominent and thoughtful’ child witnesses. Its final report (p 489) recommended that in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child ‘children should be actively engaged in decisions which affect their education’ and that schools should increasingly work to ensure pupils’ opinions are listened to in a meaningful way. Children told CPR researchers (final report, p 148) that they ‘relish a challenge,’ that they ‘enjoy succeeding’ and that they like ‘hands-on active learning’ in lessons that are full of variety. They dislike ‘mundane and repetitive’ learning, copying and ‘drill and practice’ exercises.

Children are begging for a broad, balanced and rich curriculum, as sought by CPR and CPRT. They may not express it in those words, but they do express in their actions. They triumphantly find fossils in the school garden. They catch bugs, beetles and dead butterflies and bring them in to show and discuss. They make up great stories while stirring a magic mud potion. They adore playing with electrical circuits and making bits of paper fly off motor spindles. They copy a Turner painting and say ‘Wow, Miss, I didn’t know I was good at art’. They wonder why bruises happen and why we shiver or say things like ‘I know it’s a silly question, Miss, but why did lions evolve?’ They love acting, will volunteer for anything, relish funny books (I wonder if ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ is the kind of book the Tories have in mind) and, of course, some go wild for long division and complex multiplication. ‘Please can I stay in at break and do more maths, Miss?’

So once more, as Warwick Mansell pointed out last week in his CPRT blog, we are back to the ‘basics versus breadth’ debate. Except that there is no debate at government level. The only debate is at school level as heads and teachers struggle to square the circle and reinforce the basics while not losing the breadth. Despite their efforts, largely via intervention programmes run by dedicated TAs and squeezed into every nook and cranny of a school day, some children will not meet those manifesto targets. They will not pass the new Year 6 ‘exams’. Their fate is to have to retake them in Year 7 – how humiliating is that for poor souls struggling to find their feet in their first year at secondary school?

Primary schools will be blamed for failing these children, but the truth is that they have a special need. It will not gain them exemption from the exams, though it ought to. These children are victims of a disadvantaged background where for myriad reasons there is no one at home prepared to listen to times tables or to buy a book, let alone to read it. Primary schools do an awful lot for these children – not least making them feel safe and valued for 30 hours a week. But they cannot and should not run them ragged to meet flawed targets set by a government that doesn’t listen to children and doesn’t have their best interests at heart.

If children had the vote I wonder if the Tory manifesto would have been different.

By the way, the octopus (plastic) won the school election. Make of that what you will.

Stephanie Northen is a teacher and journalist. She contributed to the Cambridge Primary Review final report and is a member of the Board of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust.

by Robin Alexander

Election 2015: here we stand

And so we come full circle. In 2010 the Cambridge Primary Review presented party leaders with eleven post-election policy priorities for primary education. Distilled from the Review’s evidence and from public discussion of its final report, these urged a more principled approach to election perennials such as curriculum, assessment, standards and accountability while asking political leaders to frame such vital matters by something a bit more visionary than ‘zero tolerance’, ‘tough’, ‘relentless’ and those other pugilistic epithets of political choice that betray such a limited view of the education of young children. Judging by the 2015 manifestos, even that was too much to ask.

Yet during the early days of the coalition government we sensed encouraging movement on several of CPR’s priorities. The Pupil Premium aimed to tackle the twin challenges of social disadvantage and educational underperformance, challenges that headed our 2010 list; government enquiries were initiated on curriculum, assessment, professional standards and primary school staffing – the last of these specifically at CPR’s request and with CPR involvement; and the new government’s ministers promised to re-empower teachers after 13 years of Labour prescription and micro-management.

But the honeymoon was short, the enquiries’ outcomes were pre-empted by narrow terms of reference and disdain for evidence and genuine debate, and the old language and mindsets soon reasserted themselves.  With a vengeance, indeed, for the national curriculum became narrower, testing became more obsessive, accountability more punitive, and ministerial interventions more abusive. As for the vision of 21st century primary education that CPR had offered but policymakers had evaded, this advanced no further than the PISA league tables: a reasonable aspiration in terms of standards in the basics, certainly, but hardly a rounded education.

Consequently, when the Cambridge Primary Review Trust was launched in 2013, we felt obliged to retain some of CPR’s 2010 priorities alongside others that the new organisation wished to pursue. So in the current list of CPRT priorities, to which I return below, curriculum and assessment remain in need of genuine reform rather than the ideological gerrymandering to which we have been treated, and closing the wealth/wellbeing/attainment gap is still at the top of our list because what government has given with one hand via the Pupil Premium it has taken away with another through economic and social policies that have made Britain the most unequal OECD country in Europe in terms of income distribution, with 3.5 million of its children living in poverty (with numbers predicted to rise further) and one million people dependent on food banks.

That is not all. At the end of CPR’s final report we noted the intense pressures to which by 2009 primary schools were subject but applauded their vital communal role in a changing, fractured and unequal society and their maintenance, against the odds, of a stable core of humane and enlightened values. This being so – and it was an outstanding achievement – we felt able to conclude that on balance the condition of England’s primary education system, though severely stressed and in need of rebalancing, was sound.

Others, though agreeing with CPR’s judgement about individual schools, were less sanguine about the system as a whole. If in 2010 this was open to debate, in 2015 it no longer is. For the word ‘system’ implies unity, coherence, consistency and hence equity, and in England these conditions no longer apply.

Thus 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’ – those back-of-the-envelope bids for media headlines that teachers and school leaders are forced by legislation or Ofsted’s compliance checks to implement, regardless of their cost to children’s education or teachers’ self-esteem.

The schooling structure itself is deeply fractured by gross discrepancies in the level and quality of local support on which schools can draw, and the ideological drive for academies and free schools. This sector, expanded by dint of grand promises, ominous threats and questionable evidence, is privileged by greater freedoms, grandiose management titles, inflated top salaries and, some suggest, gongs in return for compliance. Meanwhile, rank and file staff are under unprecedented pressure and the number of teachers prematurely leaving the profession is at a ten-year high. Not only mid-career burnout either: though the exact number is disputed, it is clear that many teachers leave within a year of qualifying.

Hardly a ‘system’ worthy of the name, then, let alone one which it is at ease with itself.

Yet the paradox identified in the Cambridge Primary Review final report – of individual schools doing wondrous things for and with their pupils, not least in circumstances of exceptional social challenge and against a background of system fragmentation and policy folly – continues to apply. These blogs have so far included reports from two such schools with which CPRT is working closely, and the blog that will follow this one provides inspiring evidence from a third, Sarah Rutty’s school in Leeds. What is doubly impressive is that Sarah, together with Jo Evans and Iain Erskine, who provided the earlier blogs from schools, so manage the taxing circumstances of education in 2015 that they are able both to lead outstanding schools and to give time, energy and experience to supporting the work of CPRT.

But those wider social challenges are not receding and one of them, population growth and the widening gap between the number of school places required – 900,000 over the next decade – and the number available – is likely to become very pressing indeed during the next parliamentary term.

Indeed it already is. In some local authorities, only a minority of parents secure their first choice of primary school for their children, and this transfers pressure from schools to families, with children facing longer journeys to and from school, siblings attending different schools, increased traffic congestion, and diminishing opportunities for friendships made within school to be maintained outside it. Primary schools, meanwhile, get bigger and bigger.  They cope, as our schools always do, with this as with other externally-induced challenges. Yet at what cost to children and teachers?

Which brings us to the election manifestos. In this last matter there is widespread concern that the coming crisis over primary school places has neither registered with the political parties nor been included in their costings. Maintaining school spending at current levels won’t be enough. Is this policy lacuna emblematic of a more general loss of touch with reality?

The manifestos themselves were helpfully prefigured in Greg Frame’s recent blog and detailed in the BBC’s excellent policy guide, while the blogs of both Warwick Mansell and Stephanie Northen drew attention to the conflicting languages, within both the Conservative and Labour manfestos, of support and retribution.

It is of course easy to dismiss manifestos as cynical posturing; worse, as in the case of the LibDems’ 2010 commitment to scrapping university tuition fees, as promises waiting to be broken. It is certainly the case that what matters is what political parties do, not what they say they will do. The promise most regularly and predictably broken by both Conservative and Labour is to reduce government prescription and give teaching back to teachers. Fine sentiments in opposition, but observe what happens when your friendly ministerial wannabe succumbs to the power of the big desk, ministerial car, obsequious officials, callow advisers and hungry press: ‘For I also am set under authority … and I say unto one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.’ Small wonder that most ministers lose touch with reality within a few minutes of arriving in Sanctuary Buildings.

At this election, then, those voters for whom education matters would do well to pay greater attention to each party’s record than to their manifesto promises. It’s an exercise from which none of the three main parties emerges unscathed. And after this election we must hope that what may be a novel chemistry of votes, personalities and minority parties will create political space for what really matters. Such as, of course, the priorities that CPRT has been pursuing since 2013. Here they are again:

  • Equity. Tackle the continuing challenge of social and educational disadvantage, and find practical ways to help schools to close the associated gaps in educational attainment.
  • Voice. Advance children’s voice and rights in school and classroom in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
  • Community. Promote community engagement and cohesion through school-community links and a community curriculum that supplements and enriches the national curriculum, and by developing communal values in school and classroom.
  • Sustainability. Embed sustainability and global citizenship in educational policy and practice, linking to the UN agenda for global education after 2015.
  • Aims. Develop and apply a coherent vision for 21st century primary education; enact CPR’s aims through curriculum, pedagogy and the wider life of the school.
  • Curriculum. Develop a broad, balanced and rich entitlement curriculum which responds to both national and local need, eliminates the damaging division of status and quality between core and non-core, and teaches every subject, domain or aspect to the highest possible standard.
  • Pedagogy. Develop a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle, rather than mere compliance, with a particular emphasis on fostering the high quality classroom talk which children’s development, learning and attainment require.
  • Assessment. Encourage approaches to assessment that enhance learning as well as test it, that support rather than distort the curriculum and that pursue standards and quality in all areas of learning, not just the core subjects.

To which, in light of the experience of the past five years, I propose two more. One is from CPR’s 2010 list of policy priorities which seems as remote a possibility now as it was then, yet for that very reason needs to be repeated. The other arises from the discussion above.

  • Policy. Reverse the centralising thrust of recent policy. End government micro-management of teaching. Re-invigorate parental and community engagement. Replace myth, spin and the selective use of evidence by genuine debate. Restore the checks and balances which are vital to the formulation of sound policy.
  • The education system. Call a halt to those policies that have so severely fragmented England’s education system, setting school against school, increasing inequalities in provision, encouraging bullying and scapegoating in the name of accountability, and destroying professional morale. Aim instead for coherence, consistency, the equitable distribution of resources, accountability for policy as well as teaching, and a culture of mutual support and respect. Replace political posturing and ministerial machismo by a sustainable vision for children, their world and their education.

Yet, and to return to that judgement about the state of England’s education system in the Cambridge Primary Review final report, if the policy process requires reform far more radical than anything ministers have imposed on schools, it’s the schools themselves that continue to provide the best grounds for optimism.  So it’s fitting that this rather depressing assessment of the national scene will be followed, in CPRT’s next blog, by news of an utterly inspiring kind from a primary school in Leeds whose head has joined the CPRT community and is leading one of its networks.

www.robinalexander.org.uk

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

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Education reform: Jekyll or Hyde?

Education policy-making is two-faced, and perhaps never more so – surprise, surprise – than during the run-up to a general election.

It has a kindly aspect, which talks soothingly about helping teachers to make this the best country in the world in which to educate children. And – as Stephanie Northen illustrated in last week’s CPRT blog – it has a tougher side, or what could be called a Robocop ‘20 seconds to comply’ mode for fans of late 1980s sci-fi, in which politicians boast of having ‘zero tolerance of failure.’

This contrast was illustrated for me perhaps more vividly than ever in this week’s launch of the Conservative Party manifesto. But it also sits underneath what seems a different vision being put forward by the other party that may be in position to lead a government from May: Labour.

So, to the Tory manifesto first. And I must avoid getting sidetracked here by its highly questionable claims about recent governments’ education records, such as on the performance of UK pupils in international tests; on the record of sponsored academies; and on the management of free schools.

But what struck me first about this document was the juxtaposition, in the bullet points with which the education section starts, of the manifesto’s plan to ‘help teachers’ with its insistence that there would be ‘zero tolerance of failure’ in primary schools. Meanwhile, there would be takeovers of ‘failing and coasting’ secondaries, which would automatically be turned into academies.

This latter move, by the way, is what is needed as the evidence shows overwhelmingly that academy status is the only way of improving schools. (Not really. See here and here).

The question is whether it is possible to talk meaningfully about supporting teachers to do their jobs well while at the same time espousing ‘zero tolerance of failure’ when the schools in which they work underperform.

I think this is a very difficult circle to square, in the reality of how schools operate: the hunch must be that if you use ‘zero tolerance’, so making schools extremely fearful as to their next bad set of results, you probably will make them unattractive workplaces for many teachers or would-be teachers.

In fact, the Conservatives’ tough talk seems to crowd out more narrowly-framed statements which might be seen as more supportive, from a teacher’s viewpoint, in this document.

Its promise about ‘helping teachers’ is followed by the words ‘to make Britain the best country in the world for developing maths, engineering, science and computing skills’. This strangely implies that these named subjects are to be privileged: is world class status for the others not something at which to aim?

And while the manifesto pledges to cut the time teachers spend on paperwork and to reduce the burden of Ofsted, no further details are provided.

Instead, under ‘zero tolerance of failure”, there is talk of “ensuring our best headteachers take control of failing primary schools’, and a factually dubious statement that ‘nearly 800 of the worst-performing primary schools have been taken over by experienced academy sponsors with a proven track record of success’.

Any school judged to require improvement by Ofsted would be ‘taken over by the best headteachers’ , with ‘coasting schools’ ‘forced’ to accept new leadership. This last promise, by the way, comes despite the current Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, telling the House of Commons Education Select Committee in October that she was ‘not really a forcing type of person’.

That other f-word – ‘failure’ – stalks this document, with promises that pupils unable to meet ‘required standards’ in primary school will re-sit tests at the start of secondary, ‘to make sure [a heroic assumption, on which books could be written] that no pupil is left behind’.

The document adds: ‘We will expect every 11-year-old to know their times tables off by heart and be able to perform long division and complex multiplication,’ without admitting that one of those implied stipulations – the teaching of long division in primary – was opposed by virtually every maths educator I know as counterproductive.

Readers can make their own judgement on whether what seems to me to be the stress-infusing atmosphere which this continuation of our present policy regime implies in schools will help create the right kind of learning environment for our children. As suggested above, I am sceptical, to say the least. I think this document is certainly out of line with the more thoughtful, much less top-down vision of the Cambridge Primary Review, which talks – particularly in chapter 23 of its final report –  about bullying policy centralisation.

This document reminds me again that the tough, posturing, unilaterally-decided and shallow incentives of ultra-politicised policy-making in England are in collision with what might be seen as some of education’s more nurturing, positive and consensual ideals. Yet, tragically perhaps, politicised policy-making usually wins.

A contrast with Labour’s recent policy pronouncements is revealing. Labour’s manifesto itself is striking in its brevity – only two pages on the detail of schools policy – though its statements that ‘children develop and learn best when they are secure and happy’ and that ‘education is vital to achieving personal fulfilment [as well as] economic prosperity’ are  worth noting.

I found the speech of Tristram Hunt, shadow education secretary, to the annual conference of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers last month more interesting.

Mr Hunt pledged that the negativity of recent policy-making, which he attributed in particular to Michael Gove through the latter’s attacks on educationists as ‘enemies of promise’, would end. Mr Hunt said: ‘I promise you today: this deplorable, hostile, almost militaristic rhetoric towards the profession dies alongside this Tory government’.

He added: ‘The idea that our children’s potential can be fulfilled if we just raise the targets, stamp our feet and demand one more heave is now, surely, approaching its end stages.’ The days of education by diktat were over, he vowed, with Labour moving schools away from the ‘narrow, “exam factory” vision of recent years’.

Mr Hunt concluded that he wanted to ‘remove this centrally-controlling, profession-bating, target-obsessed government from inflicting five more years of evidence-free market mania on our children’s future’.

Cynics – and readers of Cambridge Primary Review reports from 2007-9 and ministers’ responses to them – might wonder if the last quotation could apply almost equally to the last Labour government. But the real question for Labour, should it lead the next administration, is whether its warmer words about standing back and supporting teachers will withstand alternative policy-making pressures.

Specifically, will central government be able to back off even slightly from tough-sounding interventions in schools, predicated as they always are on being intolerant of failure?

Even in Mr Hunt’s speech there was a glimpse of that tension, as he talked of a reformed Ofsted but which needed to be ‘an interventionist inspectorate tasked with rooting out underperformance wherever it lies’.

So, is it possible to preside over a national government pledging to raise standards without resorting to macho – and shallow – ‘zero tolerance’ in its rhetoric and in the detail of its policy-making? I think so, and that an alternative vision is possible for our schools, which moves away from policy-making’s notorious ‘discourse of derision’ towards something more supportive. But it will need some courage from the politicians.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of  Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing (Methuen, 2007).

 

 

We have indeed been there before. Read chapters 2 and 23 of ‘Children, their World, their Education: final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review’, for an analysis of educational policy and the language of educational policy under Labour between 1997 and 2010. Similar threats and promises, almost identical rhetoric. Indeed, the CPR final report noted (pages 21-25) not just the ‘discourse of derision’ referred to by Warwick, but also the discourse of dichotomy (education’s complexities reduced to a starkly polarised choice between just two alternatives, good and bad, us and them), and the discourses of myth and meaninglessness.

Regular readers will by now have noticed that recent CPRT blogs have concentrated, in these last few weeks before the 2015 UK general election, on the politics of primary education; and they have done so by reference to England rather than Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales because it is in England that heavy-handed government intervention and tough or vapid ministerial rhetoric seem to take their most extreme forms.

In the week before the election we shall pull all these blogs together into a special CPRT policy supplement which will include a re-assessment, with the next government in mind, of the policy priorities proposed by CPR and CPRT. After the election we’ll try to restrict this depressing talk about policy and return to children and their education.

Contact

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