The remarkable politcal success of Michael Gove

Shortly before the British General Election in 2010 a headteacher at a local school told me: “Well, however is the new Education Secretary cannot be worse then Ed Balls.” Mr Balls, now Shadow Chancellor, was then Labour’s Education Secretary. He had built up a reputation for political posturing and bullying, while presiding over new Labour’s muddled education policies. I have not asked that headteacher how she thinks the new education Secretary, Michael Gove, compares to Mr Balls. I don’t have to; her prediction was spectacularly wrong. Mr Gove is even more loathed by education professionals than was Mr Balls. But Mr Gove, unlike Mr Balls, counts as a political success.

Mr Gove has been in the news recently. Yesterday he gave a speech spelling out his vision for state schools; over the weekend there was a fuss over his failure to reappoint the Chair of Ofsted, the schools’ inspectorate. His spin doctors have been pushing out a story of his reforming zeal against an educational establishment referred to as “the Blob” after a 1950s sci-fi movie. This has received a lot favourable coverage in the right-wing press. More neutral observers, such as the FT as well as the BBC, seem content to faithfully report Mr Gove’s spin while not openly taking sides.

All this is in stark contrast to the government’s attempts to reform the NHS, led by former Health Secretary Andrew Lansley. The government side of this argument hardly got a look in, as the picture of chaotic reforms took hold. This negative coverage stiffened opposition to the reforms, muddling them further, so that they have ended up being the biggest blot on the Coalition government’s record – though some good may yet come out of them. There has been little public support for opponents to Mr Gove’s education reforms, however. Mr Gove, an ex-journalist, is clearly a better communicator than Mr Lansley, an ex-doctor. The education system is also much simpler than the health service. But the political skills of Mr Gove’s “Blob” are totally lacking, unlike those of the doctors and nurses opposing Mr Lansley. The teaching unions have long been a bit of a comedy act, resisting basic workforce reforms, like performance appraisal, that non-teaching professionals have long since got themselves used to. Other educational professionals rarely raise themselves beyond the minutiae to give politicians and the public a clear vision of what they are trying to achieve.

Are and were British schools in a mess? Yes and no. International comparisons show a mixture of good and bad news. Overall performance is unspectacular but not awful. We have a long “tail” of under-achieving pupils that schools give up on too quickly. There is a lot of mediocrity, especially amongst rural schools, who “coast” by getting average performance from pupils capable of much more. But over the last two decades, the Blob has pulled off one of the most spectacular episodes in school improvement in the world: the transformation of London schools. This has given the lie to the standard line of the Left that the educational prospects of poor pupils will only be transformed once other social problems, like jobs and housing, have been fixed. The Borough of Tower Hamlets, one of the country’s poorest, regularly outperforms much wealthier districts outside London.

The transformation of London’s schools remains one of the last Labour government’s greatest achievements. But politically, it is problematic. It owes nothing to the various policies pushed by politicians and think tanks, such as creating semi-independent Academies. It was largely down to good old fashioned management: officials at national and council level holding school managements to account, and replacing heads of mediocre schools. As a result politicians are strangely reluctant to take the credit.

What of Mr Gove’s reforms? They are a mix of good, bad and ugly. On the good side, Ofsted’s remit has been sharpened up a lot. Previously it had expanded into such areas as “community cohesion”, which are highly sensitive to context, and inspectors did not show any great aptitude. Now they focus much more sharply on the quality of teaching. This gets to the core of what drives school performance. Some older teachers hate this – but it really isn’t any different to the pressures that accountants and lawyers find themselves under. Younger teachers seem accept the much greater level of accountability that is expected – and respond well to it. (My evidence on this is rather anecdotal though – based on my experience as a school governor in a London primary school).

Another good thing, though largely unremarked, is that Mr Gove’s Academy programme is putting private schools under real pressure. Many private schools outside the South East are now signing up to be state schools, run as academies. My local Free School is recruiting many middle class youngsters that would formerly have gone private. No doubt some on the left see this as a sinister subsidy to the middle classes – but a much higher level of social mixing occurs at these new state schools than would have occurred at private schools. And social mixing at schools helps the poorer children achieve more. It is worth noting that this policy works as well as it does thanks to two measures insisted on by the Liberal Democrats: a “pupil premium” giving extra funding for poorer pupils, and insisting on non-academic selection. Many Conservatives want to recreate academically selective Grammar Schools. These may once have been engines of social mobility, but now academic selection is simply used as a way of weeding out pupils from poorer backgrounds and reducing mixing.

The bad: there is a lot of wasted energy on changing things that don’t need changing. That particularly applies to changes to the curriculum. Mr Gove and his supporters seem to have an old-fashioned view on what should be taught in schools, to reflect a 1960s private education. Now it is true that the Blob has developed a lot of woolly curriculum ideas that don’t seem to be of lasting educational benefit (especially in “applied” qualifications), but they were gradually sorting out this mess by themselves. Mr Gove seems to have little idea as to what modern universities and employers actually want the product of a secondary education to be. A lot of the drive to turn state schools into academies seems a bit pointless, and will probably create problems of accountability in later years. It has a sinister aspect too: the Academy chains who are the main beneficiaries are politically well connected – and it is their political connections that seem to be critical in their success.

The ugly. We are getting more religiously founded state schools. Given religiously founded schools’ role in cementing toxic community relations between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and Scotland, I am very nervous about this. But it could be that making these newer schools conform to modern educational norms, and forcing them to engage with a wider civil society, will bring benefits. But I really would prefer it if our children went to schools attended by children of many faiths and none. But the alienation of some religious communities is such that they would not engage in such arrangements, and for them a state religious school is a second-best.

My verdict on Mr Gove is that he is not quite as evil as he cracked up to be. But he is wasting a lot of time and energy. What should be absorbing energy is teaching standards, establishing a broad curriculum appropriate to modern life, and establishing better systems of accountability which don’t tempt schools to game the system by neglecting “hopeless” cases. Fix these and Britain’s state schools would be world class. But alas, we are distracted by political gimmickry.

London’s schools: awkward facts for both left and right

Last Friday I attended and seminar for school headteachers and chairs of governors addressed by Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted, the body that inspects English schools. It was convened by the London Borough of Lambeth, for whom I am a primary school chair of governors, and where Sir Michael himself spent much of his school career (at least that is what he implied – though the secondary school he described sounded as if it was just over the border in Wandsworth, and very near where I live). He used the occasion to heap praise on the acheivements of Lambeth’s schools, and schools elsewhere in London too. He made his point by drawing a comparison to England’s second city, Birmingham, whose results, he implied, were mediocre. The progress that London’s state schools have made in the last decade is one of the most important facts about public services in Britain. But it is little talked about because it poses awkward questions for both left and right.

First the facts. My main source is a pamphlet produced by CentreForum in late 2011. The data may therefore be a little old, but the story hasn’t changed in the period since. London’s state school results, at both primary and secondary levels, are close to the English average. But the proportion of pupils attending school from the lowest income groups is much higher than in any other English region. About 70% (I’m a bit vague because I’m having to read off a graph without the exact numbers being in the text) of its pupils are in the lowest two income quintiles, compared to under 50% for most other regions (a bit over 50% for the North East). A lot of higher income parents send their children to private schools, especially in London, and this no doubt accounts for a lot of the skew to lower income levels. So London’s schools are achieving these results in spite of much higher levels of deprivation. The more you dig into the data, the more impressive this achievement looks. But London’s schools used to be awful.

When I have mentioned this achievement in various policy forums I get some rather strange reactions. People quickly dive in with data-less explanations which leave their basic world view intact. One economic liberal type started to lecture me on how much more aspirational London parents were. A more left-leaning type (with direct experience of London schools) attributed it to an influx of African immigrants displacing poorer performing white and Afro-Caribbean ethnic groups. Others have complained about preferential funding for London’s schools. But the data shows that, let us say, none of these explanations is anything like sufficient. But they did educate me in how selective many policy commentators are in their insistence on the use of proper evidence.

How have these results been attained? This is a lot less clear. No doubt the capital does have some inherent advantages in aspirational families and a better pool of potential teachers – which had not previously been exploited. But the main explanation seems to be strong political leadership. The boroughs led the way, but central government (under Labour) was bearing down on them, with initiatives such as the London Challenge (started in 2003, focusing on secondary schools). For Sir Michael, who was very much in the middle of it, the main point was that heads and governors were made more accountable for their results. Failure to achieve good results resulted in schools being hauled over the coals. The “Satisfactory” rating for an Ofsted inspection was in fact regarded as “Unsatisfactory”; Sir Michael has since changed that nomenclature. I have certainly seen how school leadership teams have focused more clearly on how to reach out to families from poorer backgrounds, with extended school facilities (handy for working parents) and family learning, as well as individually tailored interventions.

Why is this so awkward for mainstream politicos? The left, drawing support from the trade union movement, do not want to put schools and their staff under too much pressure. They would rather promote the fiction that England’s schools are generally good, but that they cannot overcome the social issues created by poverty – which need to be tackled through anti-poverty measures. And yet it seems that if you chivvy (and even bully) schools hard enough you can dramatically improve the results of pupils even from very challenging backgrounds. There is a very uncomfortable paradox here: leftist political activists get very worked up about deprivation, but this translates into low expectations of what deprived families can achieve, which in turn becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Things are just as bad on the right. They say that the problem is that parents lack choice, and that the state runs schools badly. So the focus is to reduce state control by converting schools to semi-independent Academies, and letting interest groups set up brand new schools. Choice and competition will drive up standards. And yet the London results show that this is at best irrelevant. The results have been achieved with existing political structures.

If London’s schools show anything, it is the effectiveness of the last Labour government’s methods – Tony Blair’s Third Way. And yet this has become deeply unfashionable in political circles. In fact there was plenty wrong in Labour’s education policies, including a very wasteful school building programme, which converted necessary school upgrades into prestige architectural projects. But the basic idea was sound: good old fashioned political leadership and accountability can transform public services – provided you are prepared to take on the vested interests of those working within it.

Or to put it another way, and to bring it into one of the main themes of this blog: effective commissioning is the secret to better public services, both at the level of whole communities and at the level of individual users. London got a lot better at both.

The Lib Dems struggle with education policy

Saturday was education day at the Lib Dem conference. Education is dear to the hearts of most Lib Dems, but the party struggles to come up with a clear party line beyond the important policy of Pupil Premium, where state funding of schools is uplifted for those with poorer pupils. This drift was on show yesterday.

There were two motions, one on early years and the other on schools. Both came over as  worthy but wishy washy wish lists, with a rather nanny state tendency on show. The most contentious point on the early years motion was support for increasing professionalisation of nursery and childminding provision. This all feels a bit New Labour and not particularly liberal. The idea that this might be a source of jobs for non graduates doesn’t seem to have taken hold, which is a pity. It would be nice to think that more jobs would be available to single mothers who have had a disadvantaged start in life. But the focus seems be on pushing graduates into those roles.

There was more contention around the schools motion. There is a body of activists who are upset by the way the party has been handling education policy in government, with very little consultation of the party at large, and seemingly tagging along to a Tory agenda. This boiled over a bit with the recently proposed reform to the GCSE exams, which was presented to the world as the result of negotiations between the Lib Dems and Conservatives. But work done by activists on the subject was ignored. The motion was not about this issue, but there was an attempt to spatula it in, rejected by the Conference Committee, which caused tempers to fray.

The motion itself was the usual worthy fare. An amendment on governance was passed which sought to ensure that no interest group had a majority on state school boards…something which would be an issue for faith schools and sponsored academies. It also had some nanny state stuff about training governors. Interestingly the conference also passed an amendment rejecting the proposal to abolish mandatory external tests at the end of children’s primary school careers – SATS. This clearly took the motion’s movers quite by surprise, and showed that the conference was taking bit of trouble over the policies it was passing. I supported this amendment, as a school governor I find these tests invaluable as a means of holding the school to account.

But it would be nice if the party could develop something more radical and interesting, to contrast with the emerging Tory/Labour consensus. This will require some strong leadership. David Laws, the new education minister, is the man who should provide it. But though he is widely respected, he does not seem to be good with the gruelling process of consultation and bringing the activists on side. We shall see.

Class warfare: changing the primary school curriculum

Yesterday the Government announced proposals to change the national curriculum for primary schools in England.  No doubt there was the same sharp intake of breath in liberal circles that accompanies anything that comes forth from the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, with his appeal to traditional, conservative values.  But liberals have often failed to convince on education.

Mr Gove is a remarkable political phenomenon.  He is instinctively disliked by those of a liberal disposition, and the vast majority of people who work in the education sector, or councillors who are responsible for it.  And yet, unlike his health colleague Andrew Lansley, or Theresa May at the Home Office, the vitriolic criticism of the professionals, and lampooning by comedians, seems to make little impression on the public at large.  The government is being hurt by a lot of things at the moment, but education reform is not among them.  For once the public seem to trust the politicians more than the professionals.

So what to make of these proposals?  They amount to a much more prescriptive programme for English, Maths and Science – with proposals on modern languages on the way.  They go further than the current curriculum, and have a traditional, prep-school feel about them – English has a heavy emphasis on spelling, punctuation and reciting poetry, for example.  This is easy to dress up in old fashioned, conservative language – which Mr Gove duly does.

The first criticism to make is that the Government had promised teachers that they would get out of their way, and give them more discretion.  All the pressure in recent years has been to take things out of the National Curriculum, and not add more things in.  The more flexibility schools have, the more room for creativity there is, and the more diversity and choice there will be – something the government had seemed keen on promoting.  But evidently there are some things that Mr Gove feels are too important to be left to parental choice and diversity.  And the changes are focused on the very core subjects – not the peripheral things that politicians had proviously like to pitch in.

Behind all this lurks a topic that vexes many: class.  Now class is something that widely is misunderstood in Britain.  Class here used to be about what you were born into, and the idea that everybody should stay in their place, with all the privileges and duties that this implied.  Mobility was frowned on, but allowed to creep in gradually.  A lot of this mobility took the form of pretending that your family was better bred than it was.  I am doing a project on my family’s history at the moment.  One of the more amusing aspects is how much effort my middle class Victorian (and some later) forbears put into trying to prove the family had noble connections.

But two world wars and a relentless industrial transformation have swept away that understanding of class.  And yet to the disappointment of many, elitism and social stratification remains very much with us – and indeed many of the institutions that supported the old system are in very good health supporting the new – “public” schools, elite universities, and so on.  And although the idea of birthright might have gone, it is very much expected that you support your peer group – and do the best you can to give your children every advantage.  Social mobility, after leaping forward in the middle of the last century seems to be slowing down.  What happens here now is not the lingering of the old system, but something similar to what happens in other modern developed societies which did not have our feudal legacy – like the USA and Australia, who also have “class” problems.

Schools lie at the heart of concerns about class – and here liberals are on the defensive.  Liberals have dominated the state educational system for generations, seeing through major reforms to both structure (for example pushing selective elite grammar schools into comprehensive schools) and the way schools are run – towards what might be called “softer” values.  It hasn’t worked very well – though why remains hotly debated.

Enter Mr Gove.  His solution is to make state schools look and feel much more like their elite,private sector counterparts – and these curriculum proposals are an example.  His critics simply think this is to give middle class parents a private, elitist education at taxpayers expense, without having much impact on the rest of society.  But that is to misunderstand the thinking.  Mr Gove, and many conservative thinkers, think that social mobility is about turning working class people into middle class ones.  And that isn’t just about imparting knowledge and skills, it’s about talking and writing like middle class people too – or at least becoming “bilingual” in class ways.  The old grammar schools did this very successfully – and their abolition has not helped social mobility.

This is all very interesting.  It is easy to see difficulties.  State schools, apart from the surviving grammars, are still quite unlike their private school counterparts in that they cannot select their intake.  Will this approach exacerbate class tensions by teaching pupils to sneer at the less fortunate (as no doubt the old grammars did)?  But liberal policies of inclusiveness have not proved enough by themselves.

I’m giving Mr Gove the benefit of the doubt this time.  Too often we liberals forget the working class ideal of “bettering yourself”; celebrating diversity is good; celebrating mediocrity isn’t.

Time to wake up to the de-industrialisation of advanced economies

Trying to understand the global economic crisis?  This article from Joe Stiglitz is required reading.

I have flagged it already on Facebook and Twitter, but without much in the way of reflection. In fact it has produced an epiphany moment for me.  I have maligned Professor Stiglitz in a past blog as producing only superficial commentary on the crisis, alongside his fellow Nobel laureate Paul Krugman.  This was based on one or two shorter articles in the FT and some snatches on the radio; I wasn’t reading or listening carefully enough.  Professor Stiglitz is one of the foremost economists on the current scene.  He used to be part of the Clinton administration, and worked at the World Bank in the 1990s, but his views proved politically unacceptable.  He also wrote the standard text book on public economics, which I used in my not so recent degree course.

The article is wonderful on many levels, but the epiphany moment for me came with his observation that, underlying the current crisis, is a long-term decline of manufacturing employment in the US, and by implication, other advanced economies too.  He draws an interesting parallel with the Great Depression, which was caused, he claims, by a comparable shift from agricultural employment – again in the US; I think that such a shift was less marked in Britain, but the depression was also less severe.  This decline in employment brought about a doom-loop of declining demand across the economy as a whole – which was only reversed by World War 2.  The war effort caused a boom in manufacturing industry which was readily redeployed into the postwar economy.  This view of the Great Depression rises above the fierce controversies over fiscal and monetary policy, and places them in a proper context.

We have been witnessing the decline in manufacturing employment for some years, and grappling with its social consequences.  The important point is that it is mainly irreversible. It has been brought about by technological change, which has improved productivity.  There is a limit to the number of manufacturing products that we can consume – just as there is a limit to the food we can consume, and we are at that limit.  So the number of jobs declines.

Of course the picture is complicated by the rise of manufacturing in the developing world, and especially China, and their exports to the developed world.  In the US I am sure, and certainly in the UK, more manufacturing output is now imported than exported, causing a further loss of jobs.  This is reversible, though, and in due course will reverse, as the developing world advances and loses its temporary competitive edge.  But this won’t be enough to reverse the overall trend of rising productivity.

But advancing productivity should be good news in the long run.  It releases the workforce to do other things, or, if people prefer, to increase leisure time.  So what replaces the manufacturing jobs, in the way that manufacturing took over from agriculture?  Services, of course.  What is, or should be, the product of these services?  Improved wellbeing.

Services have rather a poor reputation in our society.  Traditionalists see them as ephemeral, compared to the real business of making things – a bit like Soviet planners were obsessed with producing steel rather than consumer goods.  More thoughtful people associate them with poor quality jobs in fast food restaurants or call centres.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.

We need to develop clearer ideas of what tomorrow’s service-based economy will look like. That’s important because the way out of the current crisis is through investments that will take us closer to this goal, just as war led to investment in manufacturing in the 1940s (and earlier in Europe).

And the key to this is thinking about wellbeing.  This is important because one of the answers could be an increase in leisure, hobbies and voluntary activities – which is not normally regarded as economic activity at all.  Reflecting on this, I think are two areas whose significance will grow and where investment should be made, both of which raise awkward political problems – health and housing.

It is easy to understand that health and social care will take up a higher proportion of a future economy than they do now, and not just because of demographic changes.  These services are vital to wellbeing.  But we are repeatedly told that we can’t afford to expand them.  And that is because we are reaching the limits of what state-supplied, taxpayer funded services can deliver in the UK. (In the US it’s another story for another day).  The health economy of tomorrow will have a larger private sector component, whether integrated with the NHS or parallel to it.  But what should our priorities now be, while this private sector is on the back foot?  It seems sensible to make the NHS more efficient and effective, but foolish to cut jobs.  We should be building the skill base alongside the reform programme.  The chief critics of the government’s NHS plans (including the Labour front bench) are that NHS reforms should be stopped so that they can focus on the critical business of raising efficiency.  But maybe it should be the other way round – we should be pushing ahead with reform, but relaxing the efficiency targets and letting the costs rise a bit until the economy starts showing greater signs of life. then, as any cuts are made the private health sector can take up the slack.

Perhaps housing is pushing at the boundaries of what “services” are.  We traditionally view this as a capital investment.  But what I mean is providing more and better places for people to live in, whether they own them or not.  Most of the country is quite well off here, but poor housing is probably what divides rich from poor more than anything else – and more investment in the right places (decently sized social housing) could rebalance things nicely and dramatically improve wellbeing.

But beyond this we badly need to get out of a manufacturing mindset, both in the private and public sectors.  We should not view division of labour and specialisation as the ideal form of organisation (massive call centres, and so on), and we should value listening skills much more – I nearly wrote “communication skills” but most people understand this about getting over what you want to say, not understanding what your customer or service user actually needs.  This is happening only very slowly.

So I would add a third priority: education.  We need to greatly expand the teaching of life skills at school and elsewhere.  This would not only help build the skills that tomorrow’s economy needs.  It would help people make better choices in a changing world.

 

Is the Ebacc such a bad idea?

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary for England (his remit not extending elsewhere in the UK, so far as I know), is one of the more controversial figures in the government.  I haven’t met anybody that works in or with the education sector that approves of him.  But amongst politicos and journalists, especially right-wing ones, he is considered one of the government’s best performers.  He is widely reviled by Liberal Democrats.  But not everything he says is nonsense.  And indeed the controversy he stirs up reveals some uncomfortable things about our educational establishment.  Today I am looking at one of his many controversial ideas: the English Baccalaureate, commonly referred to as the “Ebacc”.

What is it?  In principle the Ebacc is a certificate awarded to pupils who get C or better grades in five or more GCSE subjects, which must include maths, English, a foreign language (including Latin or ancient Greek), science, and history or geography (for more details see the link above).  Actually I’m not sure that it is a certificate yet; it was introduced last year as a performance target to show how well schools were doing in teaching these “core” academic subjects.

Why is it so controversial?  In the first place because it was dropped on schools out of nowhere last year, before they had a chance to plan for it.  Critics say that it should have been “tested” and phased in.  There may be some pupils who suffer because employers will be looking for their Ebacc when the school had put them in for some other subjects before they knew about it.  There is a lot of upset from schools who had looked good in earlier league tables that don’t look so good under this one.  This is mainly whinging by professionals who spend too much energy gaming the system to look good in league tables rather than considering what is best for their pupils.  To be fair, of course, many of the people I am dismissing as whingers actually have a more fundamental disagreement with the idea.  I am coming to that.

Also there are some more practical issues about how schools will respond.  One blogger (Anastasia de Waal of Civitas, quite sympathetic to the idea of a more academic curriculum) worries that schools won’t bother with pupils that they don’t think are going to reach C grades in one or more of these subjects.  This goes to the heart of another question: that of the use of league tables and performance measures.  A big topic for another day.

But the real controversy is about the subjects that aren’t included.  There are some subjects, such as religious studies and philosophy, that are (or should be) quite academic.  Why not include these if they test the same skills?  But the real issue is a whole swathe of “applied” or “vocational” subjects which have found their way into the GCSE.  These include applied sciences, applied languages (don’t ask), and things such as ICT (information and communications technology) and media studies.  These subjects were designed for pupils characterised as less academic, and were popular in schools because it was easier for students to get better grades.  By focusing on the more academic topics, the critics say, you are letting down all these less academic pupils from typically poorer backgrounds.

But the problem is that these “less academic” subjects are a major failure.  They are based on a misconception of what secondary school education at that age should be about.  They are, or so I understand, largely based on knowledge transfer, and not deeper understanding.  Pupils learn answers by rote and splurge them out as required.  But even supposing retention is good for this type of study, this knowledge is soon out of date.  What higher education recruiters and employers want, even for practical jobs, is understanding.  The “academic” subjects are much better at teaching this.  A college running a technology course would much rather its pupils were taught mathematics to a decent standard than any amount of ICT teaching (though schools have long been required to focus on maths and English).

This criticism makes a lot of sense to me, though I have only been involved in secondary education as a pupil, and that a long time ago.  For accountancy it has long been said that good basics (especially maths) is all that you really need from school – the rest can be picked up pretty quickly later.  When recruiting staff, I must admit that I didn’t take all that much interest in school qualifications if there was anything else (such as work experience) to go on.  And I find the idea of doing an applied subject without doing the theory alongside it to be equally flawed.

What am I saying?  At GCSE level a broad choice of subjects does not make for good education.  You need to focus on a range of basics and do them well.  Some regard the choice of subjects in the Ebacc as perverse, when other topics are equally as good.  I’m really not sure about that.  I don’t see that either religious studies or philosophy are good candidates to push out history or geography, or still less a foreign language.  Philosophy surely best after GCSE; I just don’t believe that religious studies is as stretching or socially inclusive as history or geography.  In my day I did a standard set of O levels, all in the Ebacc range (except English Literature); I never found that limiting.

What of the pupils who don’t make the Ebacc standard?  A very real problem – but the “applied” and “vocational” GCSEs were never the answer.  Better teaching and higher expectations are.  The more I see of the educational establishment, the more I am convinced that too many are content with the mediocre.

There is a final irony.  Mr Gove and his supporters often criticise modern education for lacking a focus on facts.  Actually the more academic subjects they advocate are mainly about skills, not facts.  They teach you how to think.  The less academic subjects fail because they are too focused on facts.  Of course you might argue that history and geography are, or should be, fact-based – but don’t get me started on that!

The anti academy movement is its own worst enemy

Yesterday, as a school governor, I attended a seminar on converting schools to academy status, organised by the London Borough of Lambeth.  The paradox of the education profession was clearly evident; however good they may be at teaching the nation’s young to be clear and rational, the profession’s members seem unable to promote a rational debate about the future of education.

Lambeth tried to put forward a balanced debate with four speakers broadly supportive of conversion in the right circumstances, four vehemently opposed and one complete fence-sitter.  Of the supportive speakers, one, Bill Watkin of the Specialist Schools & Academies Trust (SSAT) was a model of clarity, addressed his arguments to the audience (headteachers and chairs of governors), and was easily the most impressive speaker of the day.  The others included a head and deputy head who had taken their schools into academy status and somebody from the Cooperative School Society promoting a particular model of academy operation; their focus was quite narrow and presentation tended to be a bit plodding with too much PowerPoint.  All four managed to be pretty dispassionate, and none was evangelical for the academy model or government policy.  Each had different light to shed on the issue.

The “anti” speakers were awful; they seemed to be addressing the public or feeding the paranoia of staff, rather than trying to influence senior school management.  Two stood out, though neither stayed for the panel session.  One, Phil Beadle, makes regular appearances on TV and writes for the Guardian.  His arguments were as chaotic as his hair, and amounted to a rant about the way the academies he had worked in were run, mixed in with tribal anti-Tory paranoia.  The other was Alasdair Smith of the Anti Academies Alliance; his grey suit, purple lanyard, grey/white hair, general bonhomie and habit of laughing at other speakers,during their presentations, all put me in mind of an archetypal UKIP candidate.  His arguments were no more coherent than UKIP ones either: a general rabble rouse about how damaging academies would be to the overall education system, how all academies were run like grasping businesses, that it was a lonely world out there for academies, and nothing about how senior managers should weigh up the pros and cons.  The other two speakers, one a headteacher and one from the Campaign for State Education basically said the same thing, but were a little duller.  The arguments were polemical rather a serious review of the evidence, scattering numerous horror stories to support their arguments.  What Lambeth thought it was doing by inviting all four to speak is a bit mysterious.

A few important and interesting points did manage to emerge.  There isn’t much money in converting to academy status; for that you need an outside sponsor.  Since education departments are being cut back drastically (Lambeth is no exception, with the key decisions all being taken before last year’s election, not as a consequence of the Coalition’s cuts) the amount of support they can offer to LA schools is pretty minimal.  Most of the things that schools might want to do (including forming relationships with their neighbouring schools and local authorities) can be done under either model, which cuts both ways.  The best part of the process, one of the academy heads said, was that it forced the school to think about its vision and strategy, and how to carry it through.

But the standard of debate was pretty awful.  Most speakers complained that the government wasn’t offering a clear vision, but they had little or no vision to offer themselves.  The antis seem to want the outside world to go away, so that schools can bumble in their own comfortable little worlds as before.  There was no horror at the awfulness of so many schools, unless they happen to academies, of course.  And then there is the hate and anger.  Mr Beadle quoted extensively from former Conservative education secretary Ken Baker to prove that this was all an evil Tory conspiracy to destroy public services.  I am not so much horrified that he says this sort of thing, but that so many people seem to be listening.  I have seen something similar on local forums about our proposed new “free” school in Wandsworth: a complete inability of the leading anti-campaigners to listen, or to weigh up arguments and evidence – even if they are at least more polite and better tempered than some on the other side of the argument.

But leaders of schools need to do the best for their children and communities schools by working with government policy as they find it.  The academies decision is a delicate process of weighing up pros and cons, often with no killer argument on either side.   What is coming out of the anti academy movement is no help.  It is so tempting to think that if that is the best their opponents can do, academies must be a good idea.  The movement is its own worst enemy.