Tag: Michael Gove

Last week’s Economist carried a remarkable article about education policy. It looked at the idea of allowing independently managed but state-funded schools, called charter schools in the United States and academies here in Britain, an idea the newspaper has long supported. It reveals weaknesses in the policy. These weaknesses are very revealing.

Independent management of schools has always been more popular with policy wonks than with educationalists. Nevertheless studies were commissioned to show that charter schools and academies performed better than ordinary state-managed schools, usually based on exam results. This is referred to evidence-based policymaking. And it drives me mad. The effectiveness of such an approach depends on the questions you ask the evidence to answer – a process that always entails risks. Schools policy shows two major ones: looking at the wrong question, and making success criteria too narrow.

What’s the problem? Research is now showing that, now that the policy is becoming more mainstream, these independent schools generally perform no better, and often worse, than state managed schools, especially in middle-ranking schools. Worse, there is some evidence from the US that where improved exam results have been achieved, they have not actually improved the life-chances of the pupils. This turn of events was entirely predictable. But whereas the Economist innocently suggests that the policy needs to be tweaked to address these weaknesses, the rest of us must ask whether it was ever a good idea to make the policy mainstream, rather than just applied to a few schools to ginger up innovation.

The first problem is that the policy, and the evidence used to support it, was addressing the wrong thing. Changing management arrangements does not change the way schools are actually run. You can set your school up as an academy and carry on just the same way as before. And indeed many schools in England have done just that, so it hardly surprising that their performance is unchanged. The government’s current drive to make all schools into academies falls precisely into this trap.; schools do the minimum to comply, and so change nothing important. So what was the point?

And it is no secret what really does make a difference in schools, based on countless studies, often reported by the Economist. That is the quality of school leadership and the quality of teaching. This trumps, money, quality of facilities, and even class sizes. To be fair, policymakers advocate independent management because they think it is the quickest way to fix leadership and teaching (where it challenges the stranglehold of teachers’ unions). But they won’t necessarily do anything of the kind, and it is possible to replicate their changes to leadership and teaching in state-managed schools, once politicians understand what is to be done. This is what happened London, for example, before the academies programme got going. I could show you some truly wonderfully state-run schools near where I live – and others who are on their way there. It is really hard to see how turning them into academies is going to help.

The problem is that political structures are something that  politicians and policy wonks find it easy to talk about and comfortable to fiddle with. I have seen something similar in business management – senior managers playing with organisation structures before they have really understood what the real issues are and how they are best to be fixed. So school independence has now become the chief aim of political policy in English education, and the subject of huge amounts of political effort, which will have little direct effect on the quality of education – and could even harm it.

And public policy journalists, including those at the Economist, have egged the politicians on. They often wrote approvingly of Michael Gove, the British Education Secretary (whose remit is actually just England) from 2010 to 2014, who led the recent drive to academies obsessively, in spite of plenty of evidence that he was barking up the wrong tree. Economist articles are anonymous, but I am sure that Anne McElvoy is at the root of this. She seems to care more about her public media profile than the quality of her journalism.

The second issue I pointed to was that of narrow performance measures. This is secondary in the Economist article, but it has been a huge problem in education policy, and in many other areas too. In education the issue is a focus on test and exam results. The article reports concerns that better results achieved in charter schools do not feed through into the employment market (for example in how much pupils are paid in employment). Their focus has become too narrow on improving the scores, at the expense of life-skills. It is even reported that charter school advocates do not send their own children there. The same weakness has been alleged for English academies, though I am not sure how true this is. The system of Ofsted inspections makes England less vulnerable – the inspectors look at broader issues, especially when conferring the coveted “Outstanding” label. Now a broad education, done well, is not incompatible with excellent test results – the pupils use their improved life skills to improve their learning, and in a highly sustainable way – but it takes top-quality leadership to appreciate this and weather the short-term costs.  It remains tempting to short cut this hard road by narrowing the focus.

In fact policymakers should be thinking much harder about the best way of preparing young people for later life, and of recruiting and training top quality teachers and school leaders. And not engage in silly think-tanker debates, for example as to whether schools focus too much on teaching skills rather than knowledge, as Mr Gove was prone to engage in.

And as for school management, no doubt the old ways of state direction of state-funded schools will re-emerge in a new guise. But will politicians and their advisers ever learn the lessons for policymaking, evidence-based or otherwise? Aim directly at the key drivers of success, not just the management structures. And use numerical measures with extreme caution.

 

Some people hate The Economist; to them it is a proselytiser of that despised creed “neoliberalism” or just plain capitalism. Not me. I have been reading the Economist weekly since 1974 (from between the two British General Elections of that year), when I was just 16 and still at school. I loved its cosmopolitanism and that that it did not lets its opinions obscure the reporting of facts. It was opinionated, yes, but not prejudiced. Much of my writing in this blog has been inspired by my 40 years of readership. No other journal has come close in winning my loyalty.

The Economist has annoyed me of course. I felt a deep sense of betrayal when in 2011 it backed a No vote in the referendum on the Alternative Vote. My own strong support for AV dates from when The Economist itself persuaded me that it would be an appropriate and sensible reform. The chattering classes had taken against AV, and the paper followed the crowd. A perverse election result in Canada under first-past-the-post, reported in the very same edition of the paper, illustrated the case for AV perfectly. The paper’s support for the education reforms of the current government were built on similarly weak foundations, I thought, but these hadn’t strayed beyond mistaken opinion. Until this week.

The top article in the UK section, The new school rules, presents itself as a serious examination of the government’s education reforms. It reads like an article placed by a pro-government think tank, and not the original and critical journalism upon which the newspaper’s reputation has been built.

A bit of background. Under its first Education Secretary, the Conservative Michael Gove, the coalition government has driven through an eye-catching programme of reforms to England’s schools (in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland education is devolved). The centrepiece of this has been the establishment of autonomous “Academy” schools, independent of local council control. This built on the previous government’s policy, where Academies often replaced failed schools, and had to secure external sponsors to provide extra finance. This government has made it much easier to set up new Academies (referred to as “Free Schools”), and allowed existing schools to convert to Academy status without a sponsor. The government has done many other things too: established a “pupil premium” to channel extra funding to schools with needier children; refocused the school inspectorate, Ofsted; changed secondary school qualifications towards more academic subjects; refashioned the primary curriculum to something a more prescriptive and more to its political taste; changed teachers’ pay and conditions to give school managers more power; moved measurement of progress away from achieving arbitrary thresholds to measuring total progress. Given the general climate of government austerity, which has limited resources, these changes have been mainly to the good, though I fail to see the point of the changes to the primary curriculum, and the jury is out on the secondary reforms of qualifications.

But the Economist focuses almost entirely on the Academy programme, which it is claims is transforming schools and driving progress. It quotes evidence that secondary academies achieve more good GCSEs (the main secondary exam – “good” meaning achieving the grade C or above) than non-academies, even allowing for the number of pupils from poorer backgrounds. As it describes this progress it fails to mention two facts that throw an entirely different light on what is happening.

The first is that the most striking progress in recent times achieved by Britain’s schools has been in London, in the years up to 2010. Schools in apparently hopeless boroughs like Tower Hamlets pulled ahead of schools in much wealthier areas. This has been much written about and commented on – but it was achieved under the previous Labour government’s tutelage, working with councils of several political stripes. It was based on what I call “good old fashioned management”. A lot of focus was put on school performance, and where results were poor, school management was changed. Some failing schools were converted to Academies, not always successfully, but otherwise existing governance structures were used. The coalition has not undermined this achievement, which has largely continued under its watch (at least in areas I know about). But it is awkward for the article’s central thesis; the upward momentum in England’s schools predates the government’s reforms; it is far from clear whether greater autonomy has much to do with school progress.

The second awkward fact is that for ordinary schools that have converted to Academy status there is a bias towards better schools making the change. Schools who want to make the move on their own (i.e. without being folded into an externally run chain of schools) must achieve a high quality threshold. Rumour has it that one my local schools has been refused because standards aren’t high enough. Conversely schools with good performance often want to convert, in case an unexpected hiccup means that they are forced into being part of a chain. The article quotes evidence that the performance of schools that have converted is better than non-converters. Well, that is hardly surprising, but cause and effect have not been disentangled.

The article discusses the rather awkward fact that academy chains have delivered disappointing performance – I must acknowledge that it does raise difficult evidence in this case. These chains have a reputation of being brutally managed and focusing on a narrow curriculum – one reason that so many schools are anxious not to be swept into one. A bit of brutality is required in order to lift badly managed schools up to the standards of the best, and the London experience confirms that – but a broader, less performance-focused curriculum is needed to deliver the wider set of skills that the world of work (and outside it) demands. Schools have to be soft and hard both at once. It is no surprise to many that aggressively managed chains deliver at best only short-term results.

But the Economist seems to think that the problem is that management of the chains is is not aggressive enough. It suggests that one way to “turbocharge” the reforms would be to open up management of schools to for-profit companies, rather than just charitable foundations as now. If I was a cynic, I would suggest that the article was prompted by private sector company lobbying to be allowed to take over state schools – but I don’t believe that.

Unlike many I have no ideological objection to the use of the private sector in public services. But I do wonder whether the sort of aggressive performance-driven management that the private sector does well is what most state schools need. Private managers will be tempted to take two shortcuts. The first is to narrow the curriculum, which undermines the overall mission of education. At least competition might act as a check on this, as schools with too narrow a focus may be less popular. The second is more insidious: selecting the pupils by avoiding the neediest, through selective recruitment or exclusion. Whatever the formal controls against this, we can expect the private sector to find innovative ways around them, as this is the quickest way to improve margins. This then leaves a pool of needier pupils which will tend to be concentrated in other schools – when in almost all cases the best chances of meeting their needs is in schools with a good social mix. A vital social objective for state schools is to reduce the number of people who get into trouble of one kind or another later in life (crime, unemployment, poor mental and physical health). It is very important that schools handle the neediest cases well – and it is something that English schools have often been bad at. It is not something that private sector organisations have a strong enough incentive to deal with, and concentrating the problem into specialist schools is no way out.

When considering education policy in an international context, The Economist often says that teaching and management are the critical issues, and not other issues such as class sizes, money – or autonomy. English (and indeed British) education is nowhere near as good as it needs to be, and many schools and local authorities are complacent or defensive. Continued reform is needed. This needs to focus on getting good leaders in place, raising teaching standards, and ensuring that incentives and accountability are functional. No doubt academies, and even private sector expertise, has a role to play. It gives the politicians a few extra tools in the box. But to make autonomy the centrepiece of reform is a highly questionable approach, especially in a country, like Britain and unlike the US, where central government has such power over schools.

The author of the article was clearly inspired by visits made to well-run Academies. If he or she wants evidence that you don’t have to be an Academy to be a very impressive school, I am happy to offer them a tour of the wonderful primary school where I am Chair of Governors. That at least may open theirs eyes to what is possible without being an Academy.

I must allow The Economist to hold firm opinions rather sit on the fence. What is so disappointing is that this time that opinion seems based on such shallow foundations. And its discussion of the evidence and wider debate lowers the papers standards to those of less distinguished papers.

 

 

Britain is ill-served by its news media. There has been a growing kerfuffle about Muslim-dominated schools in Birmingham. The issues dominating this in media coverage are the extremism of some Muslims, and the explosive relations between the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, and the Home Secretary, Theresa May, which they assume is all to do with Mrs May’s leadership ambitions. This wantonly ignorant coverage is not only damaging community relations, but it failed to shine any light on the failure of the coalition’s Conservative-led education policy. This matters because this policy has been given nearly a free run in the media, and supported by papers, such as The Economist, that really should know better.

We must start with Mr Gove, who has been in post since the government was formed in 2010, and is one of the Conservatives’ big hitters. A journalist by profession, he has strong views on both education and extremism, which he has not hesitated to put into practice. Liberal Democrats have moderated some of his more extreme positions, but many suspect that the Lib Dem leadership (in contrast to its activists) sympathises with a lot of what Mr Gove is trying to do. Instead they have concentrated on their own pet policy, the Pupil Premium.

At the heart of Mr Gove’s policy is the idea that education should be run as a quasi-market, driven by parental choice, and without the need for much in the way of government direction – rather in the way the private sector does. Schools are being progressively pushed into being “Academies” independent of local authority control, and new Academies, “Free Schools”, are being established without much of the obstructive bureaucracy that would have strangled many of them at birth under the previous regime. These Academies were not subject to the National Curriculum, though they were subject to inspection by Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, which focuses on a narrow set of core subjects (literacy and numeracy – with “behaviour” thrown in to satisfy conservative prejudices). The idea was that bad schools would fail to attract pupils, and so they would end up being closed, or management changed. Competition would impose discipline on the schools, and the whole thing would be more democratic because parental choice would not be intermediated by busybody officials, elected and otherwise.

Two other themes ran alongside this. One was the idea that existing education was not based enough on factual learning, with too much emphasis on wishy-washy “skills” and mushy “values”. Mr Gove recalled the curriculum of old-fashioned private schools and selective state grammar schools, which educated most off Britain’s elite. A second was a distrust of educational experts and officials, who Mr Gove took to referring to as “The Blob”, who watered down and undermined the reform process. The “Blob” was progressively dismantled.

In this mix we should mention faith schools. The Birmingham row does not involve faith schools directly, which has led a number of, excessively defensive, faith school supporters to claim that they are a irrelevant. But they are heavily bound up in the consequences of the row. Faith schools were not a strong element of Mr Gove’s ideas. They were rather an enthusiasm of the previous Labour government, who, it must be added, started the whole process of setting up independent Academies. Britain’s state schools have always included those run by religious foundations, in particular the Church of England in (rather obviously) England. These were joined by Catholic schools. Under Labour these were extended to Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu and no doubt other foundations. The Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair (a Catholic convert) had the idea that such faith schools gave children a solid moral grounding. Labour generally found that it helped their clientalist relationship with ethnic minority communities. These schools have been given a great deal of freedom to run themselves along their chosen lines. So long as you keep giving us good test scores and exam results, the suggestion was, we don’t care how you do it.

Finally in this background exposition, I need to mention Muslim extremism. Terrorist groups have successfully recruited a number of young British Muslims, and they have carried out a number of acts of violence both in this country and abroad, in such places as Syria. It is considered my many to be the biggest security threat the country faces. These extremists have very conservative instincts, such as believing in the veiling of women, but they tend to be converts and not very conversant with the actual teachings of Islam. Their extremism is fuelled by a general feeling of rejection and alienation.

In the public eye however, these young extremists have become tangled up with the conservative views of many Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. These are horrified by what they see as the laxity of Western moral values, and do not want their children to be corrupted by them. They share many of the conservative instincts of their extremist co-religionists, along with an acute sense of injustice over the treatment of Muslims abroad, especially in Israel and Afghanistan; but there the similarity breaks down. Terrorism plays no part in their outlook, and certainly not in a domestic UK context – they may view Palestinian suicide bombers more sympathetically. But the extremists hover at the fringes of these communities, and that leaves the British state with a very tricky problem. They need intelligence from the established minority communities, and so to maintain good relations with them. But they are quite unsympathetic to many of their beliefs.

Into this delicate situation wade opportunistic journalists and careless politicians, Mr Gove among them. To them there is a direct line between the terrorist threat and conservative religious values. Most of the white community assume this to be the case, and happily lap up this message. Almost no politicians attempt to put a more realistic public gloss on this.

And so when allegations emerged that conservative Muslims had taken over a number of state schools in Birmingham (as part of a “Trojan Horse” plot), Mr Gove assumed that terrorism was at the heart of it, and so did most of the public. He steamed into a delicate situation, upsetting community relations and the Home Office, responsible for policing. The schools had been rated highly by Ofsted, who had focused on academic achievement, which was strong. The inspectors were sent in again with a different agenda, found evidence of  a conservative religious agenda, and, with a bit of ingenuity, ways in which these breached requirements of state-funded schools. The schools are in the process of being transferred to new management.

But the problems have only just begun:

1. What has been alleged is that school governors, recruited from the local community, took the schools over and forced them into a conservative religious agenda. The school populations were almost entirely drawn from the local Muslim communities. But this is surely what school governors are supposed to do? They set the direction, ethos and strategy of the school. Their actions appear to have been perfectly popular with parents (though not staff). And though not faith schools, the widespread political support for faith schools would not have suggested to them that what they were doing was a bad thing. They were simply picking up the ball tossed by Westminster politicians and running with it.
2. The actual alleged abuses are not so black and white. Segregation of the sexes? We still have 100% segregated schools. Allowing tradition Muslim dress? A lot of perfectly respectable schools do that already – and that is surely right. The same goes for making provision for prayer, which after all can be open to all faiths. A culture of intimidation? sounds a bit like my English private school education. And surely school management has a right to make the changes it wants, and this always leads to such allegations. The were, predictably, no demonstrable links to terrorist extremism.
3. We are now told that Mr Gove wants “British Values” to be taught at all schools. Not only is defining this a minefield, but it is a step away from the “fact-based” principles that he had been so fond of espousing. And how will “real” faith schools, and not just Muslim ones, end up if judged to the same standards as those used in the second wave of Birmingham Ofsted inspections?
4. Sorting out this mess is going to take a lot of work. Schools can’t in fact be left just to get on with it. They are going to need help, guidance and correction from an intermediate level of officialdom. A newly recreated Blob, in fact.

And so we find that parents are free to choose, provided they conform Mr Gove’s own version of political correctness. It is very easy to understand how the local Muslim community (and no so local ones) feel victimised – judged by double standards from a society that has lost its moral compass.

The government’s reforms are barking up the wrong tree. Here in London we have an outstanding example of how seemingly hopeless schools in deprived areas can be turned round. This did not need the creation of Academies; the existing local authority structures were up to the task. What it is did need was strong and credible leadership. Politicians can lead from on high, but ultimately this leadership has to come from experts who live and breath schools. The country was lucky enough to have plenty of these. But they have been side-lined and pensioned off.

Coalition policy is hollow at its heart, and the last four years have been largely wasted. Even Labour could do a better job than this.

 

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.