On Thursday 16th, David Cameron issued a speech about education. Since then Boris Johnson and other rising young stars have endorsed David Cameron as a candidate for the leadership of the Tory party.
After reading the speech David Cameron made, I find this all very depressing. It is a speech in which Mr Cameron positions himself as the Tony Blair of the Right. But more important than that, it is a speech in which Mr Cameron shows that he has not got to grips with how and why the country's welfare state - particulary the education part - is in such trouble. And the fact that many rising young Tories have endorsed him, suggests that they have not understood either.
He said in his speech,
In recent times party political debate has often been in danger of missing the big point in education.The Labour Party has talked primarily about "resources", talking about spending per pupil, per school and as a share of our national wealth.
The Conservative Party has talked more about "structures", giving parents greater choices between different sorts of schools.
Both are important - but there is a danger of missing the absolutely vital bit in the middle: what actually happens in our state schools.
Will our children learn to read, write and add up properly? Will they be safe in class? Will they be stretched to the best of their abilities? Will they be taught the skills they need to have a successful career when they leave? Will our local school do the best for our child?
These are the questions parents ask themselves - the issues we stress about when considering our children's education.
Mr Cameron is, of course, quite right to think it is important that children should learn to read, write and add up properly. He is not exactly being controversial, either, in suggesting that it would be a good thing if they were safe in class and that they should be 'stretched'. These are views that anyone might have. The important issue is how do we get schools which actually achieve these things.
Mr Cameron seems to think that merely saying that such things are important and that they are common sense amounts to a policy. Does he really think that being education minister and thinking these things is going to make a difference? To be fair, he does name a genuine policy - one of giving heads the power to expel pupils without there being an appeals tribunal. But while he wants children to learn to read and write, he does not say if he is going centrally impose the synthetic phonics he approves of. If he did so, he would be going against the 'celebration' of school independence which he favours.
He has plenty of good wishes and intentions but distinctly short of methods to make them happen. It is all talk and no action and in this is is very like the superficial appeal and actual uselessness of Blairism. But the worst thing about his speech is this:
He dismisses as, at best, a subsiary idea the only realistic chance of making schools the way that he wants them. He attacks his own party saying that it has 'missed the big point' by talking about 'structures'. But on the contrary, it is only by changing the structure of schools that there is any chance of bringing about major improvement.
State schooling overall has performed lamentably badly. When he talks about children not being safe, he is really talking about them not being safe in state schools, not private ones. When he suggests they are not being stretched, he is not referring to private schools. State schools perform badly precisely because they are state schools. The only way we are going to get high quality schooling in Britain is if most or all schools are private ones with a high degree of independence enshrined in law. That is a matter of structures.
My preference would be for wholly private schools paid for by parents directly. I would understand if Mr Cameron would think that the British public is not ready to listen to that idea. But he could still go for many other options that would make really big difference to the culture of education in Britain:
1. State schools made into individual charitable trusts or sold to private companies or trade unions or friendly societies.
2. Vouchers for every child to go to a private (or any remaining state) school.
or 3. Education tax relief at the standard rate, up to a limited amount.
4. Abolition of the national curriculum.
5. Abolition of Ofsted and many another educational quango.
The structures Mr Cameron thinks are of secondary importance are, on the contrary, 'the big point'.
Imagine it is the early 1980s. Mr Cameron is a leading, 'modernising' member of the party. The privatising programme is getting under way. He declares, "The Conservatives are missing the big point about the telephone service. The important thing is that the service should be good - that the telephones should actually work and that one should be able to have a new line installed in less than three months. It does not matter so much whether the telecommunications service is privatised or not."
But of course it was only because the structure was changed - the telephone service was privatised and opened to more competition - that its quality dramatically improved. The same goes for education now.
Mr Cameron and his supporters like to describe themselves as modernisers. In fact they are, in the traditional sense, 'conservatives'. They don't want to change anything much. They certainly don't want to change structures. They don't understand how much structures matter. They are not radicals, let alone Thatcherites. Lady Thatcher, indeed, would have called them 'wets'.
It is very sad that after, all this time, a new generation of Tories has come along which, instead of showing new courage has been made gutless and meaningless by the 1997 defeat.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education • Politics
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I bet that in private David Cameron would agree with almost everything you said, but were he to do so publically Nulabour and the media would rip him to shreads.
So, does a poliitician say what he or she believes, and stand no chance of being elected, or do they go along with the consensus and say what everybody wants to hear, even if it is a load of b******s?
The second option has kept Blair in power for 3 terms, and until the electorate can be educated beyond the level of playschool economics and social theory then Cameron will have to do the same as Blair.
Posted by: John East at June 19, 2005 11:04 AM
Many of the ideas in the way things are run aren't actually that bad.
There's nothing wrong with a "National Curriculum" exactly, teachers have always been limited by the exam syllabus. The problem is the endless tinkering and targets. We lurch from extremes of Real Books to Phonics without any balance. It is *really* proscriptive. It's not just "you will teach them about Henry VIII in Year 7", it's broken down into Lesson plans. Deviation from the standard is looked on unfavourably by OFSTED et al, and is probably a bad idea anyway because the lessons are basically training to take the exam, not teach skills and/or knowledge and/or thinking. There's a reason why school leavers can do nothing.
There's nothing wrong with monitoring either. HMI have always done this. OFSTED and CSCI just do it incompetently and expensively. There's a lot of bad teaching. But they can't measure it ; all OFSTED do is randomly pick on schools for no apparent reason (the Regi has a bad hair day) and also tell us that schools with poor catchment areas have below average exam results. Whoopee-do.
How does the voucher idea work with Special Needs ? Not the current dozy definition, but the real children with Special Needs who are expensive to look after and educate - who need 52 week a year care and various other expensive forms of education ? This cannot be provided even at close to the per capita rate.
Posted by: Paul at June 19, 2005 01:29 PM
Paul
Why not increase the value of the voucher for special needs? There's so much money in the education system, this should be easily affordable within current budgets.
Posted by: Bishop Hill at June 19, 2005 04:42 PM
Although synthetic phonics is my pet subject, I fear that David Cameron's enthusiasm for it will kill it stone dead, just as Kenneth Baker killed any chance of a school teaching a reasonable curriculum. Despite their constant refrain that 'synthetic phonics is at the heart of the National Literacy Strategy', the DfES has been fighting it with dishonesty and deceit ever since 1997. To expect that an intellectual lightweight such as Cameron could make them lie down like little lambs and promote synthetic phonics is absurd. It's pretty obvious that if Cameron ever read 'All must have prizes' by Melanie Phillips, he didn't understand a word of it.
In the Tories' struggle between the managerialists and the minimalists, Cameron appears quite clearly to be one of the former. Why else would he so conspicuously announce that he wasn't going to do anything about the structures? To claim, as Gekko has, that he is just lying doggo until he achieves office is naive. You can't just go in and start cleaning the augean stables without a popular mandate.
And back to synthetic phonics: My last Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet (March 2) argued that the only way it could be introduced against the grain, so to speak, was to encourage schools to trial the synthetic phonics programme of their choice, and to have the results independently monitored by the ONS (who were instrumental in blowing the whistle on the shameless massaging of English SATs). Alas, the government has asked Jim Rose, who wrote an earlier whitewash on the same subject, to determine how synthetic phonics should be introduced. Early reports indicate that Rose clearly knows where his next quango is buttered, and once again we will have the hopeless charade of the 'experts' churning out lorry-loads of useless teaching manuals which any sensible school would send off for recycling without so much as opening it.
I wish I could believe that Cameron knows better, but having met a few 'modernisers', I fear that he is another ill-educated man with a slick grasp of the sound-bite. The Tories are daft if they think that this is still a winning formula. The real reason why the Tories get a bad press is because journalists see exactly what I see: vain and shallow men who have nothing to offer but more of the same old managerial solutions. The last Tory masterstroke was selling off council houses--quite clearly a minimalist solution.
Posted by: tom burkard at June 19, 2005 06:01 PM
... it'd work, except you'd still need some kind of assessment/statementing type procedure, spend on SEN can be anything from a few hundred quid upto six figures for the more extreme cases.
Posted by: Paul at June 19, 2005 06:28 PM
I think the DfES response to AMHP is just to stick their heads in the sands and pretend it's not happening. "It can't be .... it can't be". Never underestimate the ability of those with their noses in the public trough to miss the obvious.
If anything, I think JB is *generous* to the current "teaching methods". It's probably worse than described in AMHP and TWSWI. Standards haven't so much dropped as plummeted.
ICT (what I taught) is full of presentational waffle ; the first part of a KS3 being "What is the purpose of a corporate logo ?" (My answer would be: "so that incompetent wasters in the PR/Media department can keep their useless non-jobs, or incompetent managers can pretend they are doing something" which probably wouldn't get a good mark)
I think the number of A-grade A levels has doubled in 15 years (when I was at school only the very cream or the intensely dedicated got three or four As)
I presume even Bliar's not stupid enough to believe the children have got twice as clever in fifteen years. And if they haven't, the exams are easier to pass, QED.
(Though it's perfectly plausible that achievement is half of what it was fifteen years ago)
Posted by: Paul at June 19, 2005 06:36 PM
On the special needs question, Paul is right about the cost running up to 6 figures. I personally know of a private sin bin in Suffolk which is paid around £150,000 p.a. for residential care. For a particularly spectacular case, the LEA offered them £500,000--and they turned it down. Their facilities are palatial. The owner explained that with the money that they were making, it mattered little if one of the rooms got trashed.
In a sane world, kids like these would be sent to Borstals in Tierra del Fuego. There isn't a cat's chance in hell that any of these kids will ever be rehabilitated. Alas, the central belief of the welfare state is that only middle-class people are responsible for their own behaviour. This patronising attitude has had predictable results, which TWSWI has explained so well.
But as for the special needs system, I am in favour of a return to the status quo ante (1981) when special needs had to be diagnosed by a doctor, and then only certain recognised conditions merited extra cash. I think that very minimal cash limits should be established for very specifically defined cases, and charitable foundations should pave the way in supporting the truly deserving cases. Of course, this is never going to happen--but it would be far more humane and successful than the horrendous system bequeathed to us by Dame Warnock.
Posted by: tom burkard at June 19, 2005 08:21 PM
I really the non-yob SEN. Most of these children have problems that are IMO directly attributable to the complete lack of any effective sanctions. (And I've worked in EBD for many years)
You are wrong incidentally about the rehabilitation of these young people. It can be done (I used to work with the cases that LEAs had given up on, for much less than £150k), but they need a dose of reality, honesty, which the Children Act effectively forbids. Basically they get goodies if they do well, and baddies if they don't. The old carrot and stick. The number of pupils who are so damaged they are irretrievable is virtually nil.
They run riot because they are allowed to, because anyone who may try to stop them is accused of being a violent / sexual abuser - a career terminating accusation often. This means staff have to tiptoe around very very gently.
Imagine if the Police were suspended immediately on any accusation of any sort, however old or recent, however obviously for gain or revenge.
Criminals would do it every time, just for the hell of it. There'd be no police left. Crime would run riot. That's what these schools have to put up with. There is no defence against it either. Minor details like evidence and witnesses are discounted.
Social Services response to (say) smashing a TV in their bedroom is to buy them another (and another, and another), because it's part of their human rights to have a TV. My suggestion is to say "you don't have a TV now, tough !". They will learn fast, but this is apparently "not acceptable".
The SEN I'm thinking of are the seriously disabled, the psychotic and so on.
Posted by: Paul at June 20, 2005 10:26 AM
Paul is right to the extent that rehabilitation of seriously anti-social behavious is all but impossible under the Children's Act, even of children with relatively mild behavioural problems. But I have met a quite a number of people in my life who were just plain evil. Some of them even had caring, responsible parents--and I've known people who came from the most hopelessly violent and dysfunctional homes who were worthy of all praise. Before the advent of secular relativism, we had no problem identifying and punishing evil. Now, a politician who used the word would be ridiculed and pilloried in the press.
This is not to say that secular relativists don't have their own criteria for 'evil'--ironically, 'judgementalism' is pretty near the top of the list.
Posted by: tom burkard at June 20, 2005 02:33 PM
Wow - now there's a novel idea! Allowing Trades Unions to take over schools. The more I think about it, the more it seems like a great way to force the issue of socail responsibility for education, and aimed at developing trades for children who are not academically inclined.
I would love to be a fly on the wall when the NUT and TUC meet on opposite sides of the table!
Posted by: Ricky at June 20, 2005 07:57 PM
I've known a few pupils who were certainly dangerous, who I wouldn't turn my back on.
But many many more who were not bad kids who were just simply lost. They actually *want* people to tell them what to do ; their parents are often in a worse mess than they are ; many are quite keen on joining the army & I suspect this is why.
It's difficult to criticise them too much. They are thrown into a situation where they can more or less do what they want with little effective sanction, and massive peer group pressure not to work and a target based education system only interested in very specific things (Level 4 or a C-Grade GCSE).
This means that those who might with a big effort get a D are ignored, because there's no target result in it. The old bell curve of marks has a deliberately created skew in it round these points these days.
Most of these children are recoverable, just not under the current moronic system. Give them therapy. If that doesn't work, more therapy, then more therapy and so on.
Doesn't work, but you can always argue, well the NEXT session will work.
I don't think religion or the lack of it has anything to do with it. It's primarily the responsibility of the 1989 Children Act "believe the child, protect the child at all costs, in virtually *any* circumstances".
This leads to the current system where pupils can assault teachers at will, but teachers are crucified on trivial or fabricated allegations (think tape-over-mouth joke, fish-head and pricking skin remove scarf as some of many).
Posted by: Paul at June 20, 2005 09:32 PM
Funny you should mention the army, Paul. I learned how to teach in the Royal Pioneers, and it took all of two weeks. And the interesting thing is that we were able to train soldiers who left school barely literate, and they enjoyed it. One of the most satisfying experiences I ever had in Her Majesty's forces was at a training camp where I conducted a two week signals course. One of those selected was a Glaswegian private who was an outstanding soldier when sober, but clearly was lacking the confidence to become an NCO. We nursed him through the course by pairing him with a fully-literate Scouser who was able to help him with spelling. It was most remarkable to see his attitude change over the fortnight. He clearly had found classrooms a misery all of his life, as he had never known a word of praise which hadn't rung false. We put a hell of a lot of pressure on him, but a standard part of Army instruction is that ultimately, the instructor is responsible for ensuring that soldiers master their course. You can't have things any other way, considering the dangerous toys the Army has. So we made sure that he got all the additional support he needed--considering how fiendishly complicated BATCO was, that was quite a job.
This lad passed the course, and very shortly was promoted to lance corporal. Ever since then I have believed that this country would be a hell of a lot better place if the Army ran all PRUs (pupil referral units).
It's interesting to speculate as to why the Army is so much more successful than other state institutions. Obviously, there is something elemental about being a soldier, something that Dr Johnson recognised. But the Army has had its ups and downs over time, and I fear it is on the way down now. The officer corps has been taken over by managerialists. When I was in, officers had to prove themselves as privates before they were selected for Sandhurst. Although the formal requirement is still in place, I hear that the spirit of this has been eroded. I have heard from an old mate that officers are no longer trusted to sign chitties in the mess, so the bar has to be closed as soon as the mess attendants leave. The Army has come to a fine pass when hired waiters are more trustworthy than officers.
Posted by: tom burkard at June 21, 2005 11:36 AM
The army is successful because it doesn't have Social Workers et al. to run to. Muck around and you are in trouble - effective punishment trouble.
Everything is being taken over by managerialists. Who all seem to be uncontrollable, unaccountable and incompetent.
Posted by: Paul at June 21, 2005 10:18 PM
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Well said James. Excellent article.
Posted by: Gekko at June 18, 2005 11:37 PM