Imagine you are the head of a school. You receive a constant supply of instructions from national and perhaps local government. You have a huge volume instructions on encouraging equality and community cohesion and things of that sort as well as instructions on actual education. The strength of these instructions varies from guidelines up to laws.

There is such a vast quantity of this material that you are faced with a choice. Do you:

1. Panic
or 2. Bury yourself in reading in detail all the instructions
or 3. Be reckless (and not look at it)?

That is the situation in which heads of schools in Britain now are, according to Amanda Spielman, Research and Development Director for Ark Schools which has opened eight academies. She gave a speech last night hosted by the Learning Skills Foundation. It was a superb speech because it described in detail the sort of regulation to which schools are subject, how the regulations are increasing in number and the damage that they do. There was no doubt that this was authoriative and balanced. This made it all the more grim. At the end one wondered why anyone would want to face the onslaught of instructions. It is against human nature to be, at once a leader of a school and, at the same time, a servant to myriad instructions from various levels of government.

She referred, for example, to EU procurement rules which "add enormously to the cost of business". Then - just as an example of one rule out of hundreds - there was the code that outlaws schools giving preference to siblings who have left a school. This is now actually illegal. Schools must have 'behaviour partnerships'. She commented that most of the rules were ones which one could see were in favour of desirable things. Co-operation is a good thing. But this has gone from being something desirable to being something obligatory.

Meanwhile there is an unending demand for data from government. The National Curriculum is prescriptive. The government insists schools should do social engineering in favour of equality. It demands schools have policies in favour of 'community cohesion'. She commented that this policy was originally intended to get schools in one town to integrate more with the rest of British society. But, because rules are rules, those schools which have a complete mix of children and thoroughly 'cohesive' are obliged also to follow the instructions and demonstate that they are doing so.

All this takes a great deal of time and paperwork and most of it does absolutely nothing to improve the education of children - the purpose of schools.

There are many adverse consequences.

- The time and effort of key personnel used on these things instead of on promoting education.

- Amanda Spielman said there was an element of intimidation. She referred to a talented and able head of a school being distressed and completely throwing out policy statements she had written because they were not liked by OFTSED inspectors.

- Barriers to entry. The bureaucratic jungle acts to deter anyone from trying to start a new school or academy - particularly those who are small in scale. In fact the big companies and organisations gain something from this barrier to entry - they know it keeps out small, new and perhaps innovative competitors.

What can be done?

She would like a tougher test for new regulations. At the moment, the test seems to be 'is this desirable?' If so, the regulation is put in place. Instead, she suggests, the test should be 'could we survive without it?"

She suggests that in a previous generation, legislation was to provide punishment for seriously bad things like murder. Now legislation aims at risk management - outlawing things that might have bad consequences.

A member of the audience who works in a school said that the government first wanted to insist on the introduction of expensive soft surfaces on playgrounds so that children do not injure themselves. Then the government came to think that learning about danger was a good thing for children and came to the view that adventure areas were good. This is an example of how schools are pushed this way and then that by government.

Amanda Spielman said there was a culture now whereby whatever the government decided was good became universally compulsory.

One of the audience was senior in a group of schools (which, to protect her, I will not name). She said that heads should ignore great swathes of the instructions. She said that the government left alone those ones which were doing well.

Amada Spielman said, separately, that if a business is in trouble, it goes back to basics and cuts out non-essential activities to get the main one right. But with schools in difficulty they could not behave like this. They were obliged to go on with all the government regulations even when their backs were against the wall.

I fear I have not done justice to an excellent and persuasive speech. I hope that she will go into print herself on this.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

Comments (0) TrackBack (16)