The education legacy: Good intentions, bad moves

Civitas, 11 May 2007

Just a few more weeks remain under the leadership of the man whose realisation of ‘education, education, education’ we’ve been witnessing for the past ten years. With school improvement Tony Blair’s chief priority, the all-important question is, how has he done? The verdict? Better on effort than strategy.

Whilst Blair had the will and energy to do great good to the education system, the strategies he opted for seriously hampered this potential. Mistake number 1 was over-regulation; mistake number 2, a blind pursuit of quantifiable improvement; and mistake number 3, overlooking the importance of school and class size.
The straitjacketing of teachers, the cramming of pupils, the watering down of subjects and exams have all been integral parts of the drive for continual and steep improvement in results. Yet, it is precisely these measures which have disabled schools from making that quantifiable improvement. Forever in the shadow of a target, the ‘improvement drive’ has meant schools forfeiting time for consolidation and resorting to generating the necessary results artificially. As a consequence there has been lots of speculation about cramming for tests in primary schools and grade inflation at GCSE and A-level. What really matters, however, is less whether test and exam results are ‘genuine’ indicators but the worrying gaps in learning which have been left in order to achieve the results. This has particularly affected the primary sector, where solid building blocks are vital. The erosion of these building blocks has now become evident amongst secondary school pupils.
The emphasis on achieving the necessary results also connects to the straitjacketing of teaching staff. Constant but ever-changing initiatives and instructions have come to beleaguer the work of educators. This has been very demoralising for teachers, particularly as so much diktat is bureaucracy, which in practice has acted more as a distraction than an aid to teaching. Compliance to regulation, as well as to test and exam targets, has been particularly pressurised by the schools inspectorate OfSTED. The high stakes nature of the inspection regime has been intrinsic in compelling teachers to comply with central requirements. Teacher recruitment, but particularly retention, have suffered considerably as a result meaning a problematic lack of continuity for pupils.
The ‘hallmark’ New Labour initiatives, City Academies the prime example, are indicative of a recurrent theme in Blair’s reforms: the sidestepping of weaknesses in the system with tangential innovations. Along with Trust schools and Specialist schools, Academies ultimately signify a lost battle to improve standards in mainstream schools.
With the level of investment put up for Blair’s education reforms, the much better strategy, overall, would have been to use the money to shrink class and school size. Smaller class sizes in particular – the single greatest motivation today for parents to move their children to the private sector – would have impacted on all the persistent problems which are hampering learning in schools today, from poor behaviour to pupils’ understanding, to teacher recruitment.