Blurred visions
Civitas, 6 July 2007
Today we hear from the BBC that a well-known and highly successful private girls’ school, Colston Girls’ School in Bristol, is taking steps to move into the state sector.
Colston’s Girls’ academic record is very good, its results consistently topping the league tables with a 100 per cent pass rate at GCSE (5 A*-C) – and their aim even better: to respond to a deficit of good secondary provision in Bristol state schools. In the words of their chair of governors:
“We are committed to Bristol and are determined to do all we can to help improve the standards of secondary education within the City.”
So, the school’s trustees and owners are embarking on a feasibility study into moving into the state sector. This sounds like great news: a good school made available to all. Yet unlike a voucher-type system, in which private schools might be able to join state providers in the provision of ‘free’ education, there is a catch. Colston Girls’ would become an Academy.
Why is this a catch? After all, the trustees and owners of Colston Girls are already backing an academy it turns out. Because in spite of their nominal independence, academies are subject to considerable central regulation. As a result. there is a very real possibility that exactly what makes Colston Girls’ a good school, may not actually continue to be achievable as an academy.
In this respect, the chair of governor’s vision may be thwarted:
“Our proposal would enable us to offer the same standard of education to a wider community.”
The inspection regime alone is sufficient to stifle the nature of practice. In an era when even wholly independent – private – schools are compelled to implement highly prescriptive government stipulations via Ofsted, publicly funded schools, however ‘independent’, are very limited in their scope for innovation.
But aren’t we, under the new PM, now in a new era? Probably not when it comes to education. Gordon Brown may be making considerable changes elsewhere, but the direction of schools’ policy does not look set to turn particularly un-Blairite. Yes, Mr Brown has split the Dfes into three new departments but to date at least, he has given little sign of doing what schools – all schools – need the most: a release from the Whitehall straitjacket.
Only this way will state schools be able to return to the three ‘rs’ we want and away from Blair’s regulation, regulation, regulation.
Colston Girls’ School is mad. They have allowed themselves to be pressured into surrender like some great Abbey under Henry VIII. Selection is the key to a good education – that and independence all the way down the line. The school itself should be a free institution and its teachers at liberty to carry out their duties according to their own lights. This abject capitulation on the part of Colston Girls is another set back to the cause.
“Aren’t we,under the new PM,now in a new era? Probably not when it comes to education.”
I second Anastasia de Waal’s cautionary note on the moves by the governor and owners of Colston Girls’School to secede to the dubious status of a new Academy.
I doubt if my sometime Marxist fellow countryman, Gordon Brown, can eradicate his compulsion for deep central control which characterises all his actions.
Those who presently hold the reins at Colston’s should “gang warily” in their dealings with Brown’s Academies.