Ten Years' Hard Labour

As proclaimed by Tony Blair at the beginning of his premiership, ‘Education, Education, Education’ was an area of public policy where much could have been expected from New Labour.

An assertive and ambitious David Blunkett was appointed Secretary of State. The party in opposition had done its homework and had taken on board the latest findings from research about how an educational system could be ‘improved’ and standards raised. But the most significant research finding of all — that change was complex, messy and likely to be difficult — was strangely left out of the public rhetoric, even though this is exactly what experiences were to prove.

The chronology is an interesting one. Under David Blunkett a ‘robust’ attitude was taken in which the teaching profession was seen as part of the ‘problem’ as well as part of the solution to the nation’s perceived educational underachievement.

For two years Tory spending plans were followed that actually reduced educational expenditure as a percentage of GNP. The emphasis was upon prescription — as in the National Numeracy and Literacy Strategies and in their equivalent for secondary schools, the Key Stage Three Strategy.

The organisation of classes, the teaching methods used, the curriculum to be followed and the targets to be reached were ‘prescribed’ in the heavy boxes of documents that began to arrive in schools to be distributed to teachers, and to form the contents of the compulsory training days.

Policies were, of course, to change later, both in their tone and in their substance. Expenditure on education, particularly under Blunkett’s successor Estelle Morris, began to increase rapidly; indeed the percentage of GNP spent on education has risen from 4.7 to 5.7 per cent in the last ten years, the most sustained and substantial educational hike in British political history.

The tone of educational discussion also shifted considerably, partly prompted by real fears that the negative national discussions were putting off people from entering the profession. The OFSTED inspection regime was re-focused to emphasise the process of self-review by schools more than their compliance to any ‘tick box’ list of process characteristics to which schools were meant to adhere.

The emphasis also shifted towards the encouragement of creativity, the dis-application of any rigid national curriculum (to some schools) and the need for ‘enjoyment’; social outcomes and even physical health became goals at the same time as the relentless pursuit of academic standards.

But at the same time as the ‘mood music’ of education shifted, the political need to court what became known as the ‘Daily Mail’ reader/voter continued to influence policy. Specialist schools (replacing the ‘bog standard comprehensive’), academies projected for every large town, co-operation between public and private sectors, and trust schools independent of any existing governance structures have all been part of the New Labour ‘nod’ towards more right-wing voters, along with more ‘difficult’ A levels, stretched ‘A’ grades at GCSE and basic skills tests for teachers just so that the ‘wrong’ people do not get into the profession.

Has it all worked? Partly it has, but then given the huge increase in the resources washing around the system it could hardly fail to do so. The PISA study in 2001 showed English performance much improved over the poor levels of the mid-1990s, as did other international surveys.

Overall, the judgement on the ten years of New Labour must be that the politics got in the way of the education. After the failure of the ‘prescriptive’ approaches when results in the SATs flattened in the early 2000s, the chorus of complaints from teachers prompted a lurch to ‘laissez faire’. Even the specification of what were ‘good’ rather than ‘poor’ methods became rarer, even though the profession has always responded warmly when it is given interesting ideas to play with.

Instead of these ideas, the ‘educational centre’ of the DfES, and the ‘distributed centres’ of the local authorities have abdicated their historic ‘thought leadership’ role, under the guise of reducing pressure on schools and colleges. In reality, if schools do not now think of it for themselves, then no-one else is going to help them. Educational research, and the researchers, that literally created New Labour’s policies are now ostracised in favour of those headteachers who wear a good suit and who sing the government’s tune.

Ironically, over the ten years of the New Labour government the research and practice community finally developed understandings in two key areas that, were New Labour to have listened to them, could have helped considerably.

Firstly, and in marked contrast to the Labour obsession with playing around with policies that try to change the school level, research shows that it is the classrooms that have the biggest effect and teachers that have a much bigger effect than their school.

The policy ‘levers’ at school level have been pulled in the area of better buildings, governance changes and designation in terms of specialism, but because of the hated ‘prescription’ the area of the classroom has been fundamentally left alone. Besides, politicians can stand with cheesy grins outside schools in ways difficult in classrooms.

Secondly, research now tells us that it is variation by departments or individuals within the schools that is much bigger than that between schools, and that this internal variation may be a more suitable vehicle of change than whole school policies.

A focus by schools on their own practice is easier and quicker than waiting for the attention of the ‘super school’ twenty miles away. Learning from your own best people as a school carries a more pleasant emotional tone than being patronised by the ‘super school’ down the road.

If a school looks at its own practice, there are no excuses since, generally, it is the same kind of pupils that are being taught by every teacher or department, so that variation in the result of individuals or departments is likely to reflect personal variation.

Finally, the prize for the biggest policy failure needs to go to ICT, very much now the ‘dog that doesn’t bark’, instead of ‘the dog that barked its head off’ during the early years of New Labour.

IT (as it is now politically correct to call it) had everything going for it: it was new, shiny and unlike teachers it did not argue. Ratios of ‘kit’ to pupils improved dramatically. IT training was given to all teachers in the New Opportunities Fund (or NAFF as it was known) training, but the IT itself was treated as a ‘bolt-on’ rather than an integrated part of teaching and learning.

IT spread across all subjects, all topics and all outcomes. Just as with film, videos, OHPs and Power Point, it spread into areas where it mattered and also into areas where it didn’t. It is now clear that while IT has transformed industrial, commercial and personal life it has not done the same to education.

If a person from Mars (the value free individual beloved of social scientists) came down to assess the evidence, they would regard New Labour’s ten years as a wasted opportunity. Progress has been uneven and halting, and subject to the political necessities of playing to a right-wing gallery.

Perhaps the political reality that the story needed to be a simple one is the explanation for the continuation of whole school and school-to-school policies that have not worked, will not work and cannot work, because they are themselves old fashioned and simplistic. Now attention is moving towards the broader ‘social’ or ‘welfare’ orientation of the ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda, where new kinds of outcomes will be demanded of education and schools — economic productivity, happiness and health.

Yet these outcomes will be demanded of a workforce that has not yet achieved the first set of goals concerned with academic achievement in any reliable way, and who therefore may not have the self confidence and capacity to embrace the new agenda.

Ten years on, we are only half-way there.

David Reynolds is Professor of Education at the University of Plymouth, and acted as an Adviser at the Department for Education and Skills on various initiatives from 1999 to 2006. David.Reynolds@exeter.ac.uk