Can you improve education whilst losing the know-how?

Education is one of those policy areas where Labour has traditionally scored higher ratings than the Conservatives, but where in the last year the Conservatives have moved ahead. Much has ridden, therefore, on Michael Gove’s attempts in recent speeches in October and November 2009 to flesh out Conservative policies, and to develop a narrative that links together a variety of Conservative themes, from discipline to lower examination standards to New Academies. How persuasive have his ideas been?

The headline thesis is clear. Schools should be set free from bureaucratic State control, and control from quangos, so that they can develop their, and their pupils’, potential. So Academy schools and city technology colleges — ‘just like fee paying schools’ in Gove's words — should be encouraged. Set free from external control that holds them back, schools will improve and results get better. No wonder then that the party has explicit commitments to shut down quangos, in which the QCA has been named already, and has a secret ‘hit list’ of the others that is said to include BECTA and the NCSL as prime targets.

Together with the disestablishment of the ‘Centre’ will be the shift in power to parents and schools. Parents are to be given more power to choose their children’s school and to have that choice delivered, and to actually set up their own schools with State support. Teachers will be set free, with enhanced powers over discipline, and freedom to acquire appropriate pay and conditions that are specific to them and their school.

It all sounds an appealing prospect. But will it work? The reason for the huge increase in the central ‘State’ in education over the years was precisely because the educational system without a State failed to deliver. We acquired the NCSL because of the primitive state of school management. We acquired BECTA because IT failed to root when we left it to its own devices. We had QCA to encourage the development of a school curriculum similar to that of other modern societies. And we had the TDA (or TTA as it was historically) to ensure that teachers were trained to a high degree of excellence, as everyone in schools currently acknowledges is the case at present.

One can say that the ‘Educational State’ has grown too large. That may be true. One can say that aspects of it have not been delivered. That also may be true. But to propose that it be ‘disestablished’ and that parents can perform its functions — without the domain knowledge, the time or the inclination in many areas — is simply foolish.

Other parts of Gove’s vision seem more sensible. The Tories have finally, like the Labour government, seen what we in the field of education have been trying to tell them for decades: that it is teaching and teachers in their classrooms that are the key determinants of how the educational system performs. Politicians of all parties have been obsessed with ‘the school’ as their unit of policy. They understand schools, can pose in front of them with cheesy grins and can easily change them, in ways that they cannot legislate for ‘teaching’ for example.

However, in Gove’s recent speeches we have him quoting academic research that shows this big ‘teacher effect’. His proposals to attract the most able into teaching — amplified recently by the proposals to pay off the student loans of those in certain subject areas who enter into training — seems sensible, and the commitment to teaching long overdue.

His commitment to ‘safer’ schools has little new in it. Teachers and Headteachers have the powers they need at present to cope with serious problems. Ask schools what they really need in the area of ‘discilpline’ and they will tell you that it is the low level ‘incidents’, the guerrilla warfare of school, that really pose them problems. They will also tell you that it is the children from damaged and deprived backgrounds that cause the school ‘noise’ and it is of course not reassuring that Labour’s Every Child Matters agenda is ignored by Gove.

Rumours are that the Tories are split on this — wanting to scrap the focus on new, more social outcomes for schools because they see them as flawed, but aware that issues to do with ‘safety’ and ‘child welfare’ resonate with the public. But Ed Balls has wrapped these issues all around the Labour educational offering and even a radical, reforming Conservative government may find it hard to remove them from the agenda.

Gove’s commitments on curriculum and qualifications are the ‘blue meat’ for the conventional Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph Tories. Examinations are seen as having been dumbed down. Subjects such as History no longer see the same concentration upon our national story, not surprisingly perhaps since many of its aspects are so offensive to modern day youth. But a more traditional curriculum will be established, examinations will be tougher, and the league tables will be reformed by publishing data previously ‘kept in secret by the DCSF’ — yet until now no commentators or academics have known that such 'data' even existed.

There is also the headline grabbing expansion of the Academy programme, even though the results for the programme so far are widely seen as somewhat disappointing. Any school that wants to can become an Academy. Parents will be able to set up their own schools with State funding. New providers such as educational charities, groups of parents and teachers together, and co-operatives will find it easier to set up an Academy. A group called ‘others’ will also find it easier; these seem likely to be profit-making companies if rumours are correct, carefully airbrushed out of discussion for fear that it hands ammunition to their opponents.

Were it to be implemented over the course of a Tory government’s first term, the key issue is: would it work?

The policies represent a close to total rejection of ‘supply side’ policies, which involve the State in attempting to ‘steer’ the system in certain directions, and the assertion of ‘demand side’ policies where consumers, parents and ‘others’ operate to turn things around. However, Gove should beware. There are multiple societies across the world that went for dramatic shifts to the ‘demand’ side of increased competition and greater accountability to parents, and found that they needed to bring back a ‘supply side’ focus. Some, like New Zealand, virtually eradicated their educational ‘centre’ and then had to re-establish it a decade later.