You can’t help feeling a little bit of schadenfreude. Staunch supporters of the comprehensive schools in this country are up in arms that their sometime champion, the Labour Party, should now be the agent of their destruction. For the rightwing to start singing Ruth Kelly’s praises would be absurd, but her announcement, as The Times reports today, that not-for-profit educational charities, faith and parents’ groups will be given public money to take over failing schools looks like a step in the right direction. There are, however, causes for concern.
Firstly, the policy of closing down failing schools within a year, which is to be the precursor to the proposed takeovers, smacks of autocratic centralised control. As well as being a way to fastforward the creation of 200 City Academies – Blair’s patchy aim in which the cost-benefits make for an awful gamble with public funds – it will divest local area authorities of their powers. Placing the emphasis on new providers, so that the relationship is between parents or charities and government, will result in teachers and headteachers losing more influence, and thus being even further vilified than they already are.
Secondly, it’s not clear how much autonomy these schools will have in practice to do what needs to be done to improve. It looks like a drift towards the US charter schools or the Dutch system, and this kind of franchising could make for an interesting experiment; but endless regulation, endless OfSTED inspections, endless testing and scrutiny could lead to the new providers pulling out as soon as they come in, creating further transience and instability in the system.
Thirdly, there’s no allowance for choice in the proposed system. While parental choice over where to send their children, or school choice over how to select their pupils, or how to organise their syllabus, could foster a healthy education market in which failing schools fail and good schools expand and proliferate, different schools will not in practice be free to offer a substantially different service. This proposal looks suspiciously like a cosmetic change to ‘providers’ that will allow central government to retain complete control.
Fourthly, and connectedly, catchments, which have done so much damage, which have made schools select on income rather than ability, remain untouched. It’s hard to see how progress is possible without breaking these social jails.
Fifthly and finally, this will presumably open the way for more faith schools, energising the debate about the relationship between state funding and religion. A New Statesman pole this week shows 96.4% of its readers want Blair to end his support of faith schools. For the leftwing there is an objection to inequality since it’s clear that different faith groups perform to different levels – Catholic schools tend to do very well, for instance, while Islamic schools on average underachieve badly. For the rightwing there is the issue of social cohesion – after the 2001 riots in the north of England the official reports of Ouseley, Cantle and Denham identified the segregation of schooling as a significant factor in racial and religious tensions.
So as ever a reasonable idea from New Labour looks like a halfway house to something that could work as it seeks to run away from something that doesn’t.