In the battle of ideas, particularly where education is concerned, one of the few weapons left in Tony Blair’s arsenal is that of rhetorical sophistry. ‘Higher standards’ have to be interpreted as falling standards disguised by higher grades, for example, and the assertion that specialist schools ‘outperform’ comprehensives is true only because only top performing comprehensives are allowed to convert and become specialist schools. The same semantic slippage bleaches such words as ‘choice’ and ‘independence’ of their potency.
Blair, nervy about being replaced, is desperate to ‘accelerate change’ to leave his mark, as he has so far failed to do, on education, education, education. ‘We can either soft pedal these changes and hope to see some further incremental improvement,’ he has said, ‘or seize this moment and drive through lasting radical reform’. Yet the policy reforms being suggested do not have the potential to drive through any ‘radical’ improvements. People say that British politics has atrophied because there are no real issues to be fought any more. The lamentable state of state education, and the low levels of social mobility, show what a mistake that is – and it is not only New Labour that is failing to come up with any genuinely fresh thinking on the matter, for the Conservatives are just as bad. Still, it’s probably worth looking at what Blair’s been saying. As the BBC reports today:
‘By the end of this third term, I want every school that wants to be to be able to be an independent, non fee-paying state school, with the freedom to innovate and develop in the way it wants and the way the parents of the school want, subject to certain common standards.’
However, the mantras of independence and choice do not mean much if schools are not free to make up their own rules and parents are not free to shop around. The euphemism ‘certain common standards’ is telling: the government will still retain control over the things that matter. Teachers will continue to be overworked and underpaid. Red tape and regulation will still take up more time than teaching and marking. The things that have caused generations of schoolchildren to underperform – low examination standards, ineffective reading programmes, ill-conceived syllabi – will go unremedied. As private providers enter the system, they will increasingly discover that what is required of them is to pay for glossy new facilities, not to interfere with the business of actually running the school. Not dissimilarly, the greatest obstacle to choice is the catchment area, but this will remain, thereby preventing poorer parents from exercising any choice over where their children go.
Tony Blair’s problem is that he knows comprehensives have failed but he doesn’t know – or won’t say – how to fix them. If he wants more private schools, then he should make it easier for new providers to enter the system and bring in a voucher system, if he wants selection, then he should aim for a modification of the grammar school system, etc. He cannot have these systems within the comprehensive system. Great improvements require bold policies, not lukewarm policies driven through with autocratic determination. Until he realises this, he will only ever be remembered for political manoeuvring, not for successful policies. The sword of sophistry is looking blunt.