Last week, the new education secretary, Alan Johnson, declared that targets, testing and inspection were vital to school improvement and would therefore be ‘intensified’. This announcement came as a surprise to the education community: the fledglings of cross-party consensus seemed to have developed over the crippling impact of these measures in the state sector. Then this week, Johnson surprised us again by more or less saying that private school teachers were superior to those teaching in the state sector. Yet don’t these two views of Johnson’s actually conflict with each other?
With Alan Johnson apparently believing the private sector to be so effective, there might seem to be flickers of hope for the future of the education system as a whole. The state sector could emulate more of the independent sector’s pedagogical pluralism and the government could cease interfering in private provision. Yet Johnson’s plans to up testing and inspection, the very things hindering progress in state schools and, in the case of inspection, straitjacketing private schools nullify hope.
The one thing that has characterised the New Labour government’s approach to education is over-regulation: culminating in very prescriptive statutory pedagogical regulation for the nominally autonomous private sector (enacted in 2003). Regulation enforced through OfSTED inspection. While not everyone may be concerned with the arrested autonomy of the private sector when it serves so few pupils (around 7%), we should surely all be worried about the wider significance of this intervention: a government monopoly, which is both arbitrary and misguided, on what counts as good education. A monopoly which has proved to be very damaging to school standards. The successes of the private sector are frequently attributed to privileged intake and good resources; Alan Johnson seems to attribute them to better teachers. But in fact, small class size, the opportunity to focus on teaching rather than paperwork and the freedom to employ teaching strategies which are responsive to pupils rather than central diktat, which are key to the achievement gulf between the sectors.
We need to learn from the private sector not because it is uniformly superior, but because it highlights the flaws which are holding back the state sector.