Civitas Blog

With Brown’s priorities set to remain Blairite, education remains of course the centrepiece of the political agenda. The bad news is that Brown seems to have learnt as little from Blair’s education system as the nation’s children. It appears that the chancellor is under the illusion that all is well in schools, that children are leaving primary school able to read, write and add up; that schools and classes are orderly and pupils engaged; that teachers enjoy high morale and a sense of loyalty to teaching. His proposal, therefore, is to build on what he perceives as Blair’s success. According to Brown our education system is now ripe for the next stage, to make Britain ‘the most educated nation in the world.’ Yet despite the billions which have been pumped into our schools under New Labour, policies have failed to achieve even satisfactory standards. The chancellor seems to imagine that learning and skills in this country are ready to fly when flawed tactics have rendered them barely able to walk.

Is Brown perhaps looking through Blair’s rose-tinted spectacles? Let’s review what the chancellor considers to be the secure foundations for a world-class education system. ‘Education, education, education’ put Blair in power. Education has been the centrepiece of his democratic agenda, and above all, first-class schools have been the PM’s personal mission. It is with admiration that we are to remember Blair’s school reforms in our history books. Blair’s pledges for education have therefore been grand and accompanied by much testing, targets and…underachievement.

Since 1999-2000 spending on education has risen by 5% in real terms, each year. Yet Blair’s reforms have failed to deliver improvement at a rate anywhere near equal to this investment. Blair’s school improvement drive has focused on the primary sector, the building block for learning. Yet primary schools are performing badly on every key indicator. Government test targets have been consistently missed, this year by nine percentage points in maths and six percentage points in English. One in four children currently leave primary school unable to read and write at the level required for their age. In cases where targets have actually been achieved, there has been much evidence of both dumbed down standards and teaching to the test. Independent measures of cognitive development demonstrate that many aspects of primary learning are at an all-time low. Teacher retention is poor. In spite of higher salaries a staggering percentage of teachers leave teaching after a couple of years. Ever-changing government initiatives and administrative workload top the list of reasons for the high exit-rate from teaching. Teachers now spend almost as much time filling out pointless paperwork as they do teaching in the classroom. There is a desperate shortage of head teachers, again, thanks to the government’s regulatory burden. Class sizes are swelling. Far too many primary schools have over 30 children per class and the UK average is considerably higher than the OECD average. Poor discipline in schools is an escalating problem. With teachers forced to teach frequently inappropriate and inflexible material to over-sized classes, this is hardly surprising.

These are the foundations of a fundamentally defective, not a world-class, education system. What is needed is a serious re-evaluation of the government’s strategies. Yet Brown’s vision seems to be blurred by Blair’s rhetoric. In spite of the glaring weaknesses in our schools, the chancellor still considers a world-class education system to be within reach. Several thousand new buildings away, in fact. Whilst Brown’s commitment to an intensive literacy programme for struggling pupils would seem to indicate that he is aware of actual strategy failure, the chancellor appears to be satisfied with sprinklings of remedial measures. Unlike those directly affected by the education system, the chancellor doesn’t seem to realise that much of the rudimentary stuff needs to be urgently re-thought. Buildings, not faltering basic skills seem to be Mr Brown’s preoccupation. Investment in school buildings is to rise by £10.2 billion. Brown plans to rebuild or refurbish half of all primary schools every 15 years and every single secondary school over the same period. In the majority of cases, the school building is absolutely the last concern. The chancellor’s proposal is a cosmetic distraction when what the education system desperately needs is major internal surgery.