Excuse me?
Anastasia De Waal, 6 July 2010
A focus on policy areas related to social inequality highlights fundamental contradictions in the coalition government’s approach, writes Zenobe Reade.
For government, health – and health status – is no longer a comment on the quality of the health care system alone. The 2010 Marmot review put particular emphasis on child development and education; mode of living, housing and employment as substantiating health outcomes. It provides much of the authority for the coalition government’s focus on reducing ‘health inequalities’, as health minister Anne Milton commented this week, ‘efforts have been made to address health inequalities but more needs to be done to tackle the deep-rooted social problems that cause ill health’. This approach is salient: investing in pre-emptive measures to avoid the expensive acute hospital admissions that come about when diet, smoking and drinking manifest themselves in cardiac arrests, emphysema and kidney failure.
Early intervention was a bastion of Labour’s education policy – unprecedented investment enabled the creation of a formidable early years portfolio: 3600 Sure Start centres; free nursery care; child trust funds and child tax credits. Deprivation was seen to underlie educational failure and the government sought to displace this loaded disadvantage with its own weightings: academies were rolled out to replace under-performing schools so that pupils could benefit from specialism, sponsorship funds and private sector energy; Building Schools for the Future prioritised schools with a more deprived intake over those whose structural needs were greater and Free School Meals were to be expanded to more low-income households.
The coalition government is to eliminate all these measures from its campaign to improve education. The turnaround may be well articulated by the views of a head master who spoke this week of the factors that had driven him from the state sector under Labour. Rod MacKinnon reasoned that ‘poor schools need to stop making excuses for their failure and the Government must accept that schools cannot solve the ills of society.’ In health – as has been conventional in education – poverty may be used by professionals as an excuse for a bad outcome (such as early death). To suggest doctors have no recourse to reference factors outside their surgeries to the bad health outcomes is problematic; hence Cameron’s pledge to ‘work in collaboration with sectors outside government, to help individuals make healthy choices.’
In education, the ‘no excuses’ principle MacKinnon seeks may be emerging. Academies are not to be the preserve of the failing school but of the ‘outstanding’ one, for whom approval is automatic. The very best schools secure their freedom – from local authorities and Ofsted. We move from a redistributive culture to one of rewards. A ‘no excuses’ attitude is inspiring for children – integral to the philosophy of Michael Wilshaw, the pin-up head master of Hackney’s Mossbourne Academy who will not treat a chaotic home life as a viable reason for why a pupil might not be in the right uniform or learn Latin and the self-made academy sponsors, such as Lord Harris and Clive Bourne, figures who did not let inauspicious starts in life impede their prospects of success. Yet it is less so for schools. Just as we cannot blame doctors for the increase in strokes and heart attacks which trails the contemporary epidemic of diabetes, the new government’s educational philosophy risks putting unbearable pressure on teachers in an educational environment where a school’s achievement is judged and rewarded without recognition of its intake.