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This is the first number of FORUM to be prepared and edited
in its entirety after the June 2001 General Election; and
this extended Editorial provides me with an ideal opportunity to
both look back over the four years of the first Blair administration
and, at the same time, provide a personal assessment of prospects
for the future in the light of the policies outlined in the Education
Green Paper Schools: building on success: raising standards,
promoting diversity, achieving results, launched back in February.
It may well be that the key proposals in the Green Paper will have
been ‘updated’ in the form of a new White Paper by the time this
Editorial appears; but one imagines that the main trends of government
policy will merely have been confirmed.
After 18 years of coping with the wild excesses of a succession
of right-wing Tory governments, some FORUM readers might
well have been prepared to give the Blair administration the benefit
of the doubt where education policy is concerned. Yet the contents
of the Green Paper, along with the Prime Minister’s own well-publicised
pronouncements on the failings of comprehensive education and the
need for universal streaming and setting, seem to me to put the
whole issue beyond question: put simply, New Labour is implacably
opposed to everything this journal has campaigned for since the
late 1950s. It matters not that Estelle Morris has now replaced
David Blunkett as Education Secretary; the policies endorsing choice,
diversity, selection and privatisation remain the same, and they
must be challenged at every level.
It is quite extraordinary but very revealing that the Prime Minister
saw no reason to distance himself from the deliberate and insulting
claim made by his official spokesperson Alastair Campbell that the
publication of the Green Paper meant that the day of ‘the bog-standard
comprehensive’ was clearly over. Indeed, by arguing that the Green
Paper was actually ushering in ‘a post-comprehensive era’, Tony
Blair was giving welcome ammunition to all the opponents of comprehensive
education, provoking headlines in the right-wing press like ‘Death
of the Comprehensive’ in The Daily Mail and ‘Comprehensives
have failed’ in The Daily Telegraph. From now on, according
to the Prime Minister, everyone should be aware that ‘promoting
diversity’ was indeed synonymous with ‘raising standards’ and ‘achieving
results’.
The Conservative Legacy
To be fair, it is, of course, true that New Labour inherited a
sharply divided system of state schools at the secondary level.
In addition to 164 grammar schools, concentrated in 36 local authorities
in England, there were 1155 grant-maintained schools, accounting
for 19.6% of students in secondary schools (but only 2.8% of primary-age
children), 15 City Technology Colleges and 181 specialist schools
and colleges, 151 specialising in technology and 30 in modern languages.
Any attempt to create a successful comprehensive structure subject
to fair and transparent admissions rules clearly faced formidable
obstacles.
Yet the first Blair administration actually saw no need to tackle
this degree of diversity and create a more unified system of schools.
Nothing was done to secure the abolition of the existing 164 grammar
schools, with campaigning groups finding it extremely difficult
to activate the necessary local ballots of parents. In particular,
the outcome of the ballot held in Ripon in March 2000, where groups
of influential parents were able to secure the long term future
of Ripon Grammar School, left many campaigners feeling angry and
dispirited. Then again, there was concern that the phasing out of
grant-maintained schools was to be accompanied by the introduction
of three new categories of school: community, aided and foundation
– with only community schools subject to admissions procedures
determined by the local authority. And finally, it was a cause of
much dismay and regret that incoming New Labour ministers were embracing
the Conservatives’ ‘specialist schools’ project with a zeal of which
John Patten and Gillian Shephard would have been proud. By the beginning
of 2001, the number of such schools had risen from 181 to 608. Moreover,
the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act stipulated that specialist
schools could select up to ten per cent of their intake on the basis
of their aptitude for one or other of four ‘specialist subject areas’:
technology, languages, sports and the arts.
The Programme for the Second Blair Administration
The Green Paper argues that primary education has already been
‘transformed’ with the introduction of such successful initiatives
as the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies. It is now time
to perform similar miracles with the secondary sector; and in this
respect, there are a number of major themes and policy alignments
running through the document, notably:
a rejection of the principles underpinning the era of the ‘one
size fits all’ comprehensive (though it is, of course, debatable
whether such an era ever actually existed);
a concern to see the promotion of diversity among secondary schools
and the extension of autonomy for ‘successful’ schools; and
a desire for private and voluntary sector sponsors to play a greater
role in the organisation of secondary education.
As a prime means of promoting ‘diversity’, the Government intends
to accelerate the Specialist Schools Project so that there will
be around 1,000 specialist secondary schools in operation by September
2003.
We now know that all specialist schools and colleges will receive
a £100,000 capital grant plus £123 per student per year – a total
of £225,000 for a school of 1,000 students. This will prove particularly
divisive over the next five years as nearly half (46%) of all maintained
secondary schools become specialist schools, while the other half
have to be content with non-specialist status and no additional
funding.
As an extension of the cherished Specialist Schools Programme,
the Government intends to introduce in due course a new category
of Advanced Specialist School which will be open to ‘high-performing’
schools after five years as ‘specialist schools’. They will be expected
to ‘volunteer’ to take on a number of innovative ideas from a ‘menu’
developed centrally by the new DfES (Department for Education and
Skills). In return, they will receive an additional capital investment
to strengthen their role as ‘centres of excellence’. An important
aspect of their work might well be initial teacher training, with
many of these institutions playing a leading role as Training Schools.
Then, as yet another element in this bewildering array of new institutions,
there are the Beacon Schools (the subject of a critical appraisal
by David Webster in this number of Forum). These new Schools
are intended to develop and spread good practice among neighbouring
establishments. Back in March 1999, David Blunkett announced that
there were to be around 1,000 Beacon Schools in operation by September
2002. It is now intended that there will be 1,000 of these Schools
in existence by September 2001, a year ahead of schedule, including
some 250 at secondary level.
The Green Paper is also anxious to see an increase in the number
and variety of schools within the state system supported by the
Church of England and other major faith groups. Some 560 secondary
schools are already provided by the Church of England or the Catholic
Church; and the Government wishes to see more Muslim, Sikh and Greek
Orthodox Schools brought inside the state system and funded on the
same basis as existing ‘aided’ schools.
In addition to more ‘faith-based’ schools, which act as their own
admissions authority, the Government is also anxious to promote
an increase in the number of schools that owe their existence to
private sponsorship. The City Academy Programme, launched in March
2000, enables sponsors from the private and voluntary sectors to
establish new schools whose running costs are then fully met by
the state. Many have, in fact, seen the Programme as being modelled
on the City Technology Colleges Project founded by the Conservatives
in the late 1980s and which proved to be such a costly failure in
its original format.
At the same time, the Government intends to develop a new model
which will enable an external private or voluntary sector sponsor
to take over responsibility for a ‘weak’ or ‘failing’ school against
a fixed-term contract of, say, five to seven years, with renewal
subject to performance. This will be based on the situation at King’s
Manor School in Guildford, where ‘3Es’, a charitable off-shoot of
the City Technology College at Kingshurst in the West Midlands,
was given responsibility for establishing a new school in February
1999.
Other policies for tackling ‘underperformance’ and ‘failure’, such
as the Excellence in Cities Programme launched in March 1999, are
also discussed in the Green Paper, though there is little prominence
given to the Education Action Zones Initiative which formed such
an important part of the Excellence in Schools White Paper
published in July 1997. What is stressed is that secondary schools
operating in ‘challenging circumstances’ will be expected to achieve
at least 15% of students gaining five GCSE A to C grades by 2003;
20% by 2004; and 25% by 2006.
As far as the internal organisation of schools is concerned, the
Government wants to see more setting within subjects, including
‘express sets’ for 11 to 14 year olds to enable the ‘most able’
in each year group to advance beyond the level set for their
age and to take Key Stage Three tests early. At Key Stage Four,
students will still take a number of GCSEs, but, increasingly, they
will be able to mix ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ GCSEs and work-based
options.
Towards a New Education System
There is very little in the Green Paper to please the supporters
of a unified system of secondary education; the emphasis throughout
is on competition and division.
Yet as long ago as 1993, the National Commission on Education was
expressing concern, in its Final Report Learning to Succeed,
about the Major Government’s obsession with creating ‘new types
of secondary school’ and warning that ‘there is a serious danger
of a hierarchy of good, adequate and “sink” schools emerging within
the maintained system’.
Some headteachers and union leaders believe that all will be well
if all secondary schools are allowed to become specialist
schools, and perhaps there is a case for making the best of what
has already happened (see John Dunford’s piece in this number),
but this is to ignore some very real problems. What happens, for
example, if the local specialist school does not offer the specialism
many parents want? And, in any case, in a highly competitive and
divided society, specialisms can never be equal: they rapidly become
ranked in a hierarchy of status.
It is also absurd for politicians to claim that greater diversity
within the system will result in a greater choice of school for
most parents. All the available evidence indicates that in a fragmented
and layered system, it is invariably the schools that choose
parents, rather than the other way round. Indeed, it was Lord
Griffiths of Fforestfach, the right-wing Chairperson of the School
Examinations and Assessment Council, who admitted back in February
1992 that ‘if you give parents real choice in the system, it is
inevitable (and probably desirable) that the schools themselves
will demand to choose the kind of pupils that come’.
The education system towards which we are heading has nothing to
commend it. It is part of an ugly concept of a meritocratic society
which benefits the few at the expense of the many.
Clyde Chitty
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