Labour’s education policies

This paper by Richard Hatcher of Birmingham Left Unity was discussed at the LU education workers meeting in Birmingham on 12 July 2014

Labour has been notoriously unforthcoming about its policies for education, beyond ameliorating some of the most obvious excesses of Goveism (eg unqualified teachers) while promising to retain some of the main pillars of Goveism (eg academy chains). But recently Labour published two policy documents which spell out a number of policies in some detail, though neither are as yet official LP policy.

One is an 8 page ‘draft consultation paper’ called Education and children, published in March. The other is a 66 page Review of education structures, functions and the raising of standards for all: Putting students and parents first, known for short as the Blunkett Review, published on 30 April.

The Blunkett Review

The Review’s focus is the structure of and power in local school systems. Its solution to Gove’s centralised dictatorship is the creation of a new post of Director for School Standards. The DSS would be appointed jointly by several local authorities in a sub-region from a list of candidates approved by the Secretary of State for Education. The DSS would be responsible for ‘driving up standards’ in all schools in his or her area, including academies and free schools.

Academies and free schools would continue under Labour, including control of chains of academies by private organisations like E-ACT and AET, regardless of how discredited they have become and the repeated evidence that their schools are no better than local authority schools when compared like for like. The Review promises ‘freedom for schools to choose to join Trusts, Federations or Sponsor Chains but also to be able to leave them’ (p27). But there is a huge obstacle to schools freeing themselves from academy sponsors: the majority of governors are appointed by the sponsor. It is likely to require campaigns by parents and staff to force them, similar to those against becoming academies in the first place.

The Director for School Standards is responsible for school places and new schools

The DSS is responsible for planning school places and setting up new schools through a process of competitive bidding open to ‘All trusts (including community trusts), partnerships, chains, parent groups, diocesan authorities and social entrepreneurs’. Schools opened and run by parent groups is simply the Coalition’s free schools rebranded as ‘parent-led academies’. And ones run by ‘social entrepreneurs’ would also be no different from some Coalition free schools.

Notably, this list doesn’t include local authorities, though an internal PLP Briefing on the Blunkett Report into school standards: local oversight, challenge and support for all schools says explicitly ‘David recommends allowing Local Authorities to once again bid to open new community schools, scrapping Michael Gove’s policy which only allows new academies or Free Schools.’ (p3).This needs urgently clarifying.

The Director for School Standards is responsible for school collaboration to raise standards

The DSS must be empowered to broker collaboration within the local area they lead. … The DSS would intervene where unsatisfactory or inadequate collaboration was evident. (p10). We know that collaborative support among schools is the best method of ‘school improvement’, and it has grown in recent years as local authority capacity has declined. But what powers will the DSS have to ensure effective collaboration among the hundreds of schools in several LAs in her or his area? No team of staff, but money saved from Gove’s lavish spending on setting up academies and free schools. This money would be apparently funnelled through LAs to groups of schools. All of whom would be held to account by the DSS.

The question then is what powers would the DSS have to enforce this? They don’t look that different to Gove’s. For example, the DSS can hand over a school regarded by parents as inadequate to a sponsor (p38). This seems like a continuation of the policy of forced academisation, not, as the Review claims, an alternative to it.

Where would power lie in local school systems under Labour?

Under Labour it looks like power over LAs and schools would remain, just devolved from the Secretary of State in London to the Directors of School Standards in the regions, but still dependent on schools and LAs to implement policy, and therefore on the ability to intervene to apply sanctions. However, there are two potentially countervailing policies in the Review.

One is that the DSS would be an employee of the LAs who have appointed her or him. The question then is, is she or he therefore subject to the decisions of elected local government? If so, this would represent a fundamental break with the centralised policies of the Coalition and the reinvigoration of local councils’ role in education.

The other is the Review’s proposed ‘local Education Panel. This would include representation from schools in the area, parents and relevance Local Authority representatives, who would work with the DSS on the development of a long-term strategic plan for education, ensure commissioning decisions are taken in line with that plan and agree the budget proposed by the DSS.’ (p10). This is the most progressive policy in the Review. It offers the opportunity for genuine joint participation in strategic policy-making by schools, parents and LAs, with the possibility of Local Education Panels widening their membership to include representatives of governors, school unions, and the local community

But the crunch comes if the LA or the Education Panel decides on policies which are unacceptable to the DSS (and therefore to government), whether it is about funding in the context of a Labour government’s austerity budgets, the continuation of academy chains and free schools, the social divisiveness of the Tech Bacc (see below), or other elements in Labour’s social liberal programme. This would be a new local class battleground where campaigners should be mobilising to ensure that Education Panels and LAs maximise popular participation and pressure for progressive education policies that meet local needs.

However, our core response should be no to the DSS and instead the reinvigoration of local authorities, empowered, resourced, and democratised. By democratised I mean opened up to public – and teachers’ – participation in policy-making through the replacement of the Cabinet and Scrutiny system by Education Committees with non-councillor representation and the creation of local Education Forums. (See my chapter at http://radicaledbks.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/richard-hatcher-leas.pdf , p142 to end, for a detailed proposal.)

 ‘Education and children’

This document deals with other education polices, not those covered by the Blunkett Review. The most positive proposals concern early years support. Free childcare will expand from 15 to 25 hours per week for working parents of three and four year-olds, which will save parents over £1,500 per child per year, and wraparound care from 8am to 6pm will be provided through their local school.

Education for economic growth

The dominant theme of the paper is the need to overcome what it claims is the skills deficit which holds back economic growth. The solution is vocational education for the ‘forgotten 50 per cent’ who do not go to university. Labour plans ‘a new gold standard Technical Baccalaureate for young people, acting as a stepping stone into an apprenticeship, further study or skilled work.’ (p5).

There are five problems with this argument. First, while it is true that there are areas of skills shortage, it is also true, as Martin Allen and Patrick Ainley argue in their 2013 book The Great Reversal: Young People, Education and Employment in a Declining Economy, that many young people are over-qualified for the jobs they are doing, or cannot find a job at all. (Their book is available free at http://radicaledbks.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/great-reversal.pdf)

Second, what the Tech Bacc actually comprises isn’t explained, apart from saying it will include English and maths to 18. Is it a new qualification or simply the packaging and relabelling of existing courses? What course content is envisaged? What is ‘vocational education’? How general, how job-specific? What non-vocational education will accompany it? These are familiar questions because Labour is recycling a policy which has been tried before, most recently with New Labour’s Diplomas, and failed.

Third, at present there are far too few quality apprenticeships, as against low quality, short-term fake ones, compared to the number of applicants. Labour promises more. ‘We will …expect employers to create significantly more apprenticeships in exchange for giving them more control over skills funding and standards.’ (p8). But the reality is there are a million young people unemployed and there is no chance that employers will offer enough new apprenticeships for more than a small minority of these, unless Labour adopts far more radical economic policies, including a massive investment programme in socially useful job creation and a shorter working week to spread jobs around, neither of which it has any intention of doing.

Four, the implication of the paper is that the Tech Bacc and more apprenticeships will lead to more jobs. This is a fallacy, as Allen and Ainley demonstrate. The causes of high youth unemployment are not primarily a skills deficit, they are structural – the decline in the need for youth labour as a result of fundamental changes in the UK economy – and they require radical economic policies to tackle them.

Five, what is being proposed, far from being a common over-arching qualification such as Tomlinson envisaged, is a new bi-partite system which will powerfully reinforce patterns of social class inequality. There will be a division at 16 – probably reaching back to age 14 – with the ‘academic’ 50% staying on in the sixth form or sixth form college to take A Levels and enter higher education (where they will continue to pay high fees: Labour is only promising ‘that repayments are related more closely to ability to pay.’ (p9)). Meanwhile, the ‘vocational’ 50% will transfer to FE colleges, which are to be transformed into ‘new specialist Institutes of Technical Education…licensed to deliver Labour’s Tech Bacc’ (p5), leading to a proper apprenticeship for the few and to a low-pay, low-skill, casualised job for the many.

Standards not structures

The paper states that ‘The Government has narrowly focused on what schools are called, rather than how they teach. Putting that right is the central task for the next Labour Government.’ (p3). This is a re-run of the familiar ‘standards not structures’ argument of New Labour. It has the advantage for Labour of enabling it to ignore, in other words to accept, the continuation of Gove’s policies on academies and local authorities. Labour ‘will prioritise what matters most in our schools; driving up standards with a relentless focus on the quality of teaching.’ (p3) with four strategies. First, no unqualified teachers. This should be supported. Second, more professional development. Good, provided it is funded to make time available. Third, ‘revalidation’, i.e. time-limited licences. Not necessary. Fourth, career progression in the classroom. Yes, but again, is there additional funding available?

But the key thing here is not what Labour is saying but what it isn’t saying. Not a word about what really holds back teachers – the performance targets that dominate teachers’ lives; Ofsted, which needs replacing by a new model of evaluation, accountability and support; SATs and other iniquitous forms of assessment such as in the early years. And not a word about the need for creative teaching for creative learning. In fact the only word about the curriculum, apart from the Tech Bacc, is a promise to free all schools from the national curriculum, which makes nonsense of the idea of a national curriculum.