Michael Gove attacks teachers – and Labour supports it
Lambeth teacher Simon Hardy writes…
The NUT strike on 26 March was a result of attacks on teachers’ conditions which are the worst seen in generations.
And it is not just the coalition that supports these so-called reforms.
Labour’s shadow education minister Tristram Hunt’s comments that he would not “tinker” with the so-called reforms implemented by Michael Gove reveal that the Labour party is not on the side of teachers, students or the education system when it comes to fighting privatisation and increasing inequality. As someone who crossed a lecturers picket line to deliver a lecture on Engels, Hunt doesn’t really have any grounds for credibility with socialists or educationalists.
There are two frontal assaults by the coalition on education. The first is over teachers’ terms and conditions, implementing performance-related pay and undermining national pay scales. The working conditions of teachers are getting worse as more schools require ever more regular marking and constant observations with more administrative tasks and paper work than ever before. Stress is taking its toll and morale in many schools is rock bottom.
Whilst it is commendable that the School Teachers Review Board rejected Gove’s attempts to scrap limits on teachers’ working hours (so technically we could be made to teach a full timetable at school and get no time set aside for any planning or marking), the fact that Gove even suggested it shows how serious he is about smashing the teaching profession as we understand it.
He is banking on the possibility that, if he is successful, it might lead to an exodus of teachers from the profession, but with new blood coming in every year, soon younger generations of teachers would just come to accept the new realities of a much more stressful, over worked and underpaid work life.
The right wing onslaught over education
The second attack is an ideological one. Two things need to be understood about Michael Gove. Firstly Michael Gove has received more private donations to his office than any other minister. For instance between May 2010 and October 2011 Gove raised over £35,000, whilst George Osborne raised only £2,500. This money is being donated by right-wing fanatics who see an opportunity to turn the educational clock back a century to the kind of schooling they think is more effective. It allows him to hire an extensive inner circle of advisers, from various Tory thinktanks to sinister lobby groups like the “New Schools Network”.
One of his recent advisers, Dominic Cummings, disgraced himself when he published a thesis saying that 70% of our educational capacity “is genetic” and criticised the fact that billions of pounds has been, as he sees it, “wasted” on pointless university courses for working class people and Sure Start schemes for disadvantaged young children.
Gove’s new curriculum is a return to Victorian methods and standards of teaching; driving home “facts” instead of concepts, content over skills, subject matter over a child centred approach and harder exams versus assessments which are better as a way of testing children that need additional support.
The idea of fact-based teaching comes from the US educationalist ED Hirsch who developed various theories around the notion of cultural literacy. He decided that the main problem with reading is a lack of knowledge about content. So when teenagers he asked to read a history book on the US Civil War found it very hard to follow, Hirsch concluded that it was just that they lacked the facts to make sense of the text. As a result there was a big push in the US for fact-based teaching, ignorant of the satire of Charles Dickens whose monstrous Headteacher in Hard Times, Mr Thomas Gradgrind, lampooned the Victorian obsession with dates of famous battles. At one point Gradgrind shouts; “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.” Today Gove and Grandgrind seem to be singing from the same song sheet.
Take the example of history in the new curriculum. The plan is to teach if chronologically, from the Stone Age when pupils are seven years old through to the Cold War at 14. The problem with this approach is that you only end up with an understanding of history based on the age when you were taught it – an 11 year old’s understanding of the Victorians and an 8 year old’s understanding of the Bronze Age. Without an understanding or processes, concepts, connections and the possibility of an imaginative understanding of the events of the past, most children will suffer in their ability to grasp what is important about history – namely that it moves and flows.
Likewise Citizenship, designed to give children essential political and economic literacy has been mauled by the right wing ideologues – instead of teaching economics now teachers will be limited to “personal finance”. Instead of teaching Human Rights now teachers are expected to explain “our precious liberties”. Instead of political campaigning around issues now the course will be limited to charities.
Labour and Tories united
To make matters worse, now the Labour Party is saying it won’t repeal any of these attacks.
At first glance Tristram Hunt is a not a typical Labour MP: an author and historian who has written several books on Friedrich Engels, you could hope that he was a cut above the usual shallow post-Blair nonentities that populate the leadership of the Labour Party. Sadly, despite all his research and writing, Hunt finds himself singing from the same song sheet as Michael Gove.
But one thing we can agree with Hunt on, is that Gove and the Tories “built on” Labour ideas around education during Blair’s government. In fact, very few innovations have come from Gove, he has taken then original impetus of the Blair regime and made it even more vicious. Under Blair, the massive expansion of schools may have been done in a semi-privatised way, but at least it came with a dramatic increase in funding, with cash flowing into important areas of support like teaching assistants.
This is why the Labour party cannot mount any credible opposition to the vicious right wing attack by the coalition – they were the ideological inspiration for Gove and through the Academy scheme created the framework for him to undermine the quality of education in Britain.
Now the academies and free school programme is being accelerated at a dramatic rate – as the mainstream parties are obsessed with removing schools from local government authority. Outside of the control of the local council where the schools are based, the new academies and free schools are answerable only to central government.
What is the alternative?
That is why Left Unity exists. Not just because teachers are worried about their jobs, it is because growing numbers of people are unhappy with the way that education is going and we want a change.
But we don’t just want to “turn back the clock” to some point in the past. We recognise that as society changes and grows so too must the education system that is integral to it.
As a new party, Left Unity is still debating its policies. But we can say with some certainty that a lot of our members want a radically different vision of education in this country. We want schools that are fully funded, integrated into the local community and with a curriculum that is participatory and democratically decided.
This means without the elitism of the private school system, where all children have the chance at a decent education. One where those with special needs get the support they need to access the best quality teaching and learning. We don’t want a schooling system which is based on constant examination, box ticking and assessments which leaves our children exhausted and stressed with teacher increasingly forced to “teach to the test” instead of giving a comprehensive and well rounded education.
We don’t want a school system based on the league tables, or where the threat of the Ofsted inspection drives educators into a panic and threatens a whole school with failure if they don’t meet the often arbitrary standards of the inspectors. We have to move away from the Blairite dogma of “choice”, where concerned parents check league tables before sending their children to a given school, and instead strive for excellence across the schooling system, not driven by fear and competition but by collaboration and building better schools and educational environments. Key to that is a reduction in class sizes to well below 25 so that teachers can have more time to teach their students.
Teaching should be one a job which retains people for years so they can build on their careers and improve, not the current situation where 40% of new teachers leave the profession in the first five years.
Finally, we would take education in a whole new direction – no more private education, no more elitism, no more huge classrooms with disenfranchised children being taught by demoralised teachers. Left Unity would use money raised from progressive taxation to transform education with new investment, more democratic control of the curriculum and schools and an education tailored to the needs of different students so that everyone has a chance to succeed. If you support that goal then join Left Unity and help us build the alternative.
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This is just a continuation of the Tories attack on Further and Higher Education in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I was a lecturer in FE in ’92 and we were told we were lazy and they were going to make us work. At the same time, college principles were given huge increases in salary, if they forced us onto new contracts, longer hours, fewer holidays, no pay increases.The aim then, as now, was to destroy teachers’ terms and conditions, destroy national pay scales, and weaken teachers’ unions and collective bargaining. The aim, of course,was to force out well qualified, dedicated staff and replace them with people who would accept anything. I decided it was time for me to go when the college appointed a beauty therapist as head of Engineering!
Please accept my apologies for misspelling ‘principals’
Labour’s consultation paper on ‘Education and children’: missed opportunities and misguided priorities
Labour has circulated an 8 page ‘draft consultation paper’ called Education and children which seems likely to be the basis for its 2015 election manifesto for education. It contains some ideas which should be supported and some which are far too vague to know what they would mean. It also is notable for its silence about many of the key policies of Gove, which means that they are likely to continue under a Labour government.
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. But these are the exception.
Education for economic growth
The dominant theme of the paper is the need to overcome 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 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 (see below). 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.
Local democracy and local authorities
Another of the striking omissions in the paper concerns local authorities. In fact, astonishingly, the words don’t appear in the paper at all, or even the fashionable get-out term ‘the middle tier’. The silence may be because Blunkett is producing a review of the role of local authorities. But what it signals is that local elected government is not central to Labour’s education thinking.
So the paper says ‘local areas’ will be able to decide admissions policies (pp6 and 10) but it doesn’t say what mechanism, what institutional arrangements, will enable that to happen. A repeated theme of the paper is that ‘Labour will empower local communities to have a greater say about education in their area’ (p6) – although only one issue which they will be able to have a say about is specified: ‘local communities will have a greater say in the new schools opening up in their area.’ (p7). But again, no mention of the role of a local authority in coordinating and representing the community’s views. Similarly, the paper emphasises the need for ‘the rigorous local accountability that is crucial to driving up standards.’ (p6), but makes no mention of the role of the local authority as the body to which schools are accountable and its responsibility for ensuring that support is provided for schools that need it.
Academies and free schools
The silence about local authorities means there is no commitment to create a fully inclusive local school system by incorporating academies and free schools into it. There is a deafening silence about academies. They will continue as they are, locally unaccountable, including those run by democratically unaccountable privately-owned chains. Labour will not permit any new free schools, but there is no commitment to bring existing ones into a reinvigorated local authority system. (The case for reconstructed and radically democratised local authorities in education is argued in ‘Democratising local school systems: participation and vision’, in M Allen and P Ainley (eds) Education beyond the Coalition: reclaiming the agenda, 2013. Available free at http://radicaledbks.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/richard-hatcher-leas.pdf).
Why we need to campaign for a new direction for education
Obviously there are a few positive proposals in Labour’s paper which should be supported. But overall it is far from the radical alternative we need to root out Goveism and set the education system on a different track. The paper says little or nothing about some of the key issues, which means that it leaves some of the pillars of Tory education policy intact. And the main proposals it does venture to make, around the ‘forgotten 50%’, are a misconceived re-run of previous failed policies which will deepen the existing social divisions in the education system and the youth labour market. Some on the left have pinned their hopes on influencing Labour to change course, but it is clear now that to achieve more than minor concessions will require mass pressure on Labour from a powerful campaign bringing together teachers and other school workers with parents and the wider public.