TONY BLAIR was right yesterday morning: Labour’s education policy matters much more than Brian Sedgemore’s defection to the Liberal Democrats. So what is Labour’s education policy? I have read the manifesto. I watched Mr Blair — “education must be the No 1 priority for any modern government” — at the press conference yesterday. I have read the speech, “From Comprehensive Schools to Comprehensive Education”, given by Ruth Kelly, the new Education Secretary, to the Fabian Society three weeks ago. I have even scanned Gordon Brown’s prolific output, in case he becomes prime minister any time soon, to try to discern any hint of an education policy within.
And having done all that I am really scared, because I don’t think that they have an education policy. After eight years in office I cannot see that Labour has any idea how to improve standards significantly in schools. I’ll tell you what they do have, and it dominates the thoughts of both Ms Kelly and Mr Brown. They have a commitment to raising the standards and reputation of vocational education for 14-19-year-olds, and for widening access to higher education; to ensure, in the Education Secretary’s rather chilling words, that “people must not just be left to the mercy of market forces but supported and equipped to achieve in a market economy”.
And they have a second ambition, championed by the Chancellor. They have a plan to extend education to 3 to 5-year-olds; “education from the age of 3 that is nationwide, of high quality and available to all”, as the Chancellor put it in the Budget.
Which leaves, by my reckoning, non-vocational education for 4 to 18-year-olds to worry about. Labour’s manifesto says that successful primary schools will be allowed to become foundation schools with more freedom to manage their own sites, a policy more totemic than revolutionary. Education advisers envisage only “a relatively small number” of these foundation primaries. Most people seem to agree anyway that the problem with education is not at this level. You do not hear many complaints from parents about the lack of choice among good local schools at primary level.
But that leaves the secondaries, and what the hell is Labour going to do about them? Every speech, every policy paper I read suggests the same thing: that Labour thinks its reform here is largely complete. There will be more city academies in poorer areas. Every school will be “an independent specialist school” — although not independent of the local education authority, and not free to select. Existing specialist schools will be able to take on a second specialism. And then a third and then a fourth? And then everyone will be specialised in everything? Is that the idea?
And the specialist schools will be encouraged to work together. Good. But first they just have to work. Good schools will be able to expand, too — except that they rarely want to. Ms Kelly was challenged yesterday to name more than four that had expanded, and was unable to do so. Her department says there are six.
The Tories have nothing to offer here. I know that this is easily dismissed as a middle-class obsession but new Labour was supposed to be — is supposed still to be, I think — a coalition of the working and middle classes. First, I refuse to accept the notion that the working classes do not care about the quality of education that their children receive. Secondly, if the middle classes are desperately unhappy with the state of secondary education, unable to get their children into the schools they want, and forced to jump through practical, financial or religious hoops to secure a decent quality of education, it undermines the consensus for the state system as a whole.
A report this week by the London School of Economics found that social inequality is widening, partly because the abolition of grammar schools reduced opportunity for children from poorer families. Yet for ideological reasons Labour will not consider their return. Instead it tinkers with a tottering system in which almost half of secondary schools still get less than half of their pupils to pass five GCSEs at A-C.
Labour needs to entertain some truly “radical” ideas. It could be the return of grammars. It might be compelling all parents to send their children to the local school, to try to drag the worst up through the pressure of aspirational parents who will otherwise pay, play or pray their way into the best schools and leave the worst to sink farther. But what is utterly inequitable and indefensible is for Mr Blair to slip his children into the Oratory and his colleagues to buy houses in prime secondary catchment areas while still insisting that the current system works for everyone else.
Mr Blair gave a classic performance yesterday when confronted by a real teacher. How, the head teacher wanted to know, are we to pay for the extra staff needed to cover the 10 per cent of preparation and marking time that current teachers have been promised? “We’ve got to sit down after this and work out how we can give you the time that you need,” the Prime Minister told him. Rhetoric and reality, you see: it happens all the time. Labour means well but so many of its ideas prove unrealistic on the ground. Just ask the chief executives of the country’s leading foundation hospitals, who are now so fed up with the limits of the Government’s promise to them that some of them are ready to quit.
Without a better idea of how to reform public services, Labour’s third term is destined to flop. A really important book by the Prime Minister’s former speechwriter, Peter Hyman, the best book yet written about new Labour in government, suggests where some of the problems in policy-making lie. I hope that Mr Blair has read 1 out of 10, in which Mr Hyman swaps No 10 for an inner-city comprehensive. I hope that he begs Mr Hyman to return to No 10 to work on some solutions. In the meantime, he promises a major speech on education today. Watch this space. And let us hope that it is not just a space.
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