GORDON BROWN’S sudden piety about restoring some traditional values in Britain’s schools appeared to be astonishing, but considering that 10 Downing Street is finally in sight, perhaps the Chancellor has decided that he needs to abandon some ideological prejudices and face the realities depressing all British parents.
For 30 years, the bachelor politician had championed social engineering among schoolchildren and campaigned to demolish elitism in Britain’s classrooms and universities. His denunciation in 2000 of Oxford University’s refusal to admit Laura Spence, a Tyneside comprehensive school pupil, as “absolutely scandalous” epitomised his class-warfare rhetoric. Since that contrived outburst, Mr Brown’s opinions remained un-changed until this week, when he unexpectedly promoted competition in school sports and approved the notion of winners and losers — anathema to the egalitarian high priests of the educational profession.
One reason for Mr Brown’s conversion is understandable. Over the next months he needs to place John Brown, his three-year-old son, in an Inner London school. During that process, he will be confronted with the dispiriting truth faced by all parents, that standards have sharply deteriorated since his own schooldays.
Gordon and Sarah Brown need to resolve a familiar predicament. Should they condemn John to an inferior education in a multicultural, multilinguistic state institution handicapped by constantly changing teachers or, like most Cabinet ministers and advisers, should they ignore Labour’s ideology and opt for a private or selective school? After all, even Sue Nye, Mr Brown’s long-serving personal assistant, abandoned her socialist convictions and moved from Islington to Tory-controlled Wandsworth to place her children in selective schools. Mr Brown’s dilemma is whether he, like Tony Blair, Lord Falconer and Harriet Harman, should join the hypocrites in the interest of John’s future.
There is an irony about Brown’s dilemma. Despite Mr Blair’s famous commitment in 1997 to improve education, Mr Brown has opposed Mr Blair’s proposals. More than any other Labour minister, he is responsible for the continuing decline of standards in Britain’s schools since 1997.
Although Mr Brown speaks repeatedly about “progressive universalism” to give every child the opportunity to excel, his bid to change British society has fostered a barren, frustrating debate about schools. Improved standards, he believes, can be achieved just by spending billions. Money, in his opinion, is the answer to all Britain’s educational deficiencies. By keeping control of the cash, he has dictated the agenda, seeking to undermine the ethos of successful schools based on discipline, excellence and elitism.
Considering his personal hinterland, Mr Brown’s opposition to educational traditions is puzzling. Unlike Mr Blair and so many of his brilliant advisers in the Treasury who were privately educated and won places in Oxbridge, he is the successful product of traditional state education — the same system that he has resolutely opposed.
Kirkcaldy High provided a superb education in decrepit buildings. Sitting among the children of dustmen, miners and even millionaires, Gordon Brown excelled. He passed his A levels at 16 and won a place at Edinburgh University, where he was awarded a first-class degree. Yet, remarkably, Mr Brown approved the local Labour’s council’s destruction of Kirkcaldy High and its replacement by an indifferent comprehensive school whose working- class pupils are denied the academic and sporting opportunities enjoyed by Mr Brown.
“There is a difference between elitism and excellence,” said Mr Brown, believing that state money alone can create excellence. He wanted to remove inequalities in education by imposing one standard on all schools.
Once Mr Blair realised the folly of destroying diversity and selection in schools, he encountered Mr Brown’s sabotage of the bid to reintroduce “choice” into education. Mr Brown opposed giving parents vouchers, the creation of academies and limited selection. Repeatedly he has argued that the State could not trust the schools and parents to act in the children’s best interests.
Thanks to his policies, more children go to private schools than in 1997, truancy rates have increased by 30 per cent and the exam pass rate of state schoolchildren in core subjects is 4 per cent lower than in 2001. Pertinently, Mr Brown’s constant exhortation for more science graduates has resulted in a dramatic decline in A-level passes in science and the closure of science departments in universities. Labour ministers claim credit for improved results in sciences and maths at A level, yet half of the As are gained in private schools that educate 8 per cent of the nation’s pupils.
But now Mr Brown is confronted with finding his son a good state education. That would explain his shift towards competition in schools. Like all ideologues, when personal experience conflicts with principles, convictions are the first to be jettisoned.
But that single change might be simply a false dawn for those hoping to continue Mr Blair’s reforms. As with so much else of a Brown premiership, whether the Chancellor has really changed or whether he will return to the past remains unknown.
Tom Bower is the author of Gordon Brown, a biography
