Andrew Haldenby and Laura Kounine: Michael Gove should fund but not manage the nation's schools

Andrew Haldenby is Reform’s Director, and Laura Kounine is Reform’s Education Research Officer.

Last week's Conservative Green Paper has divided opinion.  We can discount the hostile criticism from most of the teaching unions; their opposition to the very principle of parental choice is steadily pushing them out of the mainstream of the education debate.  The real debate is between those commentators who concluded that the proposals would indeed deliver a revolution in schooling – and those who were concerned that the methods of reform might defeat its admirable intentions.  Who is right?

The first part of the paper set out the principles of new Conservative thinking on the curriculum and school management.  It proposed some adjustments to the compulsory requirements on schools, for example a phonics based reading test at six instead of a general literacy test at seven and compulsory setting in academic subjects.   Otherwise it claimed a shift away from central regulation.  Central government would only publish best practice, in very considerable detail, including the use of credits and debits for discipline and the optimal length of lunch breaks.

Anne McElvoy was surprised at this:

"Politicians who claim one day to 'set schools free' and 'trust the professionals', only to slide into the minutiae of how good heads do their jobs or whether children stand or sit to say good morning are inviting puzzlement."

We should share her concern.  The history of the last twenty years of education reform - begun by a Conservative government in 1988, and based on ever stronger intervention into the curriculum and teaching methods – is that governments are not the best judge of what works in schools.  In good schools, headteachers spend hours per week protecting their staff from advice on so-called good practice.  The Green Paper proposes an even greater intrusion than the most absurd of the Government's current directives – that on hospital cleaning, which reminds hospital staff to do “wall-washing” and “floor scrubbing”.  This is not the end to top down centralisation for which David Cameron rightly argues in the paper's introduction.

The strongest praise amongst commentators came in regard for parental choice.  A Telegraph leader said that it offered a “serious structural alternative to local authority domination of state education”.  For Iain Martin they would deliver “a supply side revolution, stripping away the monopoly power of local education authorities, the state monoliths that strangle diversity of provision and competition".  The Green Paper does indeed see local authorities as the key problem – and sees central government as the solution.  New schools would sign contracts directly with the Department for Children, Schools and Families on the academies model.  The Secretary of State could step in if local authorities were obstructive.  A central building fund would provide capital if new providers needed them.

For this reason, Anne McElvoy said, “The Gove/Cameron charter is frankly extraordinary in its apparent desire to have even more decisions taken by the Secretary of State than the most ardent centralisers of New Labour.”   We agree; after all, the Department for Education (in its various guises) has proved the greatest opponent of reform for the last twenty five years, certainly more dangerous than local authorities.  The most successful school reforms have been decentralised as much as possible.  As Per Unckel, the Swedish Minister who led their school reforms, explained at a Reform conference in 2004, his first step was to make education entirely a matter for local government.  Grant maintained schools were barely administered at all; their funding came from an arms-length agency and encouragement for them from a separate charity.  Reform's “Commission on the reform of public services” proposed that capital funding should simply be distributed as part of per pupil funding to give maximum freedom.

At heart, this debate is about what matters in education.  Is it government instruction, however well intentioned?  Or is it the commitment of headteachers, teachers and pupils, and all of the other groups involved in schools and children's lives?  The evidence of twenty years of intervention has reinforced the common sense view that it is the latter rather than the former.  Good schools have a sense of mission that means that government suggestions are neither here nor there.  As Bernice McCabe, the headmistress of North London Collegiate School, said this week:

“The key qualities of a good school are universal and easy to recognise: …. Staff with a passion for their subject who are able to convey their knowledge and enthusiasm to pupils, irrespective of background and ability; an unremitting focus on learning; a genuine conviction that each child has the potential to enjoy success and can strive for excellence in his studies; a ‘can-do’ ethos that pervades the school and inspires children and staff: a rich extra-curricular provision, giving opportunities for every child to find his niche and experience success and develop self-confidence; a pastoral care programme that ensures every child is well known and that his social as well as his academic progress is supported; a strong emphasis on self-discipline and respect for other people.”

None of this should obscure the tremendously positive elements in this week's announcement.  Michael Gove made the case that diversity raises standards better than any politician since Tony Blair.  He rightly rejected the Government's inputs-led approach, which would judge education on the numbers of pounds spent and the numbers of years taught, not on outcomes.  Real reform can be achieved if Michael Gove stays true to his convictions, does his utmost to relinquish control over schools and endeavours to fund but not to manage education.

Related link: Video of David Cameron discussing his education proposals

Comments

[David Belchamber]

Michael Gove is very intelligent and personable and I am delighted that he is shadowing education. However, I agree with concerns that a tory government should not micromanage, as Brown does and Blair did. He must not be prescriptive.
The tories were on to a winner last time round when they established the grant maintained schools. The government freed schools that decided to follow that path from the dead weight of local authority control: it was true to the spirit of the above article:

"Real reform can be achieved if Michael Gove stays true to his convictions, does his utmost to relinquish control over schools and endeavours to fund but not to manage education".

That is absolutely correct, though how to break the stranglehold of the educational establishment will not be so easy to achieve. I suggest that Chris Woodhead and some independent school heads, as well as leading figures from the state sector be brought in to advise Michael Gove.

[Matt Wright]

Some useful points. I feel that we tend to miss the most important fact. I think the single biggest factor in the success or failure of a school is the headteacher. With a good headteacher almost anything is possible, with a bad headteacher the whole pack of cards comes down. By all means make schools free and take away the myriad of targets and rules about funding but the real issue is how we train, recruit and keep the best headteachers in the world and very quickly sack poor headteachers.

[Happy Tory]

DCSF should provide a resource for schools to draw on, with suggestions on a whole menu of good practice, not a single "best practice" with detailed guidelines. The former will set schools free, but help heads and teachers to see what's working elsewhere. The latter will be back to bureaucrats' heaven. There should be no strict definition of what is the "right" way to run a school or Ofsted assessments will inevitably remain a tick box exercise, and schools will continue to be straightjacketed. We are starting to win the argument on setting schools free. We must not send mixed messages by trying at the same time to tell them what to do.

Let's really, really start trusting professionals to make the right decisions - but at an individual, not collective level (since collective decisions result in the education system lurching from one mistake to the next, while multiple individual decisions and knowledge sharing creates a systems that learns efficiently).

[anon]

Haldenby makes various errors.

He writes that the Tory proposals for dealing with normal state schools now - like OFSTED reporting on phonics teaching and other benchmarking - will apply to the new Academies. The Green Paper says clearly that this is NOT the case.

In fact, the Paper makes explicit that the Academies will be EXEMPT from the National Curriculum and will operate under the same rules as private schools.

How can a change in which all parents are given the power to leave a state school and get funding to go to a new school operating on the same basis as private schools now be presented as worse than the worst Labour centralisers?

[Bexie]

How about returning to exams set by acedemics and industrialists based on the entry requirements to industry and university

How about set based acedemics where the pupil is set entry exams to be placed in classes of similarity and learning,

Ah hang about that is where we were before we started messing with the whole affair...

I suggest we get rid of the DoE all together and use the money to hand back to the parents to go towards the school of their choice, I think that is called a tax cut.

[Simon R.]

Sweden strikes me (I could be wrong -I've never been there) as a more homogenous society than Britain's multicultural one. Therefore might it not be the case that liberalising education provision in the U.K. might need more safeguards in place to prevent (for instance) a school adopting a very seperatist Muslim agenda than somewhere like Sweden?

[John Moss]

Logic dictates a gradual approach, in terms of relaxing policy control, but we must NOT repeat the mistake of the half-hearted ntroduction of Grant-Maintained Schools. By limiting this almost to a pilot, their impact on the totality of education was miniscule and Labour could easily remove them.

ALL funding should be routed through parents from day one. That way the market will flourish, but parents, having got control of the cash, will not readily give it up.

[true outsider]

swednes muslim population is similary proportionate of the population-indeed they're cracksing donw on that aspect as we speak- i think such measures could be quite simple though-e.g a proviso that he superiroty of Britih law be taught