Boris offers a positive Conservative alternative to Labour's mess on education

John Bald says Boris Johnson and his deputy Munira Murza have assembled an impressive team

Boris Johnson's education enquiry and delivery plan are perhaps the first sign that the government is managing to move beyond sorting out Labour's mess to construct a positive Conservative alternative. There are several reasons why this is difficult, most connected with what I've described as the octopus of progressive education, which has got its tentacles and suckers into every Conservative initiative from the Bullock committee onwards.

The academic boasting of his third-class degree at the Wellington Festival was just one recent example of a person opposed to Conservative values who had been given far too much influence, in his case, over the National Curriculum.

When I was with Essex Council, the senior inspector for English stated quite openly that "we will subvert anything we disagree with", and he and the authority were very successful in doing so.

Labour is opposing a new Church of England free school for Fulham

Labour's stance on free schools is as confused as ever. Officially its position has thawed - provided that new schools have a different name. But in practice they usually snipe whenever a group of parents get together to try and achieve more choice and a better start for their children.

Recently we had Labour seizing on initial Ofsted findings for 15 free schools where the ratio of good or outstanding free schools was no higher than the general state ratio. The same day that Labour launched its attack on these new schools, Paul Goodman noted that further Ofsted reports - now covering 24 schools - meant the ratio of them judged good or outstanding had increased from two thirds to three quarters.

A report in the Mirror this morning quotes the Shadow Children's Minister, Sharon Hodgson, denouncing plans for a new Church of England secondary free school for boys, the Fulham School for Boys. She says there is "no need" for it. Local parents disagree. The Conservative MP for Chelsea and Fulham Greg Hands says:

Councils should not get in the way of good, affordable childcare

For those stuck on welfare, who conclude they would be worse off in work, the explanation is often the cost of childcare. The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is personally responsible for blocking reforms to nurseries and child minders which would have helped with this.

Mr Clegg has made the illiberal demand that the ratio of staff to children should be kept at 1:4 rather than allowing parents the choice of sending children to establishments with a ratio of 1:6. That's fine for the rich but keeps the poor trapped on welfare.

Still Mr Clegg is able to branish his "progressive" credentials.

At least there is still improvement being made with the surviving Government proposals.

They make clear that local authorities are currently part of the problem duplicating regulatory burdens and generally meddling even when childcare providers have already achoieved a good Ofsted rating:

Grammar is not enough

John Bald welcomes Nevile Gwynne's book on grammar - but warns it will not guarantee moral virtue

Gwynne's Grammar, commended by Michael Gove to his civil servants, is in fact two books - his own analysis of English grammar, and a reprint of The Elements of Style, published in 1918 by Professor William Strunck  Jnr. of Cornell University. Mr Gwynne sets out the basics -  parts of speech, sentence structures, clauses and phrases, and punctuation.

He then leaves it to Professor Strunck to instruct us in applying what we have learned, with the goal of developing a style. Style is, for Mr Gwynne, "a science, just as much a science as any of the physical sciences to which the word is nowadays more commonly applied." A student develops his own style by studying other people's, and Michael Gove's memo suggests   writers to study, including George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Matthew Parris and Christopher Hitchins.

An unusual grouping - Orwell and Eliot would be on my list, and gentle Jane's manuscripts as an interesting early use of the dash - but I'm not sure about the others. I would add Dickens, whose flexible yet entirely accurate grammar is a major part of his genius, and might prefer Charles Moore to the others, not that I always agree with him.

The National Curriculum is ambitious for our children - good

John Bald on a revolution for rigour

After what seems like endless toil, sweat, blood and a few tears, we have the final version of the revised national curriculum (NC), in the form of a draft parliamentary order here.

The most important document is the Framework, downloadable from the right-hand side of the page, which contains the complete programmes of study. The current National Curriculum is suspended from September to allow schools to get to work at once, a thoroughly good idea, which will no doubt pass without comment from our opponents.

It's worth pointing out, though, that previous versions of the NC have never been fully established outside English and maths, and that even these were overridden by Labour's national strategies, which ignored the last Conservative government's provisions for phonics in teaching reading, and instituted completely useless methods of teaching children to calculate. The evidence for this lies in their production of materials to teach the two times table to eleven year olds, when children were supposed to know it by the age of seven.

Then the strategy masters (and mistresses) began to gobble up more and more school time for English and maths in a desperate attempt to undo their folly by subjecting schools to more of it, so that there was no time for anything else. Even Labour eventually saw the monster it had created, but too late to do much about it.

Durand Academy head hits back at Hodge

 

The Labour MP Margaret Hodge has attacked spending £17 million on the country's first free state boarding school. However she has refused to raise her concerns directly with those behind the project. Under Labour the average cost of a new secondary school was £25-£30 million. The new school would offer a fantastic opportunity for 600 children to reach their full potential. The boarding element of the cost would be met by the Durand Education Trust.

All the state is paying for is the normal cost of opening a new school followed by the normal per pupil funding. The extra costs are being paid by the Trust. Of course there will be rigour to show that the scheme is viable. The final business case has not yet been sent in to the Department of Education. As those behind it already run a school with fantastic success that gives them credibility. But if Lady Hodge has concerns about it why doesn't she talk to the school?

All schools to be allowed to set school term dates

Ken Clarke and Oliver Letwin wrote earlier about the Deregulation Bill. It has a lot of small measures but cumulatively is an important piece of legislation. A thousand and one ways to get the state out of the way and to allow more independent decision making. One example is that local authorities would no longer be able to tell the remaining maintained schools when the school terms must begin and end.

At the moment Section 32 of the Education Act 2002 requires the local authority to set term dates for local authority maintained schools. This blocks head teachers and governors of these schools from making changes to their term dates that would suit pupils and parents.

It's not a huge point. All maintained schools will still be required to be open for a minimum of 190 days a year. However it is a freedom that academies have taken advantage of. For example David Young Community Academy in Leeds operates a seven-term year which starts in June. The basic pattern is a maximum of six weeks at school followed by a maximum of four weeks’ holiday. Ros McMullen their principal believes short terms and short holidays work better.

Putting the stiletto into Professor Grayling

John Bald reports on the Festival of Education at Wellington College

Wellington College, the national monument to the Duke of Wellington, is unusual as monuments go, as people do not normally have the opportunity to see it. Indeed, few realise that it is a monument at all. All credit, therefore, to Dr Anthony Seldon for opening the College for this annual festival, and for bringing people from all areas of education together in a spirit of open debate.

Here is the College's recent sculpture of Copenhagen, who carried Wellington for seventeen hours at Waterloo and whose sire won the Derby. Views of his character are mixed. The inscription notes that he carried young children on his bare back in his old age, and he is said to have enjoyed cream buns. He is also noted for his temper, and aimed a kick at Wellington's head immediately after the battle.

There was something of this mix in the Festival. Sir Michael Wilshaw kicked off with a defence of his approach to inspection and criticism for heads who focused on managing rather than leading teaching.  He criticised public schools for isolating themselves from the community by not sharing teaching skills and facilities, and had a sharp rap for Repton for opening a profitable offshoot in Dubai while ignoring need in Derby.

Listening to Sir Michael made me miss David Aaranovitch's simultaneous interview with the head of Eton - praised by Sir Michael for its recent Academy sponsorship. I made up for it  by catching his interview with Michael Gove, in which he attempted to play the genial assassin, though he had the decency to admit that he'd stolen one when he took a cheap shot over the reform of computer studies, which really had been improved to include more science and less button-pushing. 

David Laws, Minister of State for schools, made a sharp attack on Labour's obsession with Grade C at GCSE, to the neglect of those who were well below this benchmark, and an exposure of their dumbing-down of standards in primary schools by lowering the boundary of the expected level, so that those who only just scraped their Level 4 (Level 4c) were destined for failure in secondary school rather than success.

A case in point was picked up by a newly-minted First Class Honours graduate, who had just joined Teach First, and who had met a pupil in Newcastle who had been in school for six years and had not yet learned to write his name. Mr Laws promised to consider ways of indentifying and helping children in this scandalous situation. For once, it seemed that members of the coalition were on the same side.

The Festival provided a showcase for some brilliant work, including the Biobox, a Royal Society sponsored project with Writhlington School, Somerset. This takes climatic readings from Rwanda, transmits them via the internet and reproduces them exactly inside the biobox, so that plants can be grown in Somerset in identical conditions. There may be commercial applications in growing orchids.  A well-deserved MBE for teacher Simon Pugh-Jones (in red above).  After Friday's headliners, Saturday was more nuts and bolts, including sessions on improving behaviour, technology, science and maths.

My talk on spelling was meant for parents, but most of those who came were experienced teachers who had spent their careers helping children to tackle problems with learning, and were very interested in the detail. The presentation can be downloaded at johnbald.typepad.com. Sweetness and light were dispelled in the afternoon, first by Professor Dylan Wiliam, who told a session attended by our Teach First participant that he didn't want "bright young things" coming in and trying to sort things out, remarking that he had got a Third.  It's good to think that examiners sometimes get it right.

Then Dr Seldon put the stiletto into the philosopher A.C. Grayling by asking him a tricky question about the religious roots of creativity in T S Eliot and then, dissatisfied with the answer, saying he did not know why Professor Grayling was "so critical about things you do not understand". Not quite the verbal punch-up we had last year with David Starkey, but more deadly in its way, as the unfortunate Grayling could only stand there and take it.

Labour split on school academies

It is been painful to watch the contortions the Labour Party has inflicted on itself with regards to its education proposals. The Shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg has sought to reconcile two irreconcilable positions - being in favour of free schools and being against them.

Still the media has a limited interest in policy - especially the policy pronouncements of the opposition. Labour will be hoping that they won't face too much in the way of forensic examination of what they would do on this or other issues.

However there is another difficulty for the Labour Party in how they respond to the policy at local level. An example of this cropped up in Parliiament yesterday at Education questions. The Labour MP for Vauxhall Kate Hoey wanted to know why a school in her constituency was facing delays getting academy status - the reason was that her Labour-run council, Lambeth, was looking around for ploys to scupper it:

Who decides where new schools are "needed"? Politicians or parents?

The Labour Party and the teaching unions are soft on "surplus places" when it is a matter of closing or taking over an unpopular, failing school. However, when it comes to thwarting new schools from opening they suddenly become most concerned about the misallocation of resources. The problem with the Shadow Education Secretary, Stephen Twigg's, new policy on free schools is not that under his regime new free schools would have a different name "parent-led academies" or "teacher-led academies." The real problem is that, if places are available at existing bad schools, then under Labour, new free schools would not be allowed.

Lord Adonis says:

Labour will rightly locate new academies in areas – and there are plenty of them – where there is a shortage of good quality school places.

That wouldn't be so bad - although it would be the Labour Government rather than local parents who decide what constitutes "good quality" places. Good exam results? Good Ofsted? What we have seen with many free schools is that they are offering something distinctive.

In any event we shouldn't waste time debating how many angels can dance on that particular pin. Lord Adonis was, I'm afraid,  talking nonsense.  If we read Mr Twigg's speech we see that he declares that for a free school to open where there are any existing surplus places at any existing schools in a local authority, then that is a "scandal."  There is no proviso about discounting bad schools from the equation.