One of the most common complaints about education policy is that it’s overly politicised, with no continuity, and that everything would be better if independent bodies could make all the decisions without those pesky elected politicians getting involved.
At a surface level, it’s true that there is endless chopping and changing, which wastes time and drives those working in schools to distraction. But look deeper and the picture changes.
Since the 1980s, there has been a significant amount of consistency in the big shifts affecting schools and colleges. Local authorities, who used to run education, have been hollowed out, central government has taken control of setting and measuring standards, and individual school (or trust) leaders have been given responsibility for day-to-day management.
This shift has happened across successive governments and left us with a system that looks very different to most other countries, being far more centralised with much more focus on top-down accountability.
But has it worked? In a new report for the Sutton Trust, I look back at data for the past 20 years to try and answer that question.
The positives
The good news is England has become one of the highest-performing countries in literacy and numeracy in international tests. However, science has gone backwards since external assessment at key stage 2 ended.
There are other positives, too - including many more young people staying into post-16 and tertiary education (albeit a system that has seen hefty funding cuts) - and a significantly improved public reputation for schools (even if it may not always seem that way to those on the front line).
The negatives
But when it comes to closing the gap between low-income and wealthier families, we’ve made almost no progress at all. Things did improve up to 2017, but all that has been lost since.
This is probably due to factors outside of school that have made the lives of the most vulnerable young people more difficult - including rising poverty and related challenges with mental illness. Since the pandemic we’ve seen these problems get worse, combined with falling attendance and increasingly poor behaviour.
Here, the differences between the New Labour government and the Coalition/Conservative ones that followed become more apparent.
Labour sought to integrate wider children’s services with schools, but the Coalition decided they wanted schools to focus on academic attainment. This seems to have been successful when looking at attainment, relative to other countries, but the underfunding of local authorities and other services, combined with the deterioration in the lives of vulnerable young people, has undermined the strategy.
Core funding
Schools have been left having to fill in for absent services without the resources or support to do so.
Even for schools, core functions funding has fallen, after rising significantly under New Labour, while accountability pressures have ratcheted up yet further, making school leadership increasingly difficult and retention of teachers harder. Post-16 institutions have been hit hardest, meaning less teaching time and fewer qualifications for students.
The task for Labour
For a new government, this leads to some tricky questions. They seem broadly content to stick to the system that has evolved over the past 35 years. There’s no sense they want to embark on major structural reforms, nor is there much appetite for that in the sector.
But is it possible to adapt our system to alleviate some of the problems it’s created? How do we improve children’s lives in the round without making schools solely responsible for doing so?
How do we encourage more teachers to stay, and join, the profession when, in a highly centralised system, accountability measures are necessarily crude? How can special educational needs be properly supported in such a system?
How much can schools be expected to help pupils from lower-income families close the gap while other policies in welfare and housing are making their lives so difficult?
Substantial investment
Decades of reform across successive governments have led to real improvements in standards. Compared with other public services, this is a success story.
In recent years, though, as funding has dropped, the weaknesses of these reforms have become increasingly apparent. Without fixing these, the successes will be undermined. And ultimately, this cannot be done without substantial investment.
While the government has promised cash to fix crumbling schools and free breakfast clubs ahead of this week’s Budget, far greater funding is needed to tackle the major issues facing schools today.
Sam Freedman is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education
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