Former Liberal Democrat schools minister David Laws believes education policymakers should think things through more, according to a recent interview.
Mr Laws remains a centrist. It’s a relief nowadays to encounter any politician or commentator occupying the middle ground: it’s no longer cool or sexy territory.
Presumably to his surprise, he found himself part of the coalition government, and he claims to have mitigated some of the wilder legislative urges of David Cameron’s first government. He comes across as a pragmatist.
Moreover, given both the general impression that he is well thought of in political circles and the fact that he now heads the Education Policy Institute (EPI, which aims to do for education what the Institute for Fiscal Studies does in its field), he might bring some positive influence to bear.
In that Guardian interview, headlined “The quality of education policymaking is poor”, the former minister complained that politicians tend to make decisions based on ideology. The EPI aims to put that right.
Party thinktanks are, almost by definition, an oxymoron: if they’re allied to one school of thought, the thinking is unlikely to be open-minded.
By contrast, theme/subject-based thinktanks are fine: we should welcome the sight of people doing some actual thinking about policy, shouldn’t we? As long as they don’t ally themselves too closely to any particular political school of thought, which they have an unfortunate habit of doing.
Mr Laws boasts that his institute’s research demonstrated that Theresa May’s grammar schools policy would have no significant impact on social mobility: it proved persuasive even with Tory MPs.
He’s also proud of a recent report “which concludes that, while New Labour’s sponsored academies had excellent results, the Tories’ ‘convertor academies’ have failed to raise attainment except where they already had outstanding ratings.”
Any of us working in schools can explain that phenomenon. Those early academies were launched by successful leadership teams and go-getting sponsors: they were well funded, too - spectacularly so in some cases.
Examine every successful early academy, and you can find similar reasons for why they succeeded: rolling the programme out and obliging schools, particularly failing ones, to convert could not hope to have the same effect. But that harsh reality didn’t and doesn’t fit the political rhetoric of “academy good: school/local authority bad”.
More thinking in education
Perhaps government will listen to the EPI. There’s scope for more thinking in education, and I wish the institute and its head every success.
One word of warning, though. David Laws insists that the EPI will be “data-driven, influencing debate by the quality of its analysis and its quantitative skills”. OK, but he’s the man who claims to have devised the schools’ performance measure known as Progress 8.
Mr Laws believes that Progress 8 “incentivises schools to help every single pupil instead of prioritising just a few on the [GCSE] C/D borderline”. He has a point, but judging all schools by inflexible, hard-edged accountability data is a heavy-handed way to run a national system.
Schools, squeezed like toothpaste tubes, may indeed produce figures that satisfy Progress 8 and provide juicy material for the EPI to prove stuff with. But as a result they are too often obliged to downgrade other vital aspects of education.
To take but one example, research for the NUT by King’s College, London (November 2016) found that the English Baccalaureate, combined with the double-weighting of English and mathematics in Progress 8, “is having a profound effect on the hierarchy of subjects within schools, with creative, vocational and technology subject teachers reporting a decrease in examination entry rates, reduced resources and less time being allocated to their subjects”.
My plea to David Laws, then, is this: don’t allow the EPI to convince itself that valuable information about schools lies only in scientifically quantifiable data. If it does, you’ll ensure that policy is based only on what can be easily measured, and that only what is measurable is valued.
We’ve been there so many times; let’s not fall into the trap yet again.
Dr Bernard Trafford was until last week headteacher of the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne. He is also a former chair of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference. The views expressed here are personal. He tweets at @bernardtrafford
To read more columns, view his back catalogue
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