When James Callaghan spoke at Ruskin College on education in 1976, it was, remarkably, the first time that a prime minister had given a speech on education.

The topic was simply not traditionally a preoccupation of government.

In his memoirs, Bernard Donoughue, Mr Callaghan’s policy director at Number 10, recalls how appalled the Department of Education was that the prime minister would have the temerity to express a view in this area.

And indeed, it was only just over 30 years previously, in 1944, that it was mandated that a comprehensive full education system would be provided and funded by the state.

That groundbreaking piece of legislation, it is fair to say, was hardly recognised as such at the time. When Rab Butler, president of the Board of Education, explained that he was proposing an education Bill, prime minister Winston Churchill simply said “that I must show him my plans when they were ready and that he was sure they would be very interesting. I gladly left it at that.”

One can link the increasing preoccupation of central government with education with that speech by James Callaghan. But as a subject, it didn’t really hit the big time until Tony Blair and his October 1996 declaration that his priorities were “education, education and education”.

As Mr Blair noted in another speech two months later - symbolically also at Ruskin College - education ministers had traditionally been politicians on their way up or on their way out. Bluntly, they were rarely people at the top. 

That was what the Blair government changed. From 1997, education was clearly a preoccupation right at the top, and Lord Blunkett was a politician of the highest order.

‘Targets and interference’

But alongside that flowed the targets and the interference. The late 1980s and 1990s had brought league tables and Ofsted. Blair brought greater choice and competition, national strategies, three-part lessons and endless fads and initiatives often linked to pots of funding. 

It’s easy to despair about this meddling, as Hans van Mourik Broekman did in his recent TES article. And I’m not defending all of what happened by any means (even though, ahem, I funded and pushed for a fair few of those things from the Treasury). The Coalition was right to roll back on a lot of it.

“Initiativitis” under Labour led to an infantilisation of too many teachers and heads, all too accepting of a model whereby they looked up to Whitehall for directions on what they should do, rather than managing their own schools and classrooms.

The effects of that can still be seen today - for instance, in the panic that exists in many schools when faced with the requirement to design their own assessment system post-levels. 

But the main lesson of Labour - that education should be a central priority of government - was also one that the other parties rightly adopted. Michael Gove and David Laws were two of the Conservatives’ and Liberal Democrats’ heaviest hitters respectively, and the Coalition maintained - at least until 2014 - a serious interest in the area. 

Even a casual observation of schools in England in the mid-1970s, or mid-1980s, compared with the 2000s onwards, shows the latter to be infinitely better. Not just more teachers, but better ones. New buildings. A clear sense of ambition and possibility.

And school communities are more at ease with themselves than too many institutions were in the 1970s, with the remnants of the immediate post-war hierarchies and a “don’t ask, don’t tell, look the other way” philosophy.

The plain fact is that schools, or any other public service, favoured by politicians will thrive. This is for three reasons: 

1. The most obvious is money. Between 1990 and 2010, education spending doubled in real terms. And although money isn’t everything, it certainly helps.

In the perennial Whitehall bun fight for resources, a sector which the prime minister and chancellor favour will do well. 

2. The reforms which a powerful secretary of state can drive through schools. Yes, this can be irritating. But there are always things which schools can or won’t do themselves, and need external stimulus to do.

A huge amount of the early stages of London’s transformation, for example, was done by relentless pressure from Lord Blunkett and Lord Adonis on failing boroughs like Hackney, demanding that bad schools be closed and that, ultimately, the boroughs lose control. (This all happened, incidentally, in the teeth of local Labour party opposition - from a lot of the same people who 20 years on now claim London as a model for why government doesn’t need to get involved in school improvement). 

3. And the third reason is the passion which a top-tier secretary of state can generate for his or her sector.

Love him or loathe him, there are a generation of teachers inspired by the power of Michael Gove’s vision who entered teaching, or write about teaching, or set up schools, or campaign for broader education and social change because of the passion and possibilities within state education which he engendered. 

The presence of such individuals - by no means all politically aligned with Mr Gove - will deliver long-term benefit to the system.

And finally, look at the counter-factual. 

For every head who is despairing at their budget, at the recruitment situation and the endless fads still coming from DfE, I feel sympathy.

But one suggestion. Go and talk to colleagues in mental health, in further education, in local government, in social care, in offender management, in council housing, in homelessness. Ask them how government indifference is working out for them.

Ask them if they’re enjoying their freedoms to improve their services. Then think about whether you really do want schools to slip off the priority agenda.

Jonathan Simons is a TES columnist and the former head of education at thinktank Policy Exchange

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