A spectre is haunting education - the spectre of democracy.

Where are our Benjamin Franklins and our Thomas Jeffersons? Where our constitutionalists? Where our democratic thinkers? I had hoped for so much more from the Labour Party. Not for the first time in recent years, I am left thinking that democracy is something many people praise when it promises to bring them to power - and soon forget the closer they are to it.

Labour MP Emma Hardy’s engagement with education policy since being elected - and long before that, throughout her career as an outspoken teacher and union representative - has always struck a chord with me.

As a grassroots activist, her aim was always true when striking at politicians and policy influencers. As an MP and member of the Education Select Committee, that skill has not abated in her questioning and holding the government to account.

Naive or discouraging

Last week, however, the representative from Hull West and Hessle appeared in the press and, in my humble opinion, threw away much of her accrued capital in what was either a naive foray into the world of policy or a very discouraging sign of what educational thinking might be under a democratic-socialist Labour government.

In the piece in question, Emma Hardy endorses a research project about the development of oracy in schools. This might initially appear to be good news for curriculum thinking. (Evidence-informed policy? Yes, please.) However, the rest of the piece - what facts can be extricated from the surrounding puff - quickly destroys all hope of that.

The project, it turns out, looks like nothing more than an opportunity for a group of schools to present a narrative of how their methods enhance children’s oracy. These schools are precisely the ones who have often found themselves silenced under the Conservative educational stewardship.

Lack of evidence

Moreover, Ms Hardy has already bought into this narrative, serving us with the headline-grabber of “Traditionalist ‘chalk and talk’ pedagogy is pushing oracy skills out of the curriculum to the detriment of poorer pupils.”

Besides a lack of evidence to substantiate this bold claim, there is far more to concern me about this statement.

To paraphrase Franklin, I would defend to my career death these so-called “progressive” schools’ right to determine their own professional practices - and to be praised for their achievements on their own terms. However, I will also fight to my career death to halt any of them getting their hands on the policy levers.

I hold that sentiment just as strongly for all the schools and other assorted ideologues who have found favour under the current regime.

Redesigning education

And I don’t just say that either. Along with Lucy Rycroft-Smith, I’ve just published a book dedicated to this sentiment and to redesigning our education system on the principles of democratic professionalism. Doing that has pretty much-meant career death for me as a teacher. I wander around the supply circuit, a ghost of my former self.

I have unfinished business.

I had hoped for better. I had hoped that given the democratic-socialist shift the Labour Party has taken, we might see a more enlightened policy. Instead, this development makes me feel like the party is happy to fight Govianism with Govianism - and here’s why that worries me: the education system simply isn’t robust enough to sustain another violent swing of the political pendulum.

For starters, it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at it. Another five years of teachers leaving and being replaced by younger counterparts who acquiesce to the new regime will simply kill off the teaching profession and any hope Labour has of launching and embedding a National Education Service.

And, of course, it relies on five years of teachers leaving for no other reason than political manipulation. Not because they aren’t good teachers. Nor because they and their families can afford for them to walk away. Much less because there is a wonderful and vibrant private sector awaiting them with open arms. No. They will leave under duress and suffer as a result.

For seconds, the public will surely wake to the nation’s sham democratic settlement, that allows such a key aspect of the state’s role as education to become a political football. If they do, it’s the party in power who’ll be punished for it at the ballot box - and democracy itself.

The fact is that there is nothing particularly democratic about our current situation. Sure, our politicians are elected and mandated, but in a democracy, stability relies upon consensus and compromise - not polarisation and grandstanding. In a functioning democracy, power is checked and balanced.

Untrammelled powers

There is a bitter irony that Jonathan Simons, staunch Govian and formerly head of the education unit of highly influential right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange, had this to tweet a few days ago:

“Yes. Just wait until Corbyn et al want to use EI2006 and all subsequent academies legislation to unravel a decade or more of ed reform using the basically untrammelled powers of the SoS....”

For former Tes columnist Mr Simons, the only issue seems to be who is the holder of these basically untrammelled powers. For the rest of us, it ought to be that anyone can be.

To her great advantage, Emma Hardy is a specialist in her field and Labour boast many teachers among their new ranks. It could stand them in good stead, but on this form, they will have to improve rapidly on three points:

• They must commit never to get into bed with specific schools. These have, by the by, found plenty of endorsement already from such self-styled disruptors such as Richard Branson. Doing so only reinforces the competition-fuelled marketisation of education.
• They must commit never to endorse any specific pedagogy, which should only ever be determined by the happy coalescence of subject, students and teacher in the evidence-rich environment of professionally-run classrooms.
• They must commit to seeking broad professional consensus in the development, implementation and review of policy. Cherry-picking is a clear marker of what I have dubbed here Govianism. If it is wrong from the Right, it must surely also be wrong from the Left.

Unless, of course, the problem was never Govianism, just Gove, never the means of reform, just the right-wing nature of them.

In which case, let me be the first to bid farewell to the state education system. My career resurrection will not take place.

I will, however, go on haunting your corridors.

JL Dutaut is a teacher of politics and citizenship and co-editor of newly published Flip The System UK: a teachers’ manifesto, published by Routledge and priced at £14.95

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