The contents of political manifestos do not normally come as a surprise. Either the policies they contain have been long-trailed or leaked, or they are the continuation of work that is ongoing.
For example, everyone had a good idea what would be in yesterday’s Labour manifesto. The semantics were of course important, but we knew well in advance that there would be stuff in there about abolishing Ofsted, putting VAT on private school fees, and developing a so-called National Education Service.
Similarly, in 2017, we knew long before publication that Theresa May’s manifesto would contain a big commitment to grammar schools, and in 2010 you didn’t have to be Mystic Meg to predict that David Cameron and Michael Gove were going to go big on academies and free schools.
This simply isn’t true of Boris Johnson’s 2019 Conservative manifesto, which is due out any day now. We can be sure there will be stuff in there about funding and teacher pay, but these are just financial commitments. Similarly one can expect a renewed commitment to free schools.
A time for policy rabbits?
But if Johnson’s government has big or radical plans to reform schools, we simply don’t know what they are. Essentially, despite his having been a big noise in politics for a long time, there is very little to tell us what changes Johnson might want to make in schools.
Because make no mistake, this is a Johnson manifesto. Any plans for schools will have been conceived in Number 10, and not Gavin Williamson’s Department for Education. And as I’ve written before, there’s a large number of right-leaning education thinkers in this Downing Street set, including Rachel Wolf and Munira Mirza, who are writing the manifesto.
So while I can speculate about whether their document will contain commitments to extending selection and/or reimagining the Assisted Places Scheme, the honest truth is no one knows whether there are going to be any policy rabbits pulled out Johnson’s manifesto hat.
The lack of leaking or political kite-flying might suggest there’s nothing radical in the document. That would prove a massive relief for heads and teachers, I suspect.
