The former education recovery commissioner, who is set to be an expert adviser to Labour if it wins power after the election, has told school leaders he is “pretty agnostic” about school structures.
Speaking to school and education sector leaders in a personal capacity at an event hosted by Tes in Westminster this week, Sir Kevan Collins also said that the variation “between and within schools” is something “we still need to keep facing down”.
And Sir Kevan - who is set to be Labour’s expert adviser on higher standards in schools if the party forms the next government - added he was “unhappy personally” about any “personal obsessions around ideology in education that isn’t linked to the evidence and about driving outcomes”.
Sir Kevan was speaking in a personal capacity just before the country takes to the polls tomorrow.
If elected, the Labour Party has pledged to hire 6,500 new expert teachers and scrap single-word Ofsted grades.
Sir Kevan’s ‘fierce focus on standards’
“My fierce focus on standards means...I’m pretty agnostic about structures and I’m pretty agnostic about research,” Sir Kevan told leaders.
“I’m agnostic about those things when all they do is serve a purpose for themselves rather than serve one core purpose - improving outcomes for our children.”
And addressing trust leaders, Sir Kevan said that it was important to question: “Are we all truly accountable?”
Labour’s planned reforms for Ofsted are expected to include multi-academy trust inspections.
Bridget Phillipson, who is expected to take the role of education secretary if Labour forms the next government, has previously said that there is “a need for more transparency and accountability in the regional ‘layer’ of the schools’ system”.
And while Labour’s policy is no longer to pause academisation, the party has not indicated any firm plans for school structures so far.
Sir Kevan also spoke on the importance of “place”, adding that he believed it to be “critical in children’s lives”, and said that he wanted to see school leaders “work more closely with our community”.
‘System not good enough for all’
A research paper recently produced by the Confederation of School Trusts and law firm Browne Jacobson set out the “civic role” that trusts currently perform, detailing several approaches they can take to respond to the challenges facing both schools and the wider public sector.
While Sir Kevan insisted to MAT leaders this week that the English education system is “not broken”, he did admit that the system currently “isn’t good enough for everybody”.
The former catch-up tsar, who quit his role after the government fell short of funding his £15 billion pandemic catch-up package, claimed that the schools were yet to “fully exploit” the opportunity to use technology for “personalised diagnostic teaching in a more precise way”.
Education secretary Gillian Keegan has previously spoken about the “transformative change” that artificial intelligence could bring to education.
Sir Kevan said he thought there was an opportunity “to increase productivity and reduce the workload by better use of technology”.
He added that learning to collaborate is “not only a challenge for education”, but a challenge “right across domains of public service and even in the private sector”.
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