In the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen:
What do these things have in common, other than painting a pretty bleak picture?
A lack of vision for schools
No political movement has yet woven a meaningful narrative to thread together these disparate stories. They just keep coming, disembodied and insidious, like the Blob.
On one side, the government depicts itself as some sort of party of permanent revolution. They’re the only ones with the solutions to the problems they caused.
For this to work, each problem has to be viewed in isolation. It’s one school, one industrial strategy, one perverse incentive to exclude, one perverse incentive to narrow the curriculum, one disagreement over statistical validity, and another, and another.
Austerity excuses much of it. The government is making the tough decisions, and there will be teething problems.
Vision? None that it’ll admit to out loud.
On the other side, there are anti-academy and anti-austerity movements. Anti-testing, inclusion and equality campaigners. Even technologists. Each fighting their little corner against the behemoth of transformation.
It is remarkable, really. Four years after Gove, everyone is still trying to make sense of his legacy.
Meanwhile, budgets are slashed, recruitment and retention figures drop and toxic workload continues.
While there is good evidence that the School Cuts campaign was effective in taking votes from the government in 2017, even this is a poisoned chalice for the opposition. All it takes is for the government to promise to throw money at schools and we will have a better-funded Conservative education system.
Promising to better fund schools is an insufficient political vision, but Labour’s proposed National Education Service loses currency the longer it remains an empty signifier.
The crisis of democracy
Where will the political vision come from?
Whether you answer Conservative or Labour, Liberal, Green or UKIP, there is a shared assumption that solutions are to be found in Westminster.
It’s time to ditch this assumption.
The ailments of our education system are the result of a crisis of democracy - not just in education, but across the political landscape. In other words: Gove fought the Blob, and the Blob won.
Why? Because he was married to it. It was never just bureaucrats, academics or unions, but the Westminster bubble itself.
By Westminster bubble, I don’t mean the usual journalistic shortcut for a closed-off echo chamber. That is a problem, but one that is merely indicative of a bigger malaise. I mean bubble here in the sense that we talk about a tech bubble or a property bubble - a speculative market that has been valued way higher than its capacity to deliver.
How did we end up with a target culture that corrupts all it touches, a school inspectorate that few trust, and looking to technology to solve workload issues that technology only ever puts on steroids?
How did we end up with forced academisation and a decimation of local authorities?
How did we end up with such a paucity of thinking about curriculum and a vicious culture war over individual schools’ and teachers’ practices?
The answer? A democratic deficit at least as large and unsustainable as its fiscal equivalent. Yet while the latter has been tackled through austerity and quantitative easing, interest rate manipulation and tax incentives, the former has been allowed to grow unchecked.
All education policy will remain hollow until it accounts for this. We have hit an iceberg, and everyone is busy rearranging deckchairs rather than finding alternative arrangements to stay afloat.
Radical change for education
It was right, 42 years ago, for central government to demand more accountability for its taxpayer funding of education. It remains right today.
But it’s wrong to continue to assume that Westminster is the sole locus of democracy and political accountability.
It’s right for central government to insist on a national curriculum with a dual purpose of complementing industrial strategy and offering students a common core of knowledge.
But it’s wrong for the national curriculum to drive schools to ditch subjects simply to meet that common core.
It’s right that schools have autonomy.
It’s wrong for that to mean that they are autonomous from the communities they serve.
It’s right for political parties to offer competing visions for education.
But it’s wrong for manifestoes to assume that schools and parents have no place for decision making within that.
It’s right to explore how technology might impact on education.
But it’s wrong to assume that this will look the same everywhere.
The problem is the balance between the central government decision-making and that of everyone else. The pretence that an electoral majority is justification enough to run roughshod over communities, schools, teachers, parents and students is becoming more absurd by the day.
The kind of radical change needed seems beyond the abilities and desire of the current government, which warns teachers off being ideological while promoting the blogs of ideological teachers it agrees with.
The National Education Service policy of Labour is, however, the ideal umbrella for the series of reforms that would rebalance democratic accountability in education. It would require a commitment from Angela Rayner, if she was elected education secretary, to give away many of her powers.
Maybe, then, education will be taken seriously.
Maybe, then, education will be accorded its rightful place as a great office of state.
The alternative is to let the Westminster bubble burst of its own accord. A potentially sticky end for many a political career.
Few teachers whose own careers have been swallowed by the Blob will cry over that.
JL Dutaut is a teacher of politics and citizenship and co-editor of Flip the system UK: a teachers’ manifesto, published by Routledge
