Gove’s agenda fitted perfectly with this cultural and political backdrop. As a new minister, there he was on the platform at the autumn 2010 Tory Party Conference, nodding along as Katherine Birbalsingh made her impassioned speech declaring, to huge applause, that the system was ‘broken’. During his own Conference speech Gove lamented how this ‘waste of talent, this squandering of human potential … this grotesque failure to give all our fellow citizens an equal chance is a reproach to our conscience.’ Launching the Education Bill in February 2011, he said: ‘I would love to celebrate a greater level of achievement, but I am afraid that this is the dreadful inheritance that our children face.’
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Two key themes shaped Gove’s assault on the nation’s schools. The first touched on the apparent sharp drop in the performance of UK schools in recent years, as judged by the findings of PISA—Programme for International Student Assessment: a series of tests of fifteen-year-olds across the globe, in developed nations, in maths, English and science. The release of this sort of cross-country information had become, in the words of education academic Stephen Gorard, a kind of annual ‘education Olympics’ although, until recently, discussion of PISA results had been largely confined to academic and educational circles, with occasional comments by government ministers, usually regarding rising trends. PISA results for 2006, for example—which showed a slippage from 2000—had received very little coverage.
Intensive press coverage of the 2009 results, boosted by regular negative commentary from Gove, gave the impression of startling educational decline under New Labour. Inevitably, it was not that clear cut. Of the sixty-five nations that took part, England was an above average performer, coming in sixteenth in science, twenty-eighth in maths, and twenty-fifth in literacy. The position was further complicated by a recent increase in the number of participating countries, bringing in some of the ferociously competitive new ‘tiger economies’, and questions concerning the validity of the 2003 UK sample. Some questioned the legitimacy of the entire exercise. According to Stephen Gorard, ‘International comparisons also have a downside. [They] encourage policy-makers to concentrate on improvements relative to other countries rather than absolute changes over time. Above all, they seem to encourage glib remedies.’16
Gove put the PISA 2009 results down to a lack of traditional rigour in the nation’s schools under New Labour, so justifying his argument for further market reforms. But there is an alternative, almost counterintuitive, explanation, that has been put forward in recent years by experts like Professor Peter Mortimore, former director of the Institute of Education. Might the UK’s apparent decline be, at least in part, the result of intensive teaching to the test, so reducing pupil’s broader knowledge and skills, and their ability to make the kind of independent intellectual judgements that help them to do well in evaluations, such as PISA, which actually cannot be prepared for? And what of the growing gap between the highest and lowest achieving UK students? More competition, and increased testing, might only make it worse.17
At the same time, Gove conveniently ignored information which presented a more complex picture of school achievement. In 2007 England finished in the top seven countries in all four Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) tests, taken by 425,000 pupils worldwide, leading the Times Educational Supplement to state that ‘England joins the elite for maths and science.’18 Jon Coles, director-general for Education Standards at the Department for Education and chair of the National Curriculum Review Advisory Committee, told the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education at the Royal Society in March 2011: ‘Over the last ten years, just looking back at the figures, we have an awful lot to look at that suggests progress, and that’s good and positive.’ The number of people coming into maths teaching over the last ten years had doubled, he said, while the number passing the subject at GCSE had grown very significantly, and had doubled at A level. The take-up of further maths A levels had also increased markedly in recent years.19
Another favourite theme of Gove’s was the tiny number of children on free school meals who made it to Oxbridge. He constantly referred to these figures, using different comparators, depending on his opponent of the moment. In the Queen’s Speech debate, he pointed out that more pupils went to Oxbridge from St Paul’s girls’ school in London in one year than from the entire cohort of children on free school meals—a clear dig at acting Labour leader, Harriet Harman, an ex-St Paul’s pupil, who was sitting opposite him. By the second reading of the Education Bill in early 2011, several MPs commented during the debate on the frequency with which Gove referred to this single aspect of the education system, using it to hammer home his broader point that social mobility had stalled under New Labour.
Jenny Chapman, the Labour MP for Darlington, challenged him on his narrow definitions, observing that ‘the secretary of state often speaks about social mobility in a way that might lead people to think that he understood it.’ She pointed out that he only referred to statistics on free school meal take-up and admission to Oxford and Cambridge, whereas in her own constituency of Darlington, she said, ‘five or six years ago there were one or two wards where a young woman of eighteen or nineteen would be more likely to be a mother than to be a student in higher education. I can report with great pride that that is no longer the case. Teenage pregnancies are reducing, and participation in higher education in those wards is improving. That needs to be taken into account when we discuss social mobility in the House.’20
Chapman’s argument was an important one. There were clearly schools in difficulty all around the UK, particularly in areas where poverty, unemployment and social problems disfigured neighbourhoods; family background remains the single most important determinant in a child and a school’s success—or lack of. But there had also been significant improvements in state education, particularly in previously low-attaining schools. GCSE results in 2009 were the highest ever for London. There had also been a marked fall in the number of children leaving primary school without reaching the expected levels in English and maths; by 2010, 60 per cent of pupils had five ‘good’ GCSEs, more than three times the proportion that left school with five O levels in the so-called golden age of the grammars. And as Jenny Chapman had suggested, more higher education places were being taken up by young women and men from low-income families. Even Gove’s ministerial colleagues presented a more nuanced, complex picture of school achievement. Lord Hill, leader of the Coalition in the House of Lords, told a conference in January 2011, just after the publication of the Education Bill, that ‘there is much to admire and build on in the current system: hundreds of outstanding schools, tens of thousands of great teachers, the best generation of heads and leaders ever.’
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The new school revolution was not just happening in government. Gove had powerful allies, keen to promote, both politically and professionally, the new strategy for schools. In the autumn of 2010 it emerged that Gove had granted half a million pounds to one of his former aides, 25-year-old Rachel Wolf, to set up the New Schools Network, an advisory body for parents and teachers who wanted to create their own schools. For Rachel Wolf, ‘parents know what is best for their children, so if they are unhappy with what is on offer, why shouldn’t they be free to set up alternatives?’21 Wolf is, as it happens, the daughter of prominent academic Alison Wolf, who produced a report on vocational education for the government in spring 2011. Another voluble, occasionally vociferous, contributor to the debate was the journalist Toby Young, who led a high-profile campaign to set up the West London Free School in Hammersmith and Fulham, where the Conservative council gave him a warm welcome. Katharine Birbalsingh also became a public champion of the new schools policy. In May 2011 she announced plans to open a free school in Lambeth, apparently with the help of Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College—a PR marriage surely made in heaven. For Seldon, private-school involvement in free schools would ‘not only profoundly enrich the lives of many children from less advantaged backgrounds, it would also give the independent school, its teachers and pupils much, because state schools in significant ways have