When the new educational evangelists bemoan the current condition of the nation’s state schools, they invariably argue that the comprehensive ‘experiment’ has failed. Once, the charge from the right was that comprehensives let down bright, poor children who could only truly succeed in grammar schools. Now the argument has subtly shifted—or crudely widened—and comprehensives are accused of failing all children on virtually all fronts, through low academic standards and poor vocational provision: the central finding of Alison Wolf’s report in spring 2011. This position chimes with the right’s broader refusal to recognise any significant correlation between family background, poverty in general, rising economic inequality and school outcomes. Almost a third of British children live in poverty, and UK children regularly score badly in international league tables in terms of general well-being and happiness; but the idea that low incomes might still form a significant barrier to learning is now dismissed as a moral frailty of the left, or soppy middle-class posturing.23 Such arguments lay behind the Coalition decision in early summer 2011 to abolish the publication of Contextual Value-Added measures in league tables, one way in which government was able to track the relative achievement of schools with high numbers of children from deprived backgrounds, but now apparently deemed patronising to the poor.
Critics from the new educational right regularly imply that the entire edifice of state education is rotten and requires demolition rather than steady improvement. Toby Young uses his blog for the Telegraph and column for the Spectator to launch regular attacks on so-called low standards, political correctness and comprehensive reform—and reformers—while Katherine Birbalsingh, in a clear echo of Tony Blair’s remarks about ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’, frequently lambasts poor discipline, limited intellectual ambition and a ‘culture of excuses’ that ‘keeps poor children poor’. Virtually, all problems in state schools are laid at the door of poor teachers, middle-class liberals and an ineffectual and yet over-controlling state. A highly sympathetic interview with Birbalsingh in the Observer suggested that the ex-teacher articulates a ‘sense of frustration and despair felt by many people across the political spectrum at the variable and frequently poor quality of state education in our large cities and towns … Most of the schools she has worked in have been adjudged “good” or “outstanding” by Ofsted, as are 60 per cent of all schools. She wanted to write the book, she says, to show what “good” or “outstanding” can mean in the inner city.’ The interviewer, Andrew Anthony, summed up Birbalsingh’s views as follows: ‘It’s safe to say that “mediocre and poor” would seem a more appropriate verdict.’24 If parents who sent their children to local schools weren’t in despair before reading the Observer piece, they certainly might be afterwards.
For the new educational evangelists, therefore, only the new schools can act as a genuine engine of social mobility, another sign of how the education debate has subtly shifted. For decades, the issue at the heart of the school wars concerned grammars versus comprehensives. Support for the grammars has in recent years gone largely underground. Now, the academies and free schools are presented as the new face, or necessary modernisation, of the comprehensive ideal. Some of the new school providers feel a strong sense of mission, tinged with an almost religious fervour, to improve the lot of the ‘disadvantaged’. As the director of one chain of academies told me, ‘We are all really fighting for the same thing.’
Yet there is a glaring contradiction at the heart of this position. On the one hand, there is a strong emphasis on the non-selective, inclusive character of free schools and academies. A rigorous education should be available to all, regardless of class or ethnic or religious background. Toby Young continually uses the term comprehensive, albeit illogically: the West London Free School was, originally, designated a ‘comprehensive grammar’ (although as one debating opponent put it, this was rather like talking about a vegetarian butcher). On the other hand, as Young’s position implies, the new school revolutionaries strongly support academic selection. When, during the debate on the Education Bill in May 2011, Nick Gibb, the minister for schools, refused government backing to an amendment put forward by Graham Brady MP, a grammar-school supporter, proposing that private schools that come in under the free schools umbrella should be allowed to continue to academically select, observers of the debate thought Gibb’s rejection of the amendment flat and unconvincing. After all, the Tory party and its allies clearly celebrate, and confirm, academic selection wherever they find it. Grammar schools that have converted to academies have maintained their right to academically select. And Gove told a Friends of Grammar Schools parliamentary reception, in the autumn of 2010, that ‘my foot is hovering over the pedal’ concerning the expansion of selection within the state system. Clearly, the new education evangelists believe in non-selection—but only for all those who have not already been selected.
The new school revolutionaries regularly swing in behind Gove and Cameron in their attacks on the ‘educational establishment’ or ‘the forces of resistance’—echoes, once again, of Tony Blair and his attack on the ‘forces of conservatism’. Before the 2010 election, Cameron told The Times that Tory school plans ‘will mean some big battles with forces of resistance. Some Local Education Authorities might not like it, some of the education establishment won’t like it.’25 (In fact, there have been no Local Education Authorities since 2006, when Blair abolished them.) It is not quite clear who or what was meant by the amorphous term ‘the education establishment’, but it almost certainly embraced university-based teacher training, local authorities and trade unions, all of which have found their roles severely constrained by the new government. Cameron’s war cry was reiterated a few months into government when the Sunday Times claimed he was preparing to take on the teaching unions rather as Margaret Thatcher faced down the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1980s. Coming out of Waiting for Superman, the film about US charter schools, in late November last year, Toby Young tweeted, ‘Just saw Waiting For Superman. Spellbinding indictment of teachers unions. Made by director of Inconvenient Truth. Oh happy days.’
Claims that it is the teachers’ unions who use bullying tactics were a little strained by one revelation in January 2011: it emerged that Lord Hill, the minister responsible for academies, had strongly hinted to schools interested in converting to academy status that the government might turn down their request, if the school chose to abide by national pay agreements for teachers—prompting the unions to consider legal action.26 ‘It’s like tanks rolling over your lawn … while government ministers are polite and charming in private,’ observed Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in spring 2011. ‘There’s never any ceasefire; there’s never a chance to map out the lie of the land—they just carry on, and they are going to be left with many unintended consequences.’
There are some important silences, however. Probably the most significant development in the new schools revolution is the massively expanded role it will give to the private sector, a path partially cleared under New Labour with its city academy programme, encouraging private sponsors and charitable bodies into state education. Several companies already run schools in England, and many more provide important services to them. With the new free schools and academies, the door is wide open to the expansion of the market. Yet one would scarcely know it from public debate on education. Unsurprisingly, little reference is made by any of the new school celebrities or politicians to the growing private control of public education, or to the cost of this to the taxpayer who is, in effect, underwriting the latest round of privatisation of state education.
The government has continued, if with rather less conviction, to promote the idea that free schools represent the authentic voice of the people. The Department for Education website broadcasts a number of videos promoting the educational aims and vision of successful bidders. These short, artful films project a compelling picture of ordinary, decent parents and teachers working hard to create good schools, denied to them by a mix of local state bureaucrats and egalitarian ideologues. What these films do not dwell on is the role of the private sector in much of the free school movement, nor the extent to which many of the new school campaigns are dividing communities. Increasingly, free schools are like the educational equivalent of fireworks: random, concentrated