John Bald began teaching in 1973, and has extensive experience as an adviser with Essex and Hackney, as a trainer of new and experienced teachers and as an Inspector. He has written two books on the teaching of reading and spelling.
During the 2019 leadership contest, I asked Jeremy Hunt what he was going to do about the scandals that were rocking the Academy system. He replied that I should be concentrating on what was going right, and not on what was going wrong. Kit Malthouse capped this illusory and insulting reply with his Conference comment, that he saw success wherever he looked. Where was he looking?
Malthouse was the last of a series of Michael Gove’s successors (Justine Greening the exception) who knew so little – if anything – about education that it was an embarrassment to listen to them. Almost all were former associates of George Osborne, and their mission was not to improve education, but to freeze or cut budgets while turning every school into an academy. It is hard to pick out the worst of them, but Gavin Williamson’s picture of a whip on his desk, and his refusal even to talk to the Conservative Education Society, rock bottom. Damian Hinds at least spoke to us, though admitting he had little to say. I will not soon forgive him for cutting travelling expenses for pupils attending grammar schools – not because I approve of them in principle, but because I know what some of the other schools in Lincs and Kent are like.
Teacher Tapp and Schools Week recently reported Conservative support among teachers as between three and four per cent. This may be an outlier, but our internal estimates before the last election were in single figures, though in the end, we managed around 13 per cent. Was it really a policy goal to turn 97 per cent of teachers against us, when our intention (as I thought) was to turn back the tide of progressive education that had made their lives hell and failed their pupils?
I joined the Conservative Party in 2005, aghast at Labour’s decapitation of the system, with fake qualifications and “coursework”, dumbed-down examinations, rebadging Education as “Children, Schools and Families”, and shredding school inspection to promote Sir David Bell’s slogan, “Every child matters” – as if any teacher thought that a child did not matter. Labour meant well, but its good intentions were wrecked by an ill-considered alliance with progressive education that ensured that what Lord Blunkett was trying to do could not work. If they win, we can expect more of the same, with Woke added to the mix.
Rishi Sunak, whom I met during his campaign, has steadied the ship. We have a good, practically-minded team of ministers at the DfE, and Ian Bauckham, Chair of Ofqual, with whom I’ve served on several working groups, has earned his K in the New Year Honours. Last year’s reintroduction of exams rather than school-based assessment was carried through successfully, and it looks as if the unfair grading of academic subjects, such as physics and German, has begun to be reversed.
Saving the ship will be much more difficult. To begin with, the Blob – or, rather Octopus, as it has tentacles and suckers – has not been defeated. It is in retreat, having lost control of government committees and parts of its teacher training empire, but its members play a long game, based on their view that an education system based on individual achievement and academic attainment is elitist, and a way for the educated to exploit those who are not. A lecturer at the London Institute of Education has even criticised additional reading teaching as discriminatory against those who are receiving it, rather than providing them with essential skills.
Many of its battles are fought – and won – in private, through junior academic appointments that lead to senior positions, just as Georgian naval captains were promoted to admiral by seniority rather than merit. These progressives are ready to resume their dominant position, and there is every indication that they will defeat Lord Blunkett’s sensible approach, just as they did when he was Secretary of State under Blair, and as they saw off James Callaghan’s shaft of sense in his famous 1976 speech at Ruskin College.
So what is to be done? The first thing is to correct the error of replacing a lot of small quangos with one big one. The Education Endowment Foundation is headed by a person who describes grouping children according to their learning needs and abilities as “symbolically violent”. It does nothing the existing National Foundation for Educational Research could not do better, and should be scrapped. I made this point to the Prime Minister, and believe he took it on board.
Next, the new – and reappointed – Ministers at the DfE should be allowed to get on with their jobs and ditch the ideology. I’ve heard a rumour that forced academisation is to be quietly dropped, and hope it is true. Forcing a school like Henrietta Barnett, currently the highest-attaining grammar school in the country, into an academy chain is folly. One consequence, should this happen, will be the return of its brilliant headteacher, Clare Wagner, to the private sector.
Fortunately, we still have Michaela, the single greatest achievement of the last 12 years, whose results at 16 across all subjects were two and a quarter grades higher than expected from its pupils’ starting points. The Progress 8 yardstick at 16 is questionable. It encourages schools to pick easy subjects and drop languages (Michaela doesn’t), and has a ceiling effect that is unfair on schools whose intakes have high scores. Nevertheless, Michaela’s score of +2.27 is almost certainly the highest ever recorded and is now followed through at A level.
The key to this success is not simply Katharine Birbalsingh’s insistence on good behaviour, but the school’s matching of its teaching to the wide range of learning needs among its pupils. No school using mixed ability teaching has come close to such results, and none will, as the practice is directly contrary to the evidence of mental development revealed by brain research. Far from being “symbolically violent” beginning to teach pupils from where they are is the starting point for opportunity.
This point is as important for Sunak’s plans for reform at 18 as for our opponents. Sunak is right to say that almost all jobs are underpinned by statistics, which are based on the mathematics of the real world. Statistics are applied arithmetic, and, since the 60s, progressive mathematics teachers have bent every effort to replace arithmetic with algebra as the basis of learning maths.
I’ve seen the results of this in FE, where too many students have almost no calculation skills and knowledge of tables, due to the error of teaching them to count in multiples instead, which leaves them with no idea of where they are in the table. We urgently need research into the best ways of teaching tables, and organisations like the EEF and London Institute of Education will not provide it. Pragmatism needs to extend to other areas, especially literacy, where there is an important precedent in the work of the late Mina P Shaughnessy at City College, New York. My take on this, developed with FE students at Colchester Institute, is here.
The is no hiding the fact that we are in a very deep hole. If we carry on as we are, our opponents know that they just need to sit on their hands in order to win. From now on, each action by government needs to be clear, positive and beneficial. It may be too late to retrieve the situation, but any other path will lead us to a defeat on the scale of 1945, or even 1906.