John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.
Last week, Katharine Birbalsingh, headmistress of Michaela, tore into education secretary Bridget Phillipson and her Education and Welfare Bill for peddling Marxist ideology and attacking the freedoms that had allowed her and her colleagues to succeed. She used three platforms – Michael Gove’s Spectator, X – where she has almost 200,000 followers – and Vanessa Feltz’ Saturday show on LBC. “Conservatives,” she said, “had made mistakes, but they got education right.”
The Times had earlier noted that Professor Becky Francis, Phillipson’s choice to lead the review of the school curriculum, had criticised Labour’s “obsession” with academic success. This was in the first sentence of her book, co-authored with Professor Louise Archer, “Understanding Minority Ethnic Achievement,” (2007), the rest of which makes interesting reading. The academic success of Chinese pupils had not, they say, protected them from racism.
Clearly not. But they then argue that “the powers and abilities… of most parents are vastly overestimated”. In other words, parents, unlike professors of sociology, cannot be trusted to know what is best for their children. This is, if anything, even worse than orthodox Marxism – it is the Trotskyite assumption of a self-designated elite that it knows best and is entitled to impose it. The DFE’s propaganda photograph of Phillipson and Francis smiling on a sofa shows just how right Birbalsingh is in this part of her critique.
But not wholly right. As Kemi Badenoch has said, we need to tell the truth even when it hurts, and Conservatives made serious mistakes in education too, not least of which was entrusting an organisation headed by Professor Francis with hundreds of millions of pounds of public money.
Michaela’s unprecedented achievement of enabling all of its pupils to achieve two and a half grades above expectation across all of their subjects is achieved by a combination of strictness and kindness. Too many of its imitators have too much of the first and little or none of the second, which leaves pupils anxious and unhappy. If you go to Michaela – and please do – you will see smiling faces and meet intelligent conversation over lunch. It is a happy place, because children know that they are achieving, and willingly buy into the system. The person who really has got education right is Katharine Birbalsingh, who, unlike one Secretary of State, does not have a whip on her desk.
Equally important are mistakes over reading and special needs and disabilities (SEND). International comparison scores have indeed gone up, after consistent decline under Labour and devolved governments, but allowing Lib Dems a free hand on SEND under the coalition has proved disastrous for local councils as well as pupils. As well as the explosion of cases of anxiety, school refusal and mental breakdown, the approach to phonics, which attempts to grind the alphabetic system into pupils, rather than explaining how it works, leaves a significant minority in a state of complete confusion.
Every approved reading scheme that I’ve seen begins, sensibly, by presenting the links between sounds and letters, and blending these to read simple words. There is, however, a second adjustment that children need to make to their thinking when they meet words that cannot be read without understanding combinations of letters that do not represent individual sounds, and letters which can represent more than one sound – for example, no and to. The leading French neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene offers substantial evidence for his idea that learning is a process of adjusting thinking to take account of variations in what we already know, and for many of us this adjustment needs to be carefully taught. Brain science and how children learn are, however, matters of no interest to professors of sociology – or indeed to most university departments of education, whose monopoly of training teachers the Government intends to restore.
The last Labour Government started with good and grand intentions and ended with dumbed down qualifications, poor and at times violent behaviour, a tyrannical inspection system, and the abolition of the education department. Birbalsingh, and those who understand her achievement, have seen it all before. We are about to see it again.