Neil O’Brien is the Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby & Wigston and the Shadow Minister for Education
In 1987 Mrs Thatcher announced that she was going to bring the same reforms to our schools that she had brought to our economy. At party conference she announced:
“We will allow popular schools to take in as many children as space will permit. And this will stop local authorities from putting artificially low limits on entry to good schools.
“And second, we will give parents and governors the right to take their children’s school out of the hands of the local authority and into the hands of their own governing body. This will create a new kind of school funded by the State, alongside the present State schools and the independent private schools.”
As Labour peer Lord Adonis later wrote, the policy was an:
“unalloyed and almost immediate success… parental choice came to matter as never before.”
Better still, Mrs T set in train a series of reforms which continued under New Labour, and the Coalition. And those reforms worked. Under the last government, England rose up the international education league tables. In contrast, left-wing ideology blocked the same reforms from being made in Scotland and Wales, and they fell down the league tables.
In Scotland teachers are on strike over violence and lack of discipline in schools, while amazingly even deprived pupils in England are now doing better than the average child in Wales, such is the achievement gap that has opened up.
And yet, despite the fact that the reforms worked, the cross-party consensus is being demolished by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson.
England ‘s schools have been improved by the magic formula of freedom plus accountability.
On the one hand, we swapped micromanagement from Whitehall, for the empowerment of successful school leaders, and we let good schools grow. On the other hand, we moved rapidly to put failing schools under new management.
Phillipson is attacking both parts of the magic formula.
She is stripping academy schools of freedoms over recruitment, curriculum, and imposing insane micromanagement. In future academy headteachers will need to ask her for permission to put up a bike shed, I kid you not. She also tried to take away freedoms over pay. On that we forced a u-turn, but we are still pressing for government to allow freedom over pay for support staff (who are over half of the schools workforce) as well as teachers.
Phillipson is also eroding accountability. At the moment, schools judged failing by Ofsted are automatically put under new management. This rule was put in place because it proved the most effective way of turning round failing schools, and it was made automatic because back when it was optional left wing campaign groups dragged schools for the courts for years.
Phillipson is ending this accountability, which has prompted criticism from the former schools commissioner, the Children’s Commissioner and a host of top school leaders. Even Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh has warned: “the DFE will find itself mired in the high court in judicial review. When we tried to transfer our first failing school to a Harris academy we spent two years in court, and children… don’t have that time to waste.”
At the same time Phillipson is taking an axe to the original school reforms pioneered by Mrs Thatcher and Kenneth Baker. That original principle, that good schools should be able to expand, and parental choice should determine which schools grow, is for the chop. Instead, local authorities will get powers that will enable them to “share out” pupils from one school to prop up another which may be struggling.
Local Authorities will be able to go to the schools adjudicator, not just to block the expansion of good schools, but even to challenge schools that just want to keep their admission numbers unchanged. The adjudicator will be able to set a school’s admission number to zero, and effectively close a school or stop a new one from opening.
The government’s own impact assessment says “it could also limit the ability of popular schools to grow,” and “negatively impact on parental preference”.
Our concerns about this reversal of the Thatcher/Baker reforms were only compounded when Jeremy Corbyn stood up in the Commons to warmly welcome this new power.
A local authority will be able to send any school to the adjudicator, not just its own, and I suspect that left wing councils that have never liked school freedoms will be particularly inclined to use this new power to push down numbers in academies – and quite possibly to pursue ideological grudges against faith schools and grammar schools too.
In London and other urban areas there plenty of authorities that are forecasting sharply declining pupil numbers, with one in ten, or even one in eight primary pupils disappearing in the next four years. In this context moves to share out pupils to prop up failing schools will be firmly on the cards. Yet there isn’t anything in the Bill to even make the adjudicator protect excellent and popular schools in this process, and Labour rejected our amendments to do this.
Again and again during debates over the Schools Bill we have heard from successful school leaders asking – why are the government doing this? What problem are they trying to solve by taking away our freedoms?
The bottom line is that the government has prioritised currying favour with the anti-reform left over protecting the reforms we can see worked. It’s not surprise when Starmer ran for leader on an anti-academies platform.
Phillipson and Starmer are bringing the same Labour agenda to England that already failed in Wales. The have put buttering up the unions ahead of what works for pupils and parents.
As a great lady once said: “weak, weak, weak.”