English Schools: Your Chance To Vote For No Change by Richard Heller pblished in the Yorkshire Post 6 May 2009
The English school system is in deep trouble and voters from all parts of the political spectrum want to see radical changes of policy and direction. Unfortunately, none are on offer from any of the three major parties.
For a start, many voters would like to restore grammar schools. They believe that grammar schools gave all primary schoolchildren, including the disadvantaged, a motive to aspire and learn and a fair opportunity, through an open, competitive examination, to succeed. None of the major parties will restore grammar schools. Conversely, many other voters want to abolish the remaining grammar schools, because they think that they condemn rejected children to an inferior education. That too is not on offer from the major parties.
Many voters like the idea of education vouchers because they think it would give real power to parents to choose schools. None of the major parties are offering education vouchers.
Many voters believe that school ratings depend far too much on exam results and test scores, and that this encourages boring, mechanical teaching, the disappearance of essential but untested subjects and activities, the neglect of non-academic children and the distortion of educational values. But all the major parties remain committed to League tables based on exams and tests.
Many voters are uneasy about the growing influence of private business and market forces on English schools. They believe that there are many more underperforming businesses than underperforming schools. They suggest that in the present economic crisis,
Many voters think that faith schools are socially divisive and that it is wrong in principle to let any minority group control admission to a publicly-funded education on the basis of its beliefs. All the major parties support faith schools and will continue to allow them to use tests of religious observance for staff and pupils.
Many voters dislike academies. They believe that their governance gives too much power to sponsors and allows too many schools to become playthings of businessmen or faith groups. They believe that academies find it too easy to reject or exclude poor or difficult children, and that like grammar schools they condemn rejected children to an inferior education. All the major parties support academies. Indeed, they all support the proliferation of schools – such as trust schools, foundation schools, or specialist schools – which are given some kind of privileged status, freedoms or funding. Many voters reject this idea. They think that it ensures that schools cannot compete fairly with each other. They also believe that it creates a complex schools system, with bewildering and often secret selection processes, which rewards parents with the money, time and energy required to navigate it and penalizes those without. These voters will therefore be disappointed by all the major parties.
Believe it or not, but many voters still believe that schools should stay under local authority control. They argue that with all their faults, local authorities are democratic institutions who can be voted out if they make a mess of things – unlike academy sponsors and all the other unelected people now running English schools. All the major parties are committed to removing more schools from local authority control.
Even more amazingly, many voters reject the idea of parent power over schools. They believe that power and choice for all parents is an unfulfillable promise which sets up millions of parents and children for disappointment, grievance and even trauma when their choices are denied. In their view, parents are not always the right judges of their children’s education – and even if they were, the whole community, not just parents, has an interest in the school system and should be represented in decisions about it. But all the major parties are committed to parent power.
If you hold any of the views I have just described you are not weird and certainly not alone. But you will not be able to vote for a candidate from any of the major parties, unless you can find a maverick who defies the party line.
The most ambitious new proposal from any party is a pupil premium – a bribe for schools to take poor pupils. This will induce schools to pursue Little Lord Fauntleroys – bright, well-motivated children living in temporary genteel poverty. Otherwise, the three major parties between them have offered nothing which will change the direction of English education, or to reform a school system which now delivers pockets of privilege for the pushy and second-class standards for everyone else. Their collective efforts are a failure of imagination and a failure of democracy.