Coalition year one: Education
By Jonathan Clifton
Education secretary Michael Gove has had a hyperactive first year in office.
He has announced a bewildering array of policies – the most notable of which include the extension of academies and early years services, and the introduction of ‘free schools’, a pupil premium and the English Baccalaureate.There have been reviews of everything from the Early Years Foundation Stage to vocational education. And all this happened alongside the abolition of education quangos and spending cuts in key programmes such as Building Schools for the Future and the educational maintenance allowance.
It can be hard to make sense of so many changes. One way to assess them is whether they will help to narrow the gap in attainment between rich and poor pupils. This was the criteria Gove asked to be judged against when he entered office.
He was right to prioritise the issue, for children from poorer homes perform half as well as their better-off peers at secondary school. When assessing his policies in this light, a picture emerges of many well-intentioned strategies that risk being undone because they are not accompanied by the right accountability structures to drive the necessary changes. They rely too heavily on parental choice, competition and professional freedom to drive improvements.
We can see this problem play out in a number of the government’s flagship policies.
The pupil premium
The government should be proud that after a year in office schools are now being paid extra cash for each disadvantaged pupil that they teach.
But while schools have been given this money, it has not been accompanied by mechanisms to ensure it is spent effectively. There has been no serious discussion of what the money should be spent on. And schools face so many other budget pressures and league-table incentives that there is a danger the money will just be absorbed into wider school spending.
Schools should be more accountable for how they spend the premium, having to agree with individual families how it is spent.
Free schools
The government is right that in certain pockets of the country there are several poor schools and the threat of competition from a new school opening up might drive improvement. But the idea this can produce system wide change is overstretched.
In most areas, it is likely to be the articulate middle classes that make the most of this system – since they are more likely to choose schools based on academic achievement. There is a danger that pupils from poorer backgrounds will be left languishing in the weaker schools.
School improvement and inspection
In their determination to remove central targets, the government have slimmed down Ofsted inspections and other forms of assessment. Instead, they want schools held to account by the people who use them. So they have published vast quantities of school data online, in the hope that parents will audit their local schools and use it to make choices and push for change.
This reliance on transparency and choice is not enough to drive improvement. The reality for most is that switching school is limited – driven by what is nearby and a known quantity. And volumes of online data can be meaningless to many parents and easily taken out of context.
What’s more, without intermediary bodies such as local authorities and the Audit Commission to hold services to account, citizens are left smaller and divided in their ability to challenge for improvement.
English Baccalaureate
Michael Gove was right to be concerned that schools were choosing exams for their pupils on the basis of how it would affect their league table position.
The league tables created some ‘perverse incentives’ for schools to focus on those subjects and exams likely to boost their league table position, rather than on any intrinsic benefit they had for the pupils.
But he has addressed this by introducing another narrow league table measure – which will have a similar effect. Schools will now focus their resources on those pupils likely to take the E-Bacc ‘core academic’ subjects and pass them above grade D. This does nothing to help those students who do not fall into this category – who are disproportionately from poorer homes.
The English Baccalaureate is not so much a case of weak accountability – schools are now jumping to teach those subjects – it is an accountability structure that will not help pupils from poorer backgrounds. A better approach is to use measures of pupil progress or scores that include ‘contextual value added’ data.
Overall, the government has devised a set of well-intentioned strategies to tackle educational disadvantage. But their reliance on choice, competition and data transparency will not be enough to ensure the school system is accountable for delivering them. Until these weaknesses are addressed, there are unlikely to be big improvements on the ground.
Unfortunately, any progress that is made in narrowing the gap between rich and poor pupils under age 16 is likely to be wiped out by changes later in the school system. Government cuts to sixth forms, further education, the education maintenance allowance, Connexions and careers advisory services represent a complete withdrawal of support for school leavers.
Jonathan Clifton is a research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank
The opinions in politics.co.uk’s Speakers Corner are those of the author and are no reflection of the views of the website or its owners.
