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Lord Greenhalgh is a former Minister of State in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and the Home Office. He has previously served as Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime in London and as Leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council.
Schools are the engines of social mobility and these engines are being systematically dismantled by Labour. I led the Conservatives to win Hammersmith and Fulham council from Labour on May 4th 2006 with a strong mandate for positive change. We won over 50 per cent of the popular vote and, with 33 out of 46 councillors, had outright control of the authority for the first time in 38 years. This was the only inner-city gain in 2006 for the Conservatives in the entire UK. The borough had high levels of poverty and inequality and we set ourselves a mission to create ‘a Borough of Opportunity’. This involved offering excellent state education and school choice. In 2006, there were very limited opportunities for Hammersmith and Fulham pupils at the vital secondary school level. By the end of our two terms in office, we had become the most Academy friendly and Free School friendly borough in the country, with the opening of outstanding schools such as the Hammersmith Academy, the West London Free School, and most recently, the Fulham Boy’s School.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that is being pushed through by Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, seeks to meddle with academies by imposing greater central direction on them. Launched in 1992 under Tony Blair to drive up standards in deprived communities, the academies programme was accelerated under the coalition. Now academies are widespread: 80 per cent of secondary schools and 40 per cent of primary schools have academy status. Academies are state schools independent of local councils. Although academies are state-maintained schools that receive the same direct government funding, they have more control over how they operate. They do not have to follow the national curriculum, set their own term times and school hours.
Academies can also hire staff without qualified teacher status (if they complete a one-year course that confirms they have met government standards). The bill will mean they must only employ those with qualified teacher status, will be legally required to follow the national curriculum and will become part of the national framework on teachers’ pay and conditions. However, Phillipson has subsequently clarified that the Bill will create a pay floor and not a ceiling. The Bill proposes to impose conditions of service on academies, which has serious implications for a school’s ability to determine its own management structure and teachers’ contracts. Once the government has taken control of the curriculum, pay, conditions of service and admissions, academies become simply an extension of the command and control central state. It also rescinds “forced academisation” that legally obliged all schools rated “inadequate” by Ofsted school inspections to become academies. Instead the bill reverts to a system where failing schools receive strong advice which can be ignored. Councils will be able to open new schools that are not academies.
One of the benefits of academisation was breaking up the grip of the teacher unions, which have been a pretty malign player That will go under the present Labour government, which, to the delight of the unions, is in the process of forming an alliance with the unions. This is an extract from ASCL’s recent briefing to its members (and the ASCL is the least militant union):
“Yesterday, we formally signed up to an agreement between the government and unions called ‘improving education together’. This partnership is aimed at co-creating the design and implementation of education policy. It’s something that we’ve been saying is needed for many years because it puts the expertise, insights and experience of the profession into the policymaking process. That should work better for schools, colleges and the children and young people we serve than the top-down approach we’ve been accustomed to.
“The overarching aim of the agreement is to achieve the government’s opportunity mission of “breaking the link between young people’s background and future success” and supporting the recruitment, retention and development of the school workforce. The agreement sets out our respective roles, responsibilities and behaviour.”
An incoming Conservative government must reverse all these planned changes to academies. But reversing these changes to academies is not enough. There needs to be a radical schools reform programme.
The London Oratory in Hammersmith & Fulham provides a case study that provides a reform blueprint. John McIntosh was appointed Headmaster of the Oratory in 1977. A report by the Sutton Trust on university admissions in 2006 reported that of the 100 schools with the highest admission rates to Oxford and Cambridge, 80 were independent schools, 18 grammar schools and 2 comprehensive schools. One of the comprehensive schools was 99th; the other – The London Oratory – was 21st, comfortably ahead of many highly successful and very well known public schools. The table for state school entries to the 13 highest performing universities put the school at number 2, the first place going to a grammar school. Unsurprisingly, under his headmastership, the London Oratory School was chosen for the education of the children of the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
Throughout his career, McIntosh has lobbied for greater autonomy for maintained schools. This was the theme of the paper he presented at the invitation of the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, at The State of Our Schools at an Education Seminar at Downing Street in 1986. He went on to chair a group which proposed what were to become grant maintained schools. In 1989 The London Oratory School was in the first tranche of schools to opt for grant maintained status.
The schools reform blueprint should reintroduce grant maintained school status as an alternative option to academisation where ultimately the Secretary of State holds the trump card. Unlike the more diverse voluntary aided/special agreement schools system, the academy model can too easily be taken into central state control as we are witnessing with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
Academisation has unquestionably contributed significantly to the successful raising of standards, but the improvement is relative and not as great as sometimes trumpeted. The reintroduction of Grant Maintained schools will turbo charge the pace of school improvement. Grant Maintained schools were predicated on the idea of earned autonomy. Academies were designed by Andrew Adonis as a remedy for poorly performing and failing schools whose Local Authorities were unable or willing to do anything about them.
For a school to become Grant Maintained (GM) it had first to demonstrate that it was capable of managing its own affairs effectively and efficiently and was achieving high standards—and on a trajectory for raising standards further. They were corporations, not limited companies, each with its own Articles of Government and with a very high level of autonomy. Arguably it was one of the best policies since the 1944 Act. Unfortunately, its success was seriously undermined by Gillian Shephard when she was Secretary of State. She was not a fan and didn’t approve any applications for GM status. By the time of the general election in 1997 there was not the critical mass needed to guarantee the survival of GM schools. Reintroducing GM schools should be central to the school reform plans of a new Conservative government.
But an incoming Conservative government will also need to stop this Labour Government’s attack on the curriculum. While he was headmaster of The London Oratory School, John McIntosh established a specialist music course for boys from seven to 18, which included a liturgical choir which provided a rigorous choral education, equivalent to that otherwise only available in independent cathedral choir schools. However, a curriculum review by this Labour government will tell schools to cut down on museum trips and remove lessons on middle-class activities such as skiing holidays. Lee Elliott Major, a professor of social mobility at Exeter University, is championing more lessons on working-class culture with graffiti workshops, football club tours and grime and rap music back on the menu. His recommendations to the current Education Secretary should be consigned to the dustbin and hopefully ignored by the current Labour government.
This article would not have been possible without the insights from John McIntosh who transformed the lives of so many boys in Hammersmith & Fulham and who advised me on school reform from 2006-2012.
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