The Priestly Lecture 2019: Sir Tim Brighouse

Sir Tim Brighouse looks back at the English schooling system: what has changed, what remained the same but above all what needs urgent attention now if we are to ensure that our present generation of children and young people are to be equipped with the life skills, knowledge, dispositions and values to make tomorrow better than today and to live fulfilled lives themselves.

Within a wide ranging exploration of the evolution of English state education he offers us a baker's dozen of suggestions to consider ways to reverse the centralisation of power as well as how the cross-party agreement about the desirability of ‘equality of opportunity’, ‘equity’ and ‘social mobility’ might best be realised

The English Schooling System – yesterday, today but especially tomorrow: a Baker’s dozen of essential changes towards a fairer deal for everyone.

The Priestley Lecture: Birmingham University (June 2019)

Introduction

It is an honour to be asked to give this lecture to commemorate one of the two famous Priestleys whose names are associated with this city. It is Raymond Priestley whom we remember today. His predecessor Priestley – Joseph, no relation – was the famous dissenter who provoked the Birmingham Riots of 1791. But the two had much in common, including a love of science and research. Raymond, who for decade and a half was Vice Chancellor of this University at a period crucial to its rise to be among a handful of the best universities in the world, contributed to Birmingham life in a less controversial way than Joseph – so far as I know he didn’t provoke a riot even among the academics. But what a man – a survivor of expeditions both of Shackleton and Scott and one of the very few who have been a successful Vice Chancellor of separate universities in two countries, not to mention serving in France throughout the nightmare of the first world war. Both were members of the Lunar Society which mercifully survived the fury of the 1791 rioters.

I am sure Raymond would be interested in my title today and would have critical comments to make about what follows – just as I hope you have too.

There are a couple of things I can claim to have in common with Raymond. Like him I love Birmingham and like him I am persuaded of the crucial value of outdoor pursuits and residential experiences in education, as well as the importance of teacher education.

I have chosen my topic because next year is the 150th anniversary of Forster’s Education Act and it is probably timely to look back at the English schooling system: what has changed, what remained the same but above all what needs urgent attention now if we are to ensure that our present generation of children and young people are to be equipped with the life skills, knowledge, dispositions and values to make tomorrow better than today and to live fulfilled lives themselves. In 1970 there was a great celebration of Forster’s Act when one of our greatest educators Alec Clegg, the Chief Education Officer of the West Riding – then the largest schooling system in Europe - gave a memorable keynote speech¹. I suggest that it will be timely a year hence if your Education Faculty takes the national lead to host a national conference marking the 150th anniversary and setting out a new chapter of ‘Hope and Ambition’ which our schooling system so desperately needs. If Birmingham does take the lead in such celebrations a year hence, I hope what follows might be seen as one of the background papers for participants.

(I should explain that I have chosen England, rather than Britain, or the UK as my focus since the schooling systems in the four countries have diverged and continue to diverge one from another since devolution to Stormont, Holyrood and Cardiff in 1997/8 so that talk of a common system with the same aims and values is no longer possible)

With Forster’s Act of 1870 in mind therefore, let’s look in a fairly general way at how we have got from there to here. First our schooling system yesterday. The beginning of our story is not that inspiring.

English governments have shown an ambivalent attitude to state funded education and came to it rather reluctantly and relatively recently. As long ago as 1803 the Bishop of London declared that ‘Men of considerable ability say that it is safest for both the Government and the religion of the country to let the lower classes remain in that state of ignorance in which nature has originally placed them’.² Of course he put himself outside such company by adding ‘It is not proposed that the children of the poor be educated in an expensive manner, or even taught to write or cypher…There is a risk of elevating by indiscriminate education, the minds of those doomed to the drudgery of daily labour above their condition and thereby render them discontented with their lot’. It was the Church which preceded the state in providing education for the poor, while the rich and the upper classes relied on governesses and private tutors or elbowed their way into the ‘public’ independent schools which were originally intended for the poor but by then and ever since have been the almost totally exclusive preserve of the children of the rich determined to sustain that privilege for their own offspring. I shall return to the obstacles to social mobility, equity and equality presented by the major (and some minor) ‘public’ schools which have become a conveyor belt of privilege and I realise that in doing so I shall be on very thin ice here in King Edward country. But our state origins meant that the ruling classes regarded state education as something which would not concern them directly. It can be argued that the same views prevail today and that any review of Forster’s Act in a year’s time to be worthwhile should, inter alia, face up to the issue of the continued existence of the major ‘public’(private) schools. I shall provide some proposals towards the end of this paper which would make their existence less damaging to the life chances of those children and young people who do not attend them.

The first forays into education legislatively came under the Factory Acts in the 1830s and the limitation of child labour until the remit to the Duke of Newcastle’s Commission on elementary schooling in 1858 focused on ‘what measures, if any, are required for the extension of sound and cheap elementary instruction to all classes of the poor’.

The first explicitly educational legislation (Forster’s in 1870) was made reality through Robert Lowe, the architect of the notorious Revised Code, who asserted that the ‘education of the lower classes should be just sufficient to give them that sense of awe of higher education which the leaders of the nation demand’.3

It’s important to remember that these views, intertwined as they were with the philosophies of both main political parties of the Victorian era, embodied the belief that it was for the individual to survive through their own best efforts and that the state should intervene only as the provider of last resort. It coloured the approach which the state and political parties took to the provision of state education until recent times and still lingers within the unspoken assumptions of many, despite the present unprecedented, and often unremarked, cross-party agreement that our schooling system should be based on ‘equal opportunity’ and ‘equity’ which will lead to ‘social mobility’. This agreement about the purposes of the educational system governs many of the think tanks – EPI, IPPR, IFS and the Social Market Foundation for example, - established to inform the policies of the main political parties. The implications for how we run our schools are considerable. But first a little more history.

If the Victorians - and those that followed them in the early years of the 20th century - saw the state as ‘provider of last resort’ to be involved only when all else failed, the Butler Act of 1944 and the Beveridge-inspired embrace of the Welfare State changed that view completely by establishing the state as the main provider of public services. Being a public servant was an unselfish and honourable occupation devoted to the public good whether in housing, health, education, social services, the uniformed services or public utilities such as water, electricity, gas, railways, coal and steel – in short much of the available employment field. So far as education is concerned, it ushered in an age of Trust and Optimism where three partners – central government (through Ministers and civil servants), local government (through councillors and education officers) and schools (through headteachers and teachers) each played their part in building and expanding the reach and ambition of a schooling system to create a better society – what Attlee described as a ‘New Jerusalem’4. It is that better society to which Raymond Priestley through his work at this University contributed so significantly. In Higher Education it found expression in the new universities of the 1960s and the expansion of the sector through Colleges of Advanced Technology and Polytechnics which with Colleges of Further Education provided ladders of opportunity for the expanded horizons of young people leaving the schooling system.

After the doubts and disillusions of the late 1960s and 1970s however, (involving the student riots of 1968 and the oil crisis as well as concerns about the effectiveness of schools evidenced by the very public failures in William Tyndale Primary School and Risinghill Secondary School in the Inner London Education Authority, together with the so-called Black Papers) James Callaghan’s Ruskin speech preceded a second post-war educational age very different from the first. It coincided with and was coloured by what some call the ‘neo-liberal’ reforms of the Thatcher years. A process began and gathered pace whereby services, accepted as part of the public realm, were either privatised or outsourced to private providers. Council houses built for social need were sold off and local government precluded from further house-building. Utilities previously nationalised were privatised. State-provided schools were encouraged, first to become Grant Maintained (GM) and then, after a gap reasserting schools as part of the local community in the early years of New Labour, to become ‘academies’ – in effect independent schools funded by the state but ‘nationalised’ and answerable, by regulation, to central rather than local government. During this time right up to the present, all manner of jobs – architects, engineers, lawyers, accountants, carers, psychologists, administrators, ICT technicians – formerly employed as public servants have been outsourced to the private-for-profit sector where inevitably motivations are different. If the high point of public service employment was the 1950s and 60s, it is much diminished now.

As with other public services, schooling also was affected by neo-liberal ideas. Successive legislation encouraged a market in schooling: choice (for parents), autonomy (of schools), diversity (of types of school) and accountabilty became the driving themes asserted in White Papers preceding legislation which introduced a plethora of measures, such as a single National Curriculum, National tests at ages 7,11 and 14 with GCSE at 16 so that results could be published and compared in league tables. OfSTED, which was established in 1992, first published school inspection reports and then graded the outcomes at first in seven grades before settling for four. While initially Ofsted considered broader aspects of school life, they soon focused more narrowly on pupil outcomes. Poor exam or test results in practice correlated to schools’ placement in the Ofsted ratings of ‘Outstanding’, ‘Good’, ‘Requires Improvement’, and ‘Inadequate’. By these measures, governments in this second post-war period, introduced a quasi-market which required continual attention as its operation inevitably produced both failures and successes. Tinkering and interfering has become a habit enabled by increasing the powers of the secretary of state5 whose consequent managerialism interferes in many aspects of school life – even extending not just to what is taught but how it is taught.6 This second age - the prevailing background to our present consideration of what’s needed to enable schools to make ‘equal opportunity’ and ‘equity’ and ‘social mobility’ now the uncontested goal of our schooling system – can be characterised as one of Markets and Managerialism reflecting both the underlying competitive market within which schools operate and the constant tinkering as governments wrestle with the failures of markets. Markets and managerialism is an inadequate description, however, since another paradoxical feature is a centralisation which threatens the subsidiarity on which a healthy democracy depends. After all a sense of powerlessness is the enemy of democracy and in a population of 47 million, citizens in England – as opposed to Wales Scotland and in normal circumstances Northern Ireland where there is much smaller population and strong devolved and local government – are at risk of feeling dangerously alienated from government. Our present impasse over Brexit testifies to this condition. Our schooling system is a good illustration of the weaknesses induced by over-centralisation.

It was Sir Keith Joseph, ironically the politician credited with being the instigator of neo-liberal ideas supporting a social market economy as well as believing that the ‘market itself will find the solution’, who introduced the idea that central government should directly fund what he deemed desirable changes in schools. He announced his intention to do so at the Council of Local Education Authorities (CLEA) Conference in 1982 where, to a surprised audience7, he announced his intention to spend up to 0.5% of the schools’ budget on projects to enable schools and their local authorities to address issues which required attention as a result of changes in society. Joseph’s first two priorities in this form of specific as opposed to general grant funded in 1983, were the Low Attainers Project (LAP) and the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI), managed through, controversially, not the DFE but the Manpower Service Commission (MSC) as part of the Department of Business while simultaneously introducing the first computers into schools.

The second need for intervention in a competitive market arises when, as I have already noted, inevitably some schools fail as others are seen to succeed. The consequent need to make arrangements for pupils in such ‘failing’ schools became obvious. This task was initially left to local authorities but the emergence of academies has increasingly involved central government, through a set of Regional Commissioners, having a role in clearing up the mess involved in failing individual academies or Multi Academy Trusts (MATs): a prescriptive hands-on management occurs in these cases. It could be argued that management does not necessarily imply managerialism. Over the years however the product of so much legislation - there were just two Education Acts of Parliament between 1944 and 1980 and there have been almost 50 since – has been to centralise power at the expense of local government and, in some important respects, the schools. Successive Secretaries of State in consequence, empowered by so many Education Acts, have not been able to resist meddling in what schools do. They were aided in doing so by Joseph’s trail-blazing initiatives with LAP and TVEI.

It is tempting for a Secretary of State to want to make a mark not just for reasons of legacy but sometimes as a means of political advancement and occasionally as a personal whim. Almost all incumbents of the post since the Education Act of 1988 have been guilty of unnecessary and unwarranted interference in matters formerly left to local decision whether by the schools themselves or local authorities.

Local Authorities since the 1988 Education Act, have been steadily stripped of educational powers and responsibilities. First the Colleges of Further Education were removed from their influence along with the Colleges of Advanced Technologies, Polytechnics and Colleges of Education. Successive iterations of the rules of local financial management of schools, as a means of distributing money for schools’ budgets, then stripped LEAs of the capacity to have their own priorities for education. Since 2010 and the imposition of austerity measures and the simultaneous encouragement of schools to seek academy status, local democratic influence has diminished further as shrinking local authorities have been stripped of powers and cash by cuts in government grant and centrally imposed limits on their capacity to increase revenue via household and business rates. In schools the perverse outcome is that those which have acted on central government’s encouragement to become Academies or Free Schools are no longer dependent on (and – it was alleged - controlled by) local authorities but have ended up being more dependent on (and controlled by) a distant but nevertheless interfering national government in the form of the DFE and the Education Funding and Skills Agency (EFSA) through whom they have a contract directly with the Secretary of State. In doing so, this group of Academies – about a third of state-maintained schools in 2018 – are obliged to become in effect a hybrid of private limited company and charitable body.

It is difficult to overstate the huge change in the relative importance of the main players beyond the school. Local Authorities – the word ‘education’ was symbolically removed through legislation in 2006 – have only residual powers left. The Secretary of State and his/her appointed officers in the civil service in the DFE and its agencies, however, have enormous power. Meanwhile the schools themselves have exchanged power over the curriculum which in the first post-war age was left almost entirely to them, for almost complete power over how they spend ever diminishing (in real terms) budgets.

To preserve our democracy, we need to suggest ways to reverse this centralisation of power as well as consider how the cross-party agreement about the desirability of ‘equality of opportunity’, ‘equity’ and ‘social mobility’ might best be realised. I set out a Baker’s Dozen suggestions in what follows and ask that they be judged on those three criteria and the overarching one of trying to promote a more vibrant democracy and a reduction of centralisation. If they are enacted I would argue that they would mark the inception of a new age – one of ‘Hope and Ambition’.

Two other contextual points are worth making; one obvious, the other overlooked. Both affect our schools, especially secondary schools and how they may in consequence meet future needs. First the obvious: changes in societies continue to accelerate. Schools need now to prepare pupils/students for a world of accelerating change where precise predictions are foolhardy but where solving multi-disciplinary problems, working in teams and adapting their lives to and helping shape a world increasingly influenced by the growing impact of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, robotics, social technologies, the internet, climate change and political turbulence are essential.

The second is about adolescence and its complications when young people are no longer children and not yet sure about the adults they are to become. A hundred years ago adolescence was scarcely noticeable as a school leaving age of 12 or 13 was followed by employment for 90% of the peer group. Now maturation occurs earlier and earlier and the school leaving age has been successively raised to 14,15,16 until the earliest date for leaving school of further education college is 18. Higher Education participation has reached 45% of an age group so that adulthood for many is not reached until the early 20s. We have not thought seriously enough about the combination of activities and experiences most suitable for navigating adolescence – witness the huge pressures on the mental health of teens and early twenties and the well-publicised prevalence of crime and drugs in urban areas where cuts to Youth Work budgets have made things worse especially for young people most at risk.

Governance structures; national

At present governance structures exist at three levels; national, middle tier and school.

Nationally in order to limit the power of the Secretary of State we need to establish a statutory Standing National Educational Advisory Council (SNEAC) to advise variously on the national aims and values underpinning our public schools (see above) and on national decisions affecting curriculum exams and accountability as well as school admissions. It should be representative of teachers and support staff unions, HMI, Chartered College of Teachers, Universities, CBI and Chambers of Commerce, TUC, the Local Government Association (LGA) and bodies representing Churches and Faiths and its chair appointed by the Select Committee for five-year terms. Select Committee and HMCI’s reports would be considered by it and advice given to the Secretary of State annually. It should advise initially, on the new governance arrangements at the regional, local and school levels and subsequently on each of the other matters prior to decision making.

Governance structures; the middle tier - regional and local

In the relatively settled consensus years following the 1944 Education Act, I have already described the key role of the middle tier exercised by the LEA. Its relationship with individual schools came to be represented as one of undue ‘control’ on its part and ‘dependence’ on the other. This however masks subtle regional variations. Some LEAS – mainly counties - ensured each school had individual governing bodies mostly consisting of local ‘worthies’ and inevitably with limited powers although always playing a strong – sometimes too strong – role in appointing headteachers and other staff. Other LEAS – mainly urban – made a token effort in discharging their obligations to have individual governing bodies by including within the remit of their Schools’ Sub-Committees the ‘school governing body’ role and received reports, one after the other, from individual primary headteachers in long sessions on a termly basis.8 An Act of 1986 following the Taylor report ensured that every school had its own governing body with prescribed rules for composition to ensure fair representation of various stakeholders such as the local community, parents, staff and the LEA. One of the details of the 1986 Act arguably had a large and positive impact on school improvement – a topic which was receiving attention for the first time in some LEAs. There was a nationally prescribed method of appointing headteachers the detail of which – three governors and an equal number of LEA councillors – went some way to ensure that the best person was appointed to headship. Such an arrangement, which minimised the chances of either the LEA or the school governing body having undue and perhaps improper influence, was abandoned after the reforms of 1988 which pushed the pendulum in favour of the school making the appointments without reference to the wider view which had been provided by the LEA. With the emergence of Academies, a more complex position of local governance has arisen. On the one hand in self-standing academies, there is the danger that headteacher appointments are made without a wider perspective. On the other, in Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) with whom the DFE has a direct contract and to whom the budgets of all the academies with the MAT are disbursed, there is the danger that school autonomy is negated and MATs behave in a way in which the worst LEAs behaved in the first period. In short too much power is in Whitehall (tempting it to ever more managerialism) and some schools9 are not answerable to a local democratic voice, while the middle tier is a confusing muddle of overmighty, prescriptive Multi-Academy Trusts and impotent Local Authorities together with 8 Regional School Commissioners, agents of the Secretary of State.

There is a strong case for establishing two democratically accountable bodies between the national and the school. The first, using the existing network of local authorities(Unitary and County Councils) would be responsible for school admissions and the planning and building of new schools; this level would also ensure some governors on each school were nominated by that body as well as retaining responsibility exercised by themselves with representatives of the local schools for funding at present determined by the Schools Forum. The second would be regional where embracing the traditions of the Regional Development Agencies and the Local Enterprise Partnerships so as to include university and employer interests, there would be a body created along the lines of the old Police Authorities with local council representatives and based on the areas of the existing regional Schools Commissioners (excepting London where the geographical boundaries should be adjusted to honour the integrity of Greater London). This council would be responsible for SEND provision and school improvement using finance through a regional precept on the rates. Performance scrutiny offering local accountability would be exercised at both levels according to the issue to be scrutinised.

Governance; school level

I have already rehearsed some of the excesses of some of the MATs in exercising unnecessary managerialism and centralisation of decision-making. There is a strong case at a local level for saying that all schools should have governing bodies with clear budgets and responsibilities. There is no shortage of school governance models tried over the years since 1944: in my experience that of the Voluntary Aided (VA) School has the most to commend it. The Aided school combined representation from sponsor – in the case of the VA school usually the Faith – and the local authority, the community, parents and staff. Existing school governors’ responsibilities, although considerable, seem sensibly arranged and understood although there is something to be said for adjusting appointment arrangements when it comes to appointing a headteacher to ensure there is no undue bias towards internal appointment. This could be achieved by making it a joint responsibility of the local middle tier but the exact detail will require the advice of the SNEAC before any legislative change. SNEAC should also advise on whether MAT chains are ‘value for money’ and if they are, how they should be locally democratically accountable.

School Admissions

A pupil’s admission to a school is influenced by parental preference (often misleadingly called ‘choice’), by the various policies adopted by different schools -some of which are mutually incompatible leading to some parents having less choice/preference than others and by the body -sometimes the local authority, sometimes the Academy itself- administering the admissions system. Governing all their efforts in an attempt to provide ‘equity’ through a School Admission Code of Practice and an appeal system involving a Schools Adjudicator, The Code of Practice stipulates that all admission policies must give priority to children who are looked-after and those with SEND. Other priorities are at the discretion and choice of the school within certain guidelines all intended to serve the interests of ‘equity’. It is a complex and confusing system and can and does lead to unfair outcomes disadvantaging children and parents living in the poorest communities.10 Perhaps the worst failure is the almost universal prioritising of ‘distance’ as the third (after SEND and Looked after Children) tie-breaker. This inadvertently has applied a catalyst to inequity since schools – especially secondary schools – in areas of social housing have progressively closed as they have ‘failed’ Ofsted inspections and/or the verdict in the court of public opinion as a result of their position in the league tables of tests and exams. This has meant that parents in the better-off communities are surrounded by more schools and are nearer to every one of them than parents living in social housing estates who are thus condemned to sending children out of their local community often at public expense to schools far from home.

There is a strong case to be made for parents to have the right to attend the school closest to their home unless of course it is single-sex and their child is not of that gender! Their right should also apply to ‘faith’ schools who should be prohibited from selecting pupils on the grounds of faith just as the law requires in Northern Ireland. In the so-called United Kingdom surely rights of admission to faith schools should be the same?

Clearly contexts are different and rural areas will demand different answers in the name of equity from those suitable for heavily urbanised areas.

This suggests that it should be for the regional tier of local democratic control to approve the criteria for determining who should be admitted in the case of over-subscription and that the system should be administered by the local authority level and never the school itself. Such arrangements would safeguard the interests of ‘equity’ ‘equal opportunity’ and ‘social mobility’ for parents and children and guard against any individual school putting its own interests ahead of those.

Finance

Until 2006 the ‘financing’ of state schools was a matter determined variously by the c.150 separate LEAs who used government RSG (Revenue Support Grant) to decide locally how much was spent on schools among their various educational provisions and, having so determined, apply the school funding through a formula originally approved when Local Management of Schools (LMS) was introduced after the 1988 Act. Since funding had diverged over the years after 1944 the post 1988 formulae exposed significant differences in funding of apparently similar schools in different parts of the country. In 2006 the government took school budgets out of local authorities so that it would no longer be a charge on the rates and naturally the question of establishing a fair national schools’ formula has assumed greater importance.

Given this history it seems sensible to have a national schools funding formula regarded as a percentage of the total cost of schools – say between 85 and 90% with a variable amount extra being raised and spent locally. The need for some local funding is necessary for two reasons: first there needs to be a democratic local voice and involvement to give voice, as happened until 2006, if there are cuts in funding nationally which ministers and DFE naturally wish to present in the most favourable light. It is noticeable that now it is simply the teacher unions who are drawing attention to educational cuts affecting schools: in the past it would have been education officers in local authorities. Secondly however there are services to learners, such as those requiring SEND which cannot be settled within a school’s budget. So Educational Psychologists and other specialist and expert services need to be provided from a wider perspective. These could be funded at a regional level by the democratic body I have outlined above.

When Keith Joseph (see above) introduced specific grants to stimulate desirable and urgent change -in his case LAP and TVEI- he was justified in doing so since the speed of change to which society and schools need to respond accelerates. The introduction of computers and their use in schools would not have happened fairly without the stimulus of government specific grants. How such grants are administered and for how long is important and needs to be known from the outset. These initiatives could be administered through the regional authorities suggested as part of the middle-tier. In effect the London Challenge (2002-2011) was a regional initiative even though administered through the DFE11. It involved the closest collaboration with the 32 London Boroughs and the City of London as well as close working with the Greater London Authority and the Mayor. It is generally regarded by OFSTED and researchers as a great success and certainly the school outcomes, where London is now performing better than any other region, would support that. It makes a strong case for Regional democratic input. That said it avoids the question of how the funding of regional authorities should be raised. Is this a case where a proportion of the business rate could be held for the activities of the regional authorities with supplementary specific grants from central government when they want attention paid to particular school improvements?

The next three of my Baker’s dozen changes are pitched in the order of accountability, exams and tests, and finally and more extensively curriculum because one of the consequences of the second age of Markets Managerialism and Centralisation is that making schools accountable dominates both firstly assessment and then inevitably curriculum. Recently the Schools Minister in defending the forthcoming contentious introduction of mandatory baseline assessment as children enter schooling, admitted that it was being implemented not to help individual children but to hold schools accountable by comparing baseline assessment with results of SATs at age 11. Since a lack of accountability was an undoubted weakness of the first post-war age of Trust and Optimism accountability is rightly unavoidable, I stick to that order i.e.tests, exams and curriculum following accountability but hope the reforms suggested here will lead to a better balance among the three.

Accountability (1): background and the need for reform – changing Ofsted’s role

At present accountability is dominant both to facilitate the operation of the market and to identify blame. The easiest way to hold schools accountable is to find things that are measurable such as results in externally marked tests and exams where candidates regurgitate memorised knowledge and some easily assessed skills. If the knowledge skills attitudes or values are not susceptible to relatively simple uncontested examination, then the school and its pupils, which gets judged on the published exam and test results, tend to regard them as of second order importance. School Improvement is important but tends to be measured by what is measurable - namely exam and/or test results. Curriculum takes a back seat.

It is only in the 1980s that accountability, which was signalled as a concern in Callaghan’s Ruskin speech in 1976, started to gain prominence. Oxfordshire in 1979 introduced a systematic School Self-Evaluation process where schools were required to give a four-yearly account of the school’s activities involving a self-chosen peer headteacher and reporting outcomes to their governing body and a panel of the Education Committee. It was an initiative taken to head-off more punitive possibilities as the council had decided to require the publication of exam results ‘in order that parents could make a better choice of school’i. Other LEAs required a more tick-list self-evaluation and yet others renamed their advisory services to schools an ‘inspectorate’. At the time HMI (Her Majesty’s Inspectors) did not publish inspection reports on schools, which were themselves very rare since HMI were engaged on survey work which led to publications which, with HMI-run conferences, influenced schools’ practice and informed the basis of their advice to Secretaries of State.

Accountability arrangements for schools changed radically in 1992 when Ofsted was created and regular schools’ inspections with rankings – at first with seven levels now four - started together with school exam and test results published in league tables.

In 1993 school exam and test results were also published nationally in league table form. While at first Ofsted considered broader aspects of school life, they soon focused more narrowly on pupil outcomes. Poor exam or test results in practice correlated to their placement in the Ofsted ratings of ‘Outstanding’, ‘Good’, ‘Requires Improvement’, and ‘Inadequate’.

In late 2018 HMCI Amanda Spielman identified Ofsted’s role in the distorting and narrowing impact on the curriculum and intends to change the school inspection framework from September 2019 in order to encourage schools to consider the wider aspects of schools’ purposes and to demonstrate their curriculum thinking. While this is to be welcomed, it needs to be complemented by other reforms to examinations and the accepted means of assessment which have always influenced schools’ curriculum practice.

If the first post-war age of Optimism and Trust was too relaxed on issues affecting accountability, examinations tests, school improvement and curriculum the latest period of Centralism, Markets and Managerialism has been too tightly prescriptive.

One of the first tasks of the ‘standing national education advisory council’ to the Secretary of State suggested earlier should be to consider appropriate arrangements for new accountability arrangements – what should be determined nationally, what regionally and what locally. There should be a shift from national to regional and local and a redefinition of the role of OFSTED to carry out national surveys with an emphasis on advice to the Secretary of State on the one hand and to the regions and local authorities on the other. (OFSTED would inspect individual schools only when requested to do so by the regional body). At the regional and local level, the use of scrutiny committees will be vital. They – the local and regional bodies - should be held accountable by the Secretary of State for their performance in providing educational services (including national inspection and accreditation of those services) and for how well they inspire the schools and then hold the schools accountable locally and regionally for ever higher and improved outcomes. The Secretary of State would be aided in doing so by Ofsted inspections of regions.

Tests and Examinations

The use of externally set and marked tests and exams at once limits what can be used in accountability measures as well as what can be tested or measured. It tends to favour the testing of what can be easily measured in this way. So far as curriculum is concerned knowledge and a small if vital range of skills are easily within its compass. But values and attitudes tend to be overlooked- as does any assessment of what might be called the education of the spirit as opposed to the mind. And as people acknowledge even the assessment of the mind is restricted in the scope of our existing exam system, relying as it does so much on paper, pen and recall of an arbitrary set of information rather than embracing the possibilities offered – and demanded in later life – of computer based uses of easily available information and the skills required bot to navigate the reliability of that information and to use it creatively.

The question is how can we change our existing unnecessarily burdensome centralised and costly system which is so unfit for purpose.

Keeping track of national, regional and local standards could easily be ascertained through random sample testing. There is a precedent for this both historically through the short-lived Assessment of Performance Unit (APU) and presently through OECD’s PISA and various other international tests of literacy and maths (e.g. PIRLs and TIMMS)

We could then replace tests and exams (for the school pupil and as part of new arrangements for school accountability purposes) by setting tests nationally, marking at school level, moderating locally and regionally where a regional university and the regional body of employers could jointly supervise arrangements and validate their reliability and integrity.

Once again it is suggested that the exact detail should be determined after advice from SNEAC.

Accountability (2): the need for a Balanced School Scorecard as the basis of school accountability

It follows from what is outlined above in respect of exams and tests, and what follows in respect of curriculum and the values and aims that underpin them that schools should be held accountable through a balanced scorecard which would separately assess the following:

• Pupil outcomes in respect of progress made in graded tests and exams in skills and knowledge specified in the national curriculum – assessed and moderated locally and validated regionally as suggested earlier in this paper.

• Pupil attitudes and motivation as assessed by using one of the many surveys (e.g. Keele, Strathclyde) available for this purpose.

• Pupil progress in terms of well-being and health.

• Pupil participation in the school’s sporting and performing and expressive arts opportunities.

• Staff development and wellbeing.

• Pupil Destinations after schooling and

• A validated self-review externally moderated of where the school is in its ‘school improvement’ journey

Such a balanced scorecard – with numerical/banding representations for each category – would be available to all.

School Improvement

Until the research of Michael Rutter and Peter Mortimore in the late 1970s12 there was no research to back the idea that schools as opposed to individual teachers made any difference to children’s life chances. I guess the private schooling sector especially the major ‘public schools’ thought there was a ‘school effect’. Differences in pupil outcomes, which to modern eyes were very roughly estimated, were explained by socio-economic background and there was no notion that dealt with a similar student population some schools made more difference to pupil outcomes than others: and if they did it was all down to the differing success of teachers.

After Rutter, Mortimore and others a whole literature and research has built up where the received wisdom may be summarised as accepting that the teacher effect is far greater than the school effect. If the teacher makes the weather the school creates the climate.

In short school improvement is how schools create an ever-better climate for the individual and groups of teachers to do their job in the most favourable circumstances.

To do this they have maps. The one which I pioneered in this city between 1993 and 2002 and in London from 2002-2007 involved school leaders and their advisers trying to give daily thought and periodic attention to improving the following first seven of eight processes:

• Creative and courageous leadership;

• Effective management;

• Creative teaching, learning and assessment;

• Collective review;

• Creative Staff development;

• Creating an environment fit for learning;

• Parental and community involvement;

• Student involvement

The eighth I have added and I have promoted it widely since I stopped full-time work and have reflected on my many mistakes either of commission or omission. It seems to me that the context – always overlooked or misunderstood by government in creating policies - has changed and the involvement of pupils/students is now crucial to real school improvement.

The Need for National Aims and Values to be articulated as a background for the curriculum and the work of schools.

I have already remarked on the conflict between the influence of the ‘market’ and the desire for ‘equality of opportunity’, ‘equity’ and ‘social mobility’. It is surprising that historically there is no adequate expression of nationally agreed educational aims and societal shared values that underpin our educational system. An essential precursor to arrangements for curriculum supporting state-funded schools within a defined public education service should therefore be a discussion of the aims, values and attitudes which underpin society.

There are few examples to guide us. American schoolchildren daily stand and chant ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ Clearly it can be argued that such cursory words are not enough and that an explicit expectation that schools will go further is needed. This the Americans do, with guidance from their local democratically elected school district and state.

In England the aims of the national curriculum laid down in 1988 stipulated that ‘Every state-funded school must offer a curriculum which is balanced and broadly based and which promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society and prepares pupils at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life.’ In 2013 Michael Gove, in introducing the revised aims of the revised national curriculum declared ‘The national curriculum provides pupils with an introduction to the essential knowledge they need to be educated citizens. It introduces pupils to the best that has been thought and said, and helps engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement’

Each of these declarations contains fewer than 50 words. But it has not inhibited English governments from focused prescriptive advice to schools on the knowledge and skills defined by ‘subjects.’ Since the role of local authorities in the curriculum has progressively weakened to vanishing point, it could be fairly argued that our schools operate within a vacuum so far as clarity on aims, values and attitudes are concerned. This vacuum does not apply to ‘faith’ schools either within or outside the state funded system. These schools are very clear on values which derive from their religious beliefs and contribute to youngsters’ future behaviour as responsible citizens. Other state funded schools are always operating within disputed territory so far as values, attitudes and behaviour are concerned as we have seen all too clearly recently in two Birmingham Primary Schools. Connected to this is an absence of any national descriptive elaboration of what our youngsters are expected to become as adults. How youngsters turn out as citizens when they have left school is a concern of most teachers, yet such outcomes are not part of our school accountability system. Schools within the independent sector are more forthcoming. Haileybury for example was founded by the East India Company and for most of its first hundred years saw its explicit purpose as producing school leavers who would go on to serve the British Empire. All such schools for the privileged few, who are tacitly – sometimes overtly - expected to become the leaders of society, have value-laden school mottoes. Schools funded by the state tend to have ‘mission statements’ analogous to slogans in the business and commercial world. They are often value-free. When Whitehall attempted a description of British Values in 2011, it was in connection with the ‘Prevent’ strategy which itself was a response to fears of terrorism. It was updated in 2014 in the statement set out as follows:-

‘A key part of our plan for education is to ensure that children become valuable and fully rounded members of society who treat others with respect and tolerance regardless of background. ‘We want every school to promote the basic British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths and beliefs. This ensures young people understand the importance of respect and leave school fully prepared for life in modern Britain’

This statement, accompanied by examples of practice, appears at first glance unexceptionable if incomplete. But its origins in Islamophobic terrorism are easy to guess and its imprecise thinking about ‘Britain’ – as opposed to UK or its four separate countries – is evident to any thoughtful reader. Ideally, we now need an England-wide discussion led by and reporting to the Standing National Educational Advisory Council about what we want all our schools to promote in terms of values and broad aims in the long-term interests of the pupil and the public. A general description of skills, knowledge and experiences must follow but without clarity on values, aims and attitudes we make the jobs of our schools much more difficult. Table One illustrates the sort on unifying statement which might be the agreed foundation of aims – though not values – on which the schooling system might be built.

Table One

We should want our children to understand through their schooling that;

• It will be their duty as adults to guard and participate in a representative democracy which values national and local government. To that end schools will progressively involve students in many aspects of school life and the community in which the school and the families are located.

• Their religious faith and beliefs will be respected and they will be encouraged through their schooling to respect all faiths and the humanist position.

• Many differently rewarded careers which are vital to the wellbeing and practical operation of our society and others elsewhere in the world are open to them. These include carers, cleaners, cooks, designers, musicians, sportsmen and women, writers, composers, broadcasters, actors, builders, electricians, farmers, teachers, sailors, plumbers, other tradespeople, lawyers, accountants, doctors, nurses, other health-related jobs, bankers and providers of other financial services, shop-keepers, drivers and politicians. This kaleidoscope of employed and self-employed opportunities, available in the private, public and voluntary sectors, is ever changing and expanding under the influence of accelerating political and technological developments.

• These careers require differing talents and students’ schooling experience will be based on valuing them as individuals and equipping them with the values attitudes skills and knowledge to make a successful and rewarding contribution to society as adults in and out of work.

• They will be encouraged to think for themselves and act for others through their life at school and in the community. In doing so they will explore and understand the range of obligations, rights and choices open to them in our own and other societies.

• They will encounter through their schooling experiences expert help in acquiring a foundation of skills and knowledge which will allow them to survive and flourish in our own or another society.

• They will be equipped to make good arguments for a just cause and thereby influence their social and political environment.

Complementing such aims should be a similarly brief statement of values and attitudes acceptable in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. All schools are deep into this territory of acceptable behaviours on a daily basis but often in conflict with some of their families. Headteachers and teachers who have worked in both Faith and Community schools will, when asked, agree with the proposition that it is easier to establish ‘shared attitudes and values’ in the daily life of faith schools because they spring essentially from the faith and are uncontested. Values in public (community and other state schools) would be less contested if they were more explicitly stated whether ideally on a UK or English only basis. Although some values seem timeless, others -such as respect for LGBTQ+ rights and lifestyle- change over time. Once these broad values and aims are articulated therefore, they will need periodic review through the SNEAC

Curriculum Reform

Having established aims and values and the attitudes we expect of our adult citizens, there will be the need to set out a curriculum statement. As someone opposed originally to the introduction of a national curriculum, I acknowledge I am in a minority, although I suspect that Michael Gove in explicitly removing the obligation to follow a national curriculum for Free Schools and Academies shared a mistrust of national prescription. What the schools have now is a description of curriculum in terms which, technology apart, late Victorians in Universities would have recognised. It is scarcely fit for purpose.

The suggested Standing National Education Advisory Council should be asked to set out for the Secretary of State’s approval a broad statement of the knowledge and skills present and future citizens will need to make sense of as they accommodate and seek to steer a world of accelerating change where recent developments in Artificial intelligence, neuroscience and digital computer-enabled communication have made our present curriculum statements look sepia-tinted and any attempt to predict future certainty ridiculous.

The curriculum itself needs to have three dimensions- global or international, national and local.

The Supply and Retention of Teachers

This is arguably the most important point of all. After all the ‘teacher effect’ is so much greater than the ‘school effect’. If the school as a whole creates the climate within which learning happens, it is the teacher who makes the daily weather.

Until Michael Gove as Secretary of State gave up his duty ‘to secure a sufficient supply of suitably qualified teachers’ there had been at least some national attempt to plan and assess the need for teachers based on differing factors such as geography and school populations and estimates of wastage and retirements. In the early years after the 1944 Butler Act there was the most extensive planning arrangement with an Advisory Council for the Supply of Education and Training of Teachers (ACSETT) backed by regional Area Teacher Training Organisations (ATTOs) based on networks of Teacher Training Colleges (later Colleges of Education) and University Departments of Education. As routes into teaching have proliferated (e.g. Schools Direct, Teach First) there is no going back to a nationally managed system of this sort but a set of regional plans may emerge from Sam Twistleton’s Group, and it should be a ministerial responsibility to ensure there is a sufficient supply of suitably qualified teachers- a duty that Michael Gove, while shamelessly expanding ministerial powers across a range of issues best left to schools, irresponsibly gave up.

And it is surely a legitimate matter for the suggested ‘standing national education advisory council’ to consider in partnership with whatever middle tier/regional democratic body is established.

Finally, there is the question of teacher retention and their continuous professional development. This has been a running sore since the second world war and relatively neglected when compared with other school-related issues. This too will need to be high on any future agenda and it would be worth re-establishing the scheme involving what was called the ‘uncapped pool’ whereby teachers could go off on term sabbaticals but which lay largely dormant in the first age of Trust and Optimism even after the James Committee report of 1971.

The Thirteenth Reform: the ‘elephant in the room’

I appreciate that my final reform will be regarded as the most controversial. I think the time is ripe for another look at the vexed issue of one sector of private schooling. I am not talking here of the myriad growth of second and third rate private schooling which are rather like ‘pop-ups’ either in the backstreets of big cities as unregistered threats to their pupils physical and mental safety or of the rather longer-living chains such as ‘Cognita’ run by the late Chris Woodhead which appeal to parents with more money than sense. My concern is with those conveyor belts of privilege conjured up by names such as Eton, Harrow, Westminster, Winchester, Marlborough, Roedean, Cheltenham Ladies (sic) College not to mention Manchester Grammar, Oxford High, Magdalen College or indeed King Edward’s nere in Birmingham or nearby Solihull and Warwick Schools – in short the hundreds of day privileged schools where the fees are three four or five times that spent in local state-funded schools. Compared with truly ‘public’ state-funded schools, their buildings and sports facilities are incomparably better and their staff -where the ‘child/student: teacher ratio’ is so much more favourable- stay longer and receive pensions from the state. Children attending such schools are advantaged, have richer school experiences and better prospects in life – all at the expense of the other 93%13 of children not in the privileged schools. This is neither just nor does it provide equality of opportunity.

Short of closure of these schools – and others have pointed out that the two best chances 14 of doing this have gone – what can be done to mitigate their malign effect on ‘equity’, ‘equal opportunity’ and ‘social mobility’?

Table two illustrates some of the measures which, if collectively implemented, would make private schools less destructive of ‘equal opportunity’ ‘equity’ and ‘social mobility’.

Table Two

1.(i)Stop giving rates relief (of £500 million) and remove charitable status, (ii) impose full business rates, and (iii) introduce a new local hypothecated tax at half the difference between the individual private school and the average of the local state school costs and distribute the resources as a supplementary (top-up) grant to the state funded schools locally. (Independent/Private Schools would make clear that this was an extra ‘equity’ charge which parents of their children are required to pay)

2. Require every University to take no more than 10% of their undergraduate entry from those who have spent 3 years or more at private fee-paying schools.

3. Require every fee-paying school to pay a ‘recruitment/transfer’ fee for teachers trained or working in a state funded school.

4. Require every fee-paying school to run their own pension fund for all staff including teachers.

5. Give the local/regional democratically-elected body (where the school is located) the right to nominate up to 10% of the ‘boarding’ entry at those private/independent schools with boarding. (Costs paid by central government and the requirement that at least half the nominated entry be from the local list – or another authority’s list- of Looked After Children)

Finally, even when we have been explicit about the values and aims of a public schooling system, there will be a duty on those engaged in it to subscribe whole heartedly to their realisation. In short state/private school partnerships especially for staff development should continue.

I realise of course that despite the length of this Priestley Lecture I have not done justice to many matters-including outdoor education which Raymond Priestley championed- matters which contribute to the success of the schooling system. So Early Years practitioners I am sorry. Apologies too to those who wanted to hear about SEND provision including special schools, Careers advice, Youth Work, or the place of complementary and supplementary education such as that provided by the Childrens University or the University of the First Age. Of Alternative Provision I have uttered not a word. All of these matters should be considered next year as we mark the 150th anniversary of Forster’s Act. This paper besides its background purpose hopes to have highlighted the danger that we might inadvertently be stumbling towards a world where the state is once again regarded as the provider of last resort. I have preferred to focus on those matters which if left as they are will frustrate our efforts to deliver the trinity of equal opportunity equity and social mobility about which we hear so much from national politicians but from whom we see so little meaningful action.

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Footnotes:

1 The speech at Westminster Hall is still available and reflected on the progress then made and stiil to be made in the English schooling system. It is notable for refences to the Newsom Report’s (‘Half our Future’) Implications for those who were not academic and gained least from the schooling system

2 Leese.J ‘Personalities and Power in English Education’ (London 1950)

3 ibid

4 Bew.J ‘Citizen Clem; a biography of Attlee’ (London 2016)

5 Under the 1944 Act the Secretary of State had three powers now he has over 2000.

6 Nick Gibb has made the teaching of synthetic phonics compulsory in schools. A more trivial example is Michael Gove distributing to all schools a copy of the King James bible and currently each secondary school is being sent a scripted lesson to teach of the dangers of knife crime.

7 I was at the conference along with many colleagues from Local Education Authorities. Coverage of his speech can be found in the issues of the Times Educational Supplement and the journal Education at the time.

8 LEAs kept themselves informed by establishing the practice that governing bodies should receive a Headteacher’s report at each of their termly meetings and that these along with minutes should be sent to the ‘Office’ as the Lea headquarters were called. For an excellent example of these (along with the chance to ascertain the changing priorities of schools during part of this period) see Yordan.M ‘Records of Holton Park Girls’ Grammar School (1948-1972)’: Oxfordshire Record Society Volume 71 (2017)

9 There has been a proliferation of school types -academies, foundation, free, community, voluntary aided, voluntary controlled, trust – which has served to obscure and complicate responsibilities and lines of accountability.

10 See Education Policy Institute Report May 2019 for researched evidence to support this statement.

11 For an account of the London Challenge see inter alia Woods.D ‘The story of the London Challenge’ (2017)

12 Until Rutter,M. (et al) ‘Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and their Effects on Children’ (Harvard1979) there had been no school effectiveness research and consequently no attention paid to the individual school effect.

13 The percentage varies in different parts of the country from 3% to 25% so the financial supplementary grant to state-funded schools outlined in Table Two will vary accordingly.

14 Green.F and Kynaston.D ‘Engines of Privilege’ (London 2019) See also Verkaik.R ‘Posh Boys: how English public schools ruin Britain’ (London 2018)