OK, something different this time. Inspired by various pronouncements in recent weeks, and the odd twitter discussion, I’ve been imagining a - fictional - scenario in which our schooling system operates against a radically different political and power backdrop.
Actually, it is different in only respect: in this fantasy we now have a government for the entire world, which is busy implementing policies for education, in England and elsewhere.
I’ve then imagined a conversation which might ensue between the education minister in this global government and one Michael Gove. The latter would be, as now, education secretary for England. However, instead of wielding his current extensive powers over the characteristics of England’s schools, in this fantasy he would have to cede to the world government the final say on how education was organised, since policy is now made worldwide. He would, then, be in a position not wildly different from today’s local authority leader in England.
As the final element of this scenario, I am imagining Mr Gove as a reasonable, fair-minded person keen to probe the evidence base and implications of the world education minister’s ambitious plans. This latter bit may or may not be in accordance with your perception of reality.
Here we go, then, with that imagined conversation, which takes place at the headquarters of the World Education Ministry, to which Mr Gove has been summoned to explain England’s apparently poor performance in the well-known Organisation for Co-operation and Development’s “PISA” tests.
World education minister (WEM): Mr Gove, because England’s results in PISA are just not good enough, I am going to have to instigate some radical changes in the management of your schools. From now on, I will be targeting the worst performing primary and secondary schools, on measures I am setting unilaterally, for takeover by organisations I appoint.
Mr “Reasonable” Gove: But minister, our results are really not that bad. The difference between our scores in PISA and those of comparable large economies such as France, Germany and the US suggest there’s no great difference between any of us.
Maybe that’s a problem or function of the PISA metric, in that really quite different systems actually look quite similar, when you judge matters only by their pupils’ average PISA test scores. But, whatever, your policy is bringing in some really fundamental structural change on the basis of a “performance” gap of just a few points for each country in PISA.
WEM: This is nonsense. England’s results show a trend downwards, while Germany’s, for example, are moving the other way, and are now ahead of England’s. I have your data here, and it’s clear in black and white: you are not doing well enough. Our league tables simply don’t lie. Maybe if you’d concentrated on managing your schools better, rather than challenging me with your alternative view and your low expectations, the institutions in your country would be in a better way. I cannot tolerate this acceptance of poor performance in the PISA tests by you any more.
RG: But I’m not “tolerating” low performance. We all want our pupils to do well. I’m just questioning the basis on which you are planning such sweeping changes. After all, we would be throwing away quite a lot in simply imposing changes on schools and the communities they serve unilaterally from the (global) centre like this.
WEM: Oh? In what way?
RG: Well, for a start there’s the issue of democracy. You may think you have a solution that will improve these schools in England in terms of their test results, but we have views, too. I am elected Secretary of State for Education in England, but you seem not to want to take my local knowledge of the schools, their history and the culture against which they operate into account. Some would say you’re out of touch: you’re making decisions from your desk in the ministry without even having visited most of the schools affected.
WEM: That’s all very well, but I’m a busy man, I can’t visit all schools for which I am now responsible and I have their test results here and they aren’t good enough. Nor are many of the inspection verdicts my inspectors have provided me on the schools our ministry has targeted for change because their performance is not good enough. These inspection reports say clearly that an unacceptably high number of schools are returning below average levels of performance, compared to others in your country.
RG: But that would be the case in any country
WEM: (Continuing…) In any case, I simply can’t listen to your arguments for the right of national self-determination while your results are so poor. After all, I’m doing this for the children: your country’s young people’s futures, and particularly those of the poorest, depend on our getting this right. So we have to act and I will use the powers I passed in the World government’s Parliament shortly after taking office to ensure that we do.
RG: But it’s not just about me, as a local politician, wanting some power over the decision-making structure of our schools. It’s also that local people themselves: the parents and staff working at the schools which are under threat of takeover, need to feel a sense of empowerment and ownership. There is an important principle at stake, here, which is that, surely, schools which build a positive relationship between parents, pupils and staff are more likely to work effectively.
Take this one primary school you’re threatening to take over. The strong, supportive relationship between parents and staff seems enviable, and so much so that the whole community has united to oppose the idea of an organisation you appoint to take over the school.
Some schools would kill for that level of community support. And yet you’re planning to have this school replaced by one of your Rebrand schools, which are funded directly by you and have to sign an agreement with you to operate. There is no direct relationship with the local community through the governing body, with the governors instead reporting to the school’s sponsor, who is appointed by you without, seemingly, anyone outside your ministry getting a say if you choose to force through a certain sponsor.
WEM: Yes, that’s it.
RG: Well it seems that you’re sacrificing a lot there, in terms of the interaction with the local community. As, in this country, Margaret Thatcher once argued, schools should be fully responsive to the “consumers” of the education they produce – in this case, the parents, through their governance arrangements - and this seems a strange way of doing it: the power in terms of the governance of the school here seems to rest with the “producer”, the sponsor, rather than with its users. And with you, of course.
WEM: All we’re doing is giving schools the freedom to bring in a sponsor - who will take complete control of the running of the school in agreement with me - and to operate with more flexibility than existing schools.
RG: But not all of them want that claimed freedom.
WEM: OK, well we’re just going to have to force them to be free then.
RG: “Force them to be free”?! I really can’t say I’m a fan of this idea of top-down enforcement action. Apart from anything else, schools should be nurturing places. Your policies are in danger of turning them into sites of bullying: where teachers and management, who after all surely went into this profession as public servants to improve young people’s lives, are in some cases intimidated out of their jobs in the name of raising test scores. I have heard of respected school leaders being seen in tears over being forced out by this policy, after decades of public service. Shouldn’t respect for the way we treat others be part of what we teach young people? And aren’t your policies in danger of sending an opposite message: that bullying people working in schools into “delivering” better results for their pupils is OK, so long as it gets those results?
WEM: I don’t share your reservations about our policies for raising standards.
Anyway, as more than half of secondary schools in your country are now Rebrand schools, if you criticise what we are doing through this policy, then you’re criticising state education. So you’re an enemy of state education.
RG: Hmm. That’s a neat formulation, but it’s just another attempt to label your opponents in a particular way, isn’t it? For someone who seems to have acquired a reputation for being polite and charming, you seem to go in for this type of approach quite a lot, don’t you?
Anyway, you don’t have an electoral mandate for this. When you went to the world’s people in the last World Parliament elections, you said in your manifesto that forcing rebrand status on schools would only be used in the most extreme of cases : when schools had been judged to be failing by your inspectors for more than a year. (Note 1)
Now, I see little more than a year after taking office you widened the criteria, to include any school put in a “category” by the inspectorate, or with results which are below the targets you’ve set. Now the inspection system is even being changed seemingly to put more schools in a “category”.
WEM: I can’t believe you just said that. You’re just showing your naivety now, in believing that political parties should be held to account for what they said in their manifestos. What a ridiculous suggestion. In any case, this stuff is too important for us to hang around for the next election so we can put it in a manifesto.
RG: But the lack of a democratic mandate for this stuff is incredibly important, given that what you want to do is, in some cases, to go against the will of communities in imposing a particular Rebrand on a school. The point is: where is the public mandate for what you want to do? It can’t just be your own will, can it? Otherwise what kind of overly-centralised society are we living in?
And, further to my point on centralisation, how does this square with your avowed support for giving parents choice over their child’s education? What do I say to the parent who tells me she chose a particular school because of its ethos before it was a Rebrand school, and now she fears that will be taken away as new management is imposed on the school by you? Is there anything she can do about this?
WEM: No, there’s not. Nothing at all. There is no way for a parent to challenge my judgement, which is final. In every case, my vision for the school will be the correct way forward, so there’s no need for a challenge: after all, I have the data and the inspection judgements I need.
RG: Why is this parent being denied this choice?
WEM: Her child’s school’s average test scores are not good enough.
RG: But that doesn’t mean her own child won’t do well at this school, does it? It just means that, on average, perhaps because of its status as an inclusive school, its test scores are below ministry expectations.
WEM: Correct.
RG: Well where does that leave your parental choice agenda then?
WEM: Well, parents can have choice as long as they choose school which tally with the ministry’s definition of a good school.
RG: And that centres on average assessment - mainly test - results in English and maths, doesn’t it? What about all the other aspects of school life, from history and geography to the arts, sport and excursions out of school, which so many parents value? They don’t really count, do they?
WEM: Well, we’ll never put it this way in public, but the reality of the way schools are now judged is that no: they don’t really count. In fact, one senior media supporter of my reforms, presiding over a publication which has covered education in all its breadth for more than a century now, has described culturally enriching activities outside of English and maths in primary schools as “finger painting”. That was very useful for us. Our centralised measurement system needs narrow…sorry focused…priorities to be set for schools.
RG: But that does seem to lead to the danger of non-tested subjects being marginalised if results in English and maths are below the ministry’s stipulations. And yet one feels that many members of the public, though undoubtedly viewing English and maths as important, would want their child to get as broad an education as possible.
I feel that that argument, about the narrowing effect of how schools are being judged as successes or failures as they are targeted for intervention by the ministry, is almost being forgotten now, as the debate moves on to whether or not the ministry’s plans for education amount to the dismantling of an education structure which seems to have served us reasonably well since the 1940s.
WEM: I haven’t got time for this. Hard data - test and exam results - are what matter, and independent research shows that our Rebrand schools get better results than those of your conventional, nationally or locally governed institutions. So we can’t hang around: your children’s futures depend on my plans.
RG: But you only have research evidence on secondary schools. Much of the thrust of your plans to introduce these Rebrand schools is now in the primary sector. Where’s the evidence in relation to primary education?
WEM: Why do we need that evidence? These schools have been shown to work in the secondary sector, so why would primary schools be any different?
RG: Erm…well one reason would be scale: secondary schools are likely to find it easier to “go it alone” in a contract directly with yourself than primaries because they are larger organisations. The secondaries on which much of the research seems to have been based also often came with capital building programmes worth tens of millions of pounds, which it seems to me may have helped their image in the local community and which seem not to be available in your latest incarnation of the scheme. And the point is that no research seems to have been done on primary Rebrand schools.
WEM: Well, that’s as maybe. Anyway, we do have a handful of primary Rebrand schools which have been open a few years – actually, these are “all through” schools with a primary as well as a secondary section. And, although there’s no research evidence on their effectiveness, and their test results aren’t always better than the schools which I’m targeting for takeover, my schools Commissar has experience of one or two and they really are very good, I can assure you.
RG: That’s not much of an evidence base, is it? You’re making sweeping changes to the relationship between schools and their local communities, in some cases going directly against the will of their communities, and you’re not even able to point to robust research showing this is the best way to go?
That’s a very strange way of going about things, isn’t it? In an ideal world, even less radical reform would be subject to careful piloting and independent scrutiny before implementation. Instead, we seem to have a fundamental policy change being implemented nationally on the basis that “this is what the World Education Minister wants”.
WEM: No, that’s not the case at all. Anyway, all this talk of the benefits of careful research smacks of “education establishment” thinking. We can’t rely on that. I know much of this “establishment” sits within institutions – universities – which are seen as the apex of the education system, towards which many of our pupils are aiming, and towards which we want them to aim, but… it is the low standards and expectations of this often university-based “education establishment” which have condemned generations of poor children to underachievement. We need a different approach.
RG: Err, OK…But on that note, I notice there’s now a section of the World Education Ministry’s website called “Rebrand schools work”. Not “Rebrand schools” and then a patient explanation for the public of what they are, and a fair-minded overview of what research says about them, but that particular message.
That’s a very strange way for an education ministry to behave, isn’t it, given that we are talking about the Ministry of Education here? After all, aren’t you supposed to be a showcase and example for learning, including research, in all its glory? And isn’t a central point of learning through investigation that you have to try to inquire after both sides of an argument? One of our A-level or undergraduate students, doing an investigation into whether Rebrand schools actually do work, would rightly be marked down if they reached such a simplistic conclusion, so why are you encouraging this approach on your own website?
WEM: Well that’s politics.
RG: But I thought your Rebrand schools initiative was about taking politics out of education.
WEM: Erm. Anyway, moving back to the research, on secondary education this has shown beyond doubt that our Rebrand schools “work”.
RG: Well, the data is pretty equivocal, actually. And even the best piece of research, which does show some positive effect of Rebrand schools in terms of some measures of exam results at Rebrand schools and their neighbours, has been said by its lead author not to be applicable to your current scheme which is greatly expanding the Rebrand programme.
WEM: Well we think the findings are applicable and can be extrapolated to apply to our current plans.
Anyway, I’ve a political agenda to force through here and I am going to be judged on the number of Rebrand schools created – my schools Commissar is even said to have a globe outside her office with the number of Rebrand schools around the world dotted all over it - so I really have little time for this.
RG (persisting): But this is a very strange way for assessment of the strength of particular education policies to be made, isn’t it: not by actually what goes on in schools, but by the number of schools of a particular category?
WEM: We live in a strange world. In any case, after this conversation I can only conclude, Mr Gove, that you are an enemy of reform. I am the politician for change, and for high standards for our children, as all my newly restructured schools demonstrate only too clearly. You are on the side of accepting things as they are, and of the status quo, which as we know has been failing children – poor children especially – for generations. Why should anyone listen to you?
RG: You know, it’s interesting, that phrase “enemy of reform”. You must know, as World Education Minister, that many countries around the world are reforming their education systems, but they are not all doing it in the same way. In fact, some seem to be reforming in exactly opposite directions to our own.
For example, while we seem to be heading towards a more traditionally-oriented curriculum, jurisdictions such as Hong Kong and Singapore seem keen to put the emphasis on creativity. Reports are heard of teachers from China – which had the top-performing jurisdiction in the whole of PISA last time out – arriving in England to look at what they can learn from how our schools are run. And while some countries go in for politicians pushing reform by essentially talking down the existing system – this week there was talk of “paying bad teachers less” – in others such as Canada, Finland or even the aforementioned Germany, there is much more talk of working with the profession to build a world class workforce.
In relation to Finland, for Heaven’s sake, a leading government educationist there has even taken to social networking to tell the world how many teachers want to work there because its schools are such high-status, high-trust places, with basing your entire education system on high-stakes test scores to judge institutions a complete no-no.
I know, it will never take off here.
In fact, if you are using PISA test scores as a guide, one of the models for the types of reform you want – your plans for a special type of new school – is Sweden and its results in the PISA tests are hardly a model of excellence in recent years, as it is not performing well overall and its system seems to be becoming less equitable.
So… “enemy or reform”? “Reform” means very little in this sense when it comes in so many different types. It might just be better if you call me an “unashamed sceptic about your type of reform”. But that sounds too…reasonable…doesn’t it, I guess?
WEM: Yes, you’re just so reasonable, aren’t you? But we have no time for reasonableness. Your PISA results simply aren’t good enough for anyone to be “reasonable” in their approach to reform. You need to “man up” and accept that things are going to be tough. And if teachers and heads don’t like it they can always leave the profession.
RG: Right. I am very intrigued by this idea that talking down the profession can be a long-term recipe for success. Can you really expect to attract and retain the best people if all they read in the papers every day is how bad things are in the schools in which they slave away? So often, this seems out of step with reality: surely you’re aware that recent reports by our inspectorate, Ofsted, have found that more than 90 per cent of parents surveyed agreed with the statement “I am happy with my child’s experience at this school”, with more than 50 per cent strongly agreeing. (Note 2)
WEM: Yes, but those are annoying statistics, aren’t they? I’m glad they haven’t had much coverage or even been featured in your inspectorate’s press releases but instead been buried deep in the reports, as they really don’t fit the narrative we need to improve schools in your country.
For, in order to convince people that our plans need to be implemented, we first have to show them that “something must be done”.
You see, it may sound cynical but I’ve found that increasingly policy-makers adopt the following formulation, as put forward on your own very popular 1980s comedy, Yes Prime Minister. The logic, as quoted there, runs as follows: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.”
If we can’t convince the public in the first place that “something must be done”, we won’t be able to convince them that it is our “something” which must be done. And the whole policy world would be nowhere if there wasn’t “something that must be done”. So it’s all about persuading people that things are particularly terrible, that “something must be done” and therefore that reform is needed.
RG: I’m a bit confused by all of this, but that would be your type of reform, would it?
WEM: You read my mind.
RG: Coming back specifically to your Rebrand schools, in England in the late 1980s and early 1990s we had a similar scheme, called Grant Maintained status, in which schools were offered the chance to be funded directly through a central ministry – in this case, my department – rather than by a local authority.
It proved popular with some schools, which were drawn to it partly by a notion a greater independence from their local authorities, but also in some cases by the seeming extra cash involved. The trouble for my predecessors was that not enough schools opted into this scheme for it ever to be seen as a total success.
You seem to have found a way around this, though: simply force schools into Rebrand status. Starting with “underperforming” schools is the natural way of doing this, since who could possibly argue with taking this strong action in these cases? It may seem blatantly undemocratic, but who is really going to oppose it, given that, of the two other main parties in the World Parliament, one launched the Rebrand scheme in its original form when it was in government and the other is now in a coalition administration with you. And those outside of Parliament who do oppose it can be painted as “enemies of reform”, “defenders of low standards” or both. It is really neat, isn’t it?
WEM: I am glad we are getting to understand each other so well.
This blog was partly inspired by the following exchange in the House of Commons last month: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2012-04-16b.8.6
Note 1: For any coalition manifesto mention of the forced academy policy, see http://media.conservatives.s3.amazonaws.com/manifesto/cpmanifesto2010_lowres.pdf (page 51), which says (only) that “any school which has been in special measures for more than a year will be taken over immediately by a successful academy provider”.
Note 2: See HMCI annual latest annual report http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/annualreport1011 , page 44. Parents were asked if they agreed with the statement “Overall, I am happy with my child’s experience at this school”. 94 per cent agreed, 52 per cent strongly. Sample size: 315,182 parental forms.
