Oh, how terrible that schools should be encouraged to reflect on their practice and improve other time, rather than simply deciding that all change stopped in 2003 and they can just carry on without bothering to try to improve.

There’s only one sort of school that can sit back: one where every single child achieves 100% in every exam and goes on to the university and career of their choice. Since none of those exist, schools should be trying to improve. If those that don’t improve get walloped for sitting still, then good: you try submitting your GCSE course-work as your PhD thesis and see where standing still gets you.

1 It depends how you define “failing”. If the school is being judged merely on its GCSE/SAT results when its teaching is satisfactory or better, then that school is not “failing”. The low results point to factors outside the school’s control. However, if the school’s teaching is inadequate then that school is failing even if the GCSE/SAT results are satisfactory. Whatever criteria was used to judge schools as “failing”, and whether deserved or not, this label proved to be useful reason to hand schools over to private companies via the Academies programme.

2 The Academies programme may have been inspired by a Tory idea (City Technology Colleges) but the last government expanded it.

3 The National Curriculum was originally supposed to be a core curriculum. Baker wanted more, it mutated and then grew to monstrous proportions under Labour.

4 Many schools who had previously been judged good and who kept the same good practice found they were judged inadequate in the next round of OFSTED because the rules were changed. It does not follow that I believe that “inadequate schools are, in fact, palaces of learning”.

Whatever the origin of these policies, the last government picked them up and ran with them. Andy Burnham will need to distance himself from these follies.

Are you implying that there aren’t any schools that actually are failing?

“The Academies programme”

Tory. Or at least, CTCs, which amount to the same thing.

“Introducing an unwieldy national curriculum”

Tory. And both they and Labour could have told university academics, log-rolling for their own specialisms, to get stuffed. A national curriculum at a high level is a good thing: it means, for example, that children can move from school to school with their parents’ jobs with less disruption. It does not, however, need to be a prescriptive as it is, and that’s not the product of government.

“Changing OFSTED rules which resulted in more schools being judged “inadequate”.”

Are you saying that inadequate schools are, in fact, palaces of learning?

1 Allowing specialist schools to select a proportion of pupils by aptitude.
2 Putting so-called failing schools into the hands of private companies
3 The Academies programme
4 Allowing an increasing involvement of religious organisations in education (thus encouraging further fragmentation of society)
5 Introducing an unwieldy national curriculum
6 Increasing the reliance of GCSE grades in league tables which has led to grade inflation.
7 Changing OFSTED rules which resulted in more schools being judged “inadequate”.

Andy Burnham is right in publicising the disastrous policies of the present government. However, he also needs to put a clear distance between his policies and those of the previous government. And he needs to explain how he is going to undo the damage.

It would be more impressive had he stood up for comprehensive education while Tony Blair was dismissing “bog standard” comprehensives, rather than waiting until he was in futile opposition. Labour were in office for thirteen years, and presided over a wholesale dismantling of the comprehensive ideal; it seems a little disingenuous to now talk as though they had nothing to do with that dismantling.

I have posted comments about the Adam Smith report – its statistics and its motivation – on the threads dealing with this.

Burnham also rightly identifies the real dangers that Gove and this government pose to our state education system, taking us away from a publicly funded service, nationally directed, but planned locally, improving the education of ALL children. If the Tories finish off the job as they mean to, we will have, in effect, a privatised school system, strictly hierarchical, with local authority schools acting as the safety net of every neighbourhood. Why on earth are we trying to emulate Charter schools or other privatised experiments, when all our energy and resources need to go into improving what we have already, including improving quality and introducing a degree of productive choice within the state system.