Exclusive – Adonis: I back Gove
Fraser Nelson 2:34pm
Is Michael Gove’s school reform a hideous distortion of the Labour Academies
programme, as Ed Balls put it, or the fulfillment of that agenda? Until now Lord Adonis, the architect of the Academies programme, has kept silent on the issue. But he’s interviewed in The
Spectator tomorrow by Matthew Smith, editor of Attain magazine. Here is a brief extract:
'Ed Balls has declared Gove’s plans for academies as ‘a total perversion of Labour’s policy, which was about turning round under-performing schools in disadvantaged areas’. Adonis’s response is rather different. ‘Neither I nor Tony Blair believed that academies should be restricted to areas with failing schools. We wanted all schools to be eligible for academy status, and we were enthusiastic about the idea of entirely new schools being established on the academy model, as in Michael Gove’s Free Schools policy.’
He says that, for Labour, it was a question of sequencing. ‘The most urgent challenge facing English education is the replacement of failing and underperforming comprehensives. We focused academies accordingly, and the coalition would be wise to do so too. Eradicating the tail of failing comprehensives is what will transform English education — and English society.’
Looking back, does he feel that the Academies programme lost momentum when Tony Blair left? ‘I couldn’t possibly comment on that one. The fact is that we have more than 400 academies which are either open or on the way to being opened. That’s a phenomenal achievement for state-funded education. The coalition is taking the academies movement further, it is making it possible for more successful schools to become academies too and I support that.’
Much attention has fallen on ‘free schools’, academies that can be set up by new providers and run independently under the state system. What does Adonis think of them? ‘I support them. I have no problem with free schools at all. As you know I am a strong supporter of diversity in the state system and independently managed schools. Provided the schools are funded fairly and they don’t have unfair admissions practices, then I think having greater diversity of schools is a good thing.’
This, I suspect, is as close as Adonis dares come to saying that the Gove agenda is precisely what the Blairite reformers would have done if the Labour Party hadn’t weighed them down – beholden, as its MPs are, to the vested interests in local authority. Adonis helped Blair write the introduction to the White Paper on Education in 2005, when he predicted that in five years time all state schools would become independent. It was a radical and bold vision, which I strongly supported then and still do now. It’s a weird thing, how the school reform agenda has been “owned” by various parties. Keith Joseph attempted it, but was talked out of it by the Department for Education. When Joseph moved to the DTI, the recently-sacked Lord Young came up with the idea of technical education – which became City Technlology Colleges under Lord Baker, but it took five years to create 15. Milburn and Blair worked on the “foundation” model for quasi-independent schools and hospitals. These became Academies, but, until Adonis was ennobled and sent to the department, there were just 17 of them. It is against this context that we must consider Adonis’ record: by the time Labour were booted out, 203 Academies were running. Then Gove reduced the barriers to entry (and quickly; the Academies Act took just 77 days to approve). Now there are 407 with a further 250 on the way. The 400 target was one Blair kept talking about: it has now been achieved.
While success has many fathers, the Academies programme comes stamped with Adonis’s DNA. I have bored CoffeeHousers before with my theory that the real dividing line in politics is between those who believe in the choice agenda, or the market, and those who believe in the state. This line cuts across all three parties. Adonis, David Laws, Michael Gove, Kenneth Baker, Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Sarah Teather are in the reformist party – wearing lapel badges of various colours. That’s why the Gove agenda is not the “perversion” of Adonis’ policy, as Balls pretends, but the fulfillment of it.
Previous
SophiaO
January 12th, 2011 2:56pm Report this commentGiven Lord Adonis now in a politically impartial role at the Institute of Government, I wonder if he will thank you for your headline..
Conand
January 12th, 2011 3:29pm Report this comment@SophiaO You can hardly get more impartial than a senior Labour figure praising a Conservative initiative in contradiction to the Labour HoC front bench.
Chris lancashire
January 12th, 2011 3:31pm Report this commentBalls would say anything to a) score a political point and b) get himself noticed.
The one sensible thing Milliband did was to send him to be Shadow Home Office where he is struggling on both a) and b)
Paul Kenop
January 12th, 2011 4:06pm Report this commentBalls is a tool, by the way
Erica Blair
January 12th, 2011 5:01pm Report this commentBut Adonis has always been a Tory.
Commentator
January 12th, 2011 5:30pm Report this commentWhat a load of pompous waffle from the over-rated Adonis.... academies are an expensive sticking plaster non-solution to the deep-seated problems in UK education created by all the major parties over many decades.
Richard Manns
January 12th, 2011 6:23pm Report this comment@ SophiaO
Surely Lord Adonis is supposed to give an opinion of his own, which may support or criticise the government as he chooses.
What else should he do? Sit down and shut up, in which case, what's the point of him leading a think-tank, or oppose policies blindly and uniformly, even ones he spent years trying to implement himself?
No, his job is to think and say what he thinks.
Simon Stephenson
January 12th, 2011 6:28pm Report this commentCommentator : 5.30pm
Yes, this is the point from which one should start. It's up to the politicians to point out real reasons why one should think differently, rather than just expecting the population to accept the rhetoric and propaganda as though they were sheep.
There have been too many soap/beer/car/shampoo/furniture manufacturers telling us falsely that their products are superior to the others for us to believe that politicians are doing anything different.
Holly ......
January 12th, 2011 6:52pm Report this commentCommentator.5.30.
What deep-seated problems in UK education are those?
The fact that some teachers are cr@p,and
protected by the union,continue to be so.
Or the fact that the good teachers dare not speak out for fear of getting sacked,which is sadly happening frequently of late.
This will change once the new qualifying rules come into play,weeding out the duds.
Dumbing down everyone in the state sector,
does nothing for the pupil,many of whom are leaving the education system now,just a bit less thick than when they went in at infants
level.Many know how to read what they have written.The travesty is,employers discover,
at the same time as the school leaver,they can not do it correctly.
These poorly educated adults are Labour's children.
That is such a betrayal,I could weep.
Richard Manns
January 12th, 2011 7:12pm Report this comment@ Simon Stephenson
Perhaps the reason why politicians talk as they do is because, by and large, it works? You also fail to propose any alternative, let alone a viable one, which means you're having a long-winded moan rather than thinking.
Further, perhaps it would be more constructive to analyse the information, sift out the trite and choose rationally. Isn't this what you do for soap, beer, etc? Or will you join "Commentator" in their "all politicians are equally bad" received knowledge diatribe, in which case, I assume you don't buy any soap at all.
Brian Hutchinson
January 12th, 2011 7:34pm Report this commentAndrew Adonis' contribution to the Academies' Programme should not be undervalued, neither should Kenneth Baker's, but the person who made the template for specialist schools work was Cyril Taylor.
I am a patron of Macmillan Academy on Teesside and was formally a chair of it's predessor Macmillan College one of the first CTCs.
TrevorsDen
January 12th, 2011 8:08pm Report this commentBlair by the BBC - 2007 ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6509535.stm
'One day every secondary school will be a trust or a city academy, Tony Blair has predicted.
He said it would be the norm for schools to engage outside partners, adding that the key to future economic success lay in workforce flexibility.'
So Balls is a liar.
normanc
January 12th, 2011 8:45pm Report this commentIf this programme improves failing schools you'd have to be some kind of brain dead moron to think it won't also improve schools performing well.
Step forward Ed Balls!
daniel maris
January 12th, 2011 8:53pm Report this commentThis proposal is a real diversion from what needs to be done with education.
The free schools will become a vehicle for Islamic supremacists to set up their own education sector.
We cannot draw on the experience of Sweden. Sweden is far less class-bound than Britain and there single parents are not the social disaster they are over here - parents take a much more active interest in their children's education.
We should focus on uniting the private and state sectors through education vouchers and local co-operatino agreements. WE should allow parents freedom to choose their children's secondary school. We should create distinct academic and business/vocational schools.
David Lindsay
January 12th, 2011 9:16pm Report this commentCameron wanted Adonis as Education Secretary, but Adonis declined because of the Conservative Party's hostility to grammar schools. There was no suggestion that Adonis would have had to have given up his Labour Party membership, but then at that point most people expected the next Labour Leader to be the wrong Miliband brother, rather than, as has turned out to be the case, the right Miliband brother.
Similarly, Peter Mandelson publicly announced, while still in the Brown Cabinet, that he would be in a Cameron Cabinet, as he would have been if the Coalition had not come to pass instead. And Gove has repeated heaped effusive praise, not only on Blair, but also on those unrepentant old Trots, Alan Milburn and Stephen "Cab For Hire" Byers. Byers had killed himself off by the Election, but as for Milburn, while we may not have much for which to thank Nick Clegg... Oh, and Google "Bernard Gray".
There will be more, mostly with the sectarian Leftist backgrounds that made them Blairites, since that is where Blairites came and come from. If Cameron had an overall majority then there would be a whole lot more.
Are you listening? Are you listening at all? Will you ever listen?
Andy Leeds
January 12th, 2011 10:19pm Report this commentAcademies will help to transform education but the reality is you will get nowhere until and unless you destroy the power of the vested interests, and that means the educational establishment and the damn teaching unions.
It is a disgrace that some many of our children leave school hardly able to read nor write. We could do one other thing and give every pupil an educational voucher worth £x. This could be spent at whatever school the parents chose. That would radically transform education. The teaching unions would wet themselves. Bring it on.
Tim W
January 12th, 2011 10:27pm Report this commentTotally agree with Adonis, Gove and the reformists on this issue, which is the biggest issue in education today if we are to produce better state schools which must be, in my view, the Conservative Party's 'Number One Priority' rather than the NHS. If I was to ringfence any funding it would be education as that is one of the few areas of govt spending which produces economic growth. The key thing for the government is to not worry about how many get A grades or not but to worry about our international ranking in education. If they can move us up it will be very valuable come the next election or more.
BUT this is in real danger of being ruined for Gove by his mistakes on more trivial matters. Why on earth he is making an enemy of sportsstars and sports columnists by cutting school sport? He shouldn't be making mistakes either on things like Building Schools for the Future. He needs to realise that this is the stuff real people care about - more so than Academies. Currently Michael Gove is one of the most hated men in government and was ripped to pieces by viewers on 5Live today. He may have been an Oxford Union debater but he comes across as far to aloof and insensitive when talking to real people, (even when he is right). My point is that if he wants to stay in his job and see through the freedom agenda then he shouldn't pick unnecessary fights and enemies.
Commentator
January 13th, 2011 10:22am Report this commentIt must be a struggle to be someone as enlightened as Richard Manns....and to have to get up every day and breathe the same air as those truculent members of the lower orders who refuse to display 1952-vintage reflexive deference to the "top people", of whom Richard no doubt regards himself as one.
Turkeybellyboy
January 13th, 2011 10:40am Report this commentfyi fascinating article in this week's Economist about (amongst other things) the amount of damage they ascribe to Teachers' Unions - http://www.economist.com/node/17849199.
I suggest that one of the reasons that all the folks mentioned in the article had such a tough time of it was because of Union resistance. Also, to what extent is the Labour Party funded by Teachers' Unions I wonder?
Turkeybellyboy
January 13th, 2011 10:43am Report this commentfyi fascinating article in this week's Economist about (amongst other things) the amount of damage they ascribe to Teachers' Unions - http://www.economist.com/node/17849199.
I suggest that one of the reasons that all the folks mentioned in the article had such a tough time of it was because of Union resistance. Also, to what extent is the Labour Party funded by Teachers' Unions I wonder?
Simon Stephenson
January 13th, 2011 1:08pm Report this commentRichard Manns : 7.12pm
"Perhaps the reason why politicians talk as they do is because, by and large, it works?"
What do you mean by "works"?
I can understand that New Labour's abandonment of basic honesty in communication had the one-off effect of allowing progress on various policies where basic honesty would have caused delays. But I think this will eventually cost far more than it produced, because it has caused such a distrust of politicians and their methods, that seriously necessary non-intuitive policy will become more and more difficult to put in place.
I'm afraid I just don't believe that the behaviour of elected officials has no effect upon their ability to govern.
Nick Biskinis
January 13th, 2011 10:24pm Report this commentIt's ironic Andrew Adonis started out as an SDP member: had he stayed with the Lib Dems he would have been in the Coalition: reportedly the Tories were keen even before the election to keep him on as Transport Secretary, as he was the first Transport Secretary who was actually interested in transport. Instead we have Phil Hammond.
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