Exclusive – Adonis: I back Gove

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.