Do take the time to read Michael Gove’s report A Failed Generation: Educational Inequality Under Labour, out today. Many of it findings have peppered his recent articles and speeches (including his speech on Monday, sadly overshadowed by the lads’ mag row). But gathered together as they are here, they amount to the most coherent – and shocking – denunciation of Labour’s record on education. Here are some of the headline statistics:
— Last year, over 60 per cent of pupils eligible for free school meals did not gain the 3Rs at Key Stage 2.
— 33,909 pupils eligible to receive free school meals did not attain any GCSE grades higher than a D in 2006/07 – 47 per cent of all FSM pupils.
— In the last year, the attainment gap at GCSE between the poorest areas and the wealthiest widened by 15 percentage points – from 28 per cent to 43 per cent.
— In 2007, by the time pupils came to take GCSEs, 21.1 per cent of FSM pupils gained five good GCSEs including English and maths, compared to 49 per cent of non-FSM pupils- a gap of nearly 28 per cent. It is perhaps the great tragedy of the Brown years (both as Chancellor and as Prime Minister) that, after years of unprecedented funding, little has been done to close the achievement gap between rich and poor; little has been done to improve social mobility. The answer is not greater centralisation, as our Prime Minister seems to think, but greater freedom for schools, teachers and parents alike. This much was demonstrated by the early successes of the academies programme. But this has since been debased by Ed Balls, who has imposed greater central control on academies – for example, wedding them more closely to the national curriculum.
In government, Gove would transplant the successful Swedish schools model – a kind of academies programme on steroids – to the UK. And he’s got Cameron’s full backing on this. Indeed, the policy would form one of the main planks of a first term Conservative government. In this case, then, the Tories have got it right. They understand that, when it comes to schooling, governments don’t know best – parents do. And it’s an understanding which could go some way to delivering the kind of equality that Brown’s failed to. Equality of opportunity.
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