Twin studies are one of the most useful exercises in scientific inquiry. Take two biologically identical children who are brought up in different environments, and study their progress through life. Pioneered by Francis Galton in the late 19th century, they can demonstrate how much of our destiny is dictated by nature or nurture.
This government is precise in seeking to destroy the policies that have given children the best education possible
Over the past two decades we have been conducting a twin study on an epic scale across these islands. Children in England have been educated in accordance with one set of principles. Children in Wales and Scotland have been in schools following a very different route.
In England, schools have been given greater autonomy, and at the same time have faced sharper accountability. The majority of secondary schools and nearly half of primaries are academies – with the freedom to pay good teachers more and set higher standards than are required by law. Alongside those academies, hundreds of new free schools – educational start-ups with teachers, not bureaucrats, in control – have been established. The curriculum in England has been tilted away from the pursuit of generic ‘skills’ and towards the acquisition of greater knowledge. League tables have allowed us to identify which schools perform best, with a particular focus on identifying those that help children from poorer backgrounds to make the most progress. The same measures have also ensured that poorly performing schools can be identified, their leadership replaced, and their pupils given a better chance in life.
In Wales and Scotland, those principles have not applied. No academies. No autonomy over pay and standards. No league tables. No additional rigour and stretch in the curriculum – indeed quite the opposite: a move away from a knowledge-rich approach towards greater ‘relevance’ and ‘diversity’.
The result? A gulf in achievement wider than the Severn Bridge. A disparity in performance so massive that it’s as though Arsenal were being compared to Partick Thistle. A mountain of evidence that can’t be ignored. In every international measure of educational achievement, England has improved relative to other countries in the past decade or so, while Wales and Scotland have faltered or fallen behind. Between 2009 and 2022, England rose in the OECD Pisa school rankings from 21st in the world for maths performance to seventh. Wales nudged forward from 29th to 27th. In science, England rose from 11th to ninth; Wales fell back from 21st to 29th. It’s not just by those metrics that England has outpaced others. In the international TIMSS league tables for maths and science and the PIRLS league tables for reading, England is now the consistently best-performing nation in the western world.
Many of the pupils who have benefited most have been the poorest in our society – stellar free schools such as Michaela in Brent and the London Academy of Excellence in Newham serve areas of deep deprivation and send their students to our best universities.
These achievements were the work of many hands. Tens of thousands of brilliant teachers, thousands of brilliant heads, and politicians from every party – Tony Blair, Ruth Kelly and Andrew Adonis from Labour, Nick Clegg and David Laws from the Liberal Democrats, David Cameron, Nick Gibb and Nicky Morgan from the Conservatives. It’s a cross-party, multi-year, many-starred triumph of public policy.
So what does this Labour government do on inheriting this achievement? Sets out to destroy it. Not through absent-minded carelessness or confused neglect, but with a deliberate, brick-by-brick dismantling that is stunningly audacious in its malice. Shadow ministers have denounced the government’s approach as vandalism. But it’s worse than that. Vandals are anarchic and opportunistic troublemakers. This government is chillingly precise in seeking to destroy the policies that have contributed to giving English children the best education possible. It is Rome’s approach to Carthage – a salting of the earth.
The government’s education bill, introduced this week, is horrifying. Academies will have their freedoms taken away. They will no longer be able to pay good teachers more or set higher standards. Failing schools will no longer be placed in the hands of the people from academy trusts who can turn them round. New schools will no longer be created by people from the free school movement with a track record of excellence. A new national curriculum is being developed by the very people who opposed the improvements and ambition in the existing one.
The accountability system has already been wrecked. Ofsted, the school inspectorate, has been ordered by the government to replace the clarity of previous judgments – from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’ – with opaque word salads. The government did so in response to pressure from unions, which wished to protect underperforming teachers from scrutiny and, in the process, they shamefully and unfairly traduced the record of the superb former chief inspector Amanda Spielman – one of the most principled and impressive public servants I have ever met.
Why is a government led by Keir Starmer – the beneficiary of a grammar school education – setting out to narrow the horizons for working-class children across the country? The answer, I fear, is that Starmer’s government came to power with no effective analysis of what had worked, and what hadn’t, in the past 14 years. Their only mantra was change, their only conviction that the Tories were wrong. About everything. Into that arid absence of thought has come a ready-made agenda fashioned by the teaching unions and their allies in academia – radical left-wingers who hated seeing their ideology proven consistently wrong over the past 14 years. Starmer may have expelled Jeremy Corbyn from his party, but he has empowered Corbyn’s allies to drive the government towards the destruction of educational excellence.
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