Michael Gove’s decision to stand down in this election was a reminder that the one really bright spot in the past 14 years was the education reforms he steered through between 2010 and 2014. These policies were vindicated in the most recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) survey, which showed England climbing the OECD’s international league table and outperforming Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In maths, England rose from 17th place in 2018 to 11th in 2022, whereas Scotland, significantly above England in 2010, fell below the OECD average.
I was involved in the most successful of these reforms, the free schools programme. Many of these schools are now topping the performance tables: the Michaela Community School got the best Progress 8 score in England last year (this measures how much progress pupils make between the ages of 11 and 16 relative to children with the same prior attainment) and the King’s Maths School got the best A-level results in the country. Of the four free schools I co-founded, the three primaries are all ranked ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted and the secondary’s GCSE results last year placed it in the top 2 per cent of English comprehensives.
Labour is going to rewrite the national curriculum, reverting to the failed skills-based approach
It is disappointing, therefore, that the Labour party wants to dismantle many of these reforms. Take the curriculum. One of my reasons for helping to set up those schools is that the national curriculum Labour devised in 1999 was so poor, with its emphasis on skills over knowledge. Broadly speaking, this is the curriculum still being taught in Wales, which is so far below England that, according to PISA, the average pupil there performs at the same level as the most disadvantaged pupil in England.
Free schools, like academies, are exempt from having to teach the national curriculum, meaning we were able to ditch subjects like civics and make doing a GCSE in a foreign language compulsory. In the primaries, we adapted the knowledge-rich curriculum developed by the American educationalist E.D. Hirsch and now share those resources with hundreds of partner schools across the country. The success of our growing Multi-Academy Trust, which boasts nine schools, shortly to be ten, is in large part due to the rigorous, knowledge-based curriculum we teach at those schools.
Unfortunately, Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, has said Labour is going to force free schools and academies to teach the national curriculum. That wouldn’t be so bad if it meant teaching the one introduced by Michael Gove in 2014, a vast improvement on its predecessor and pretty close to what we already teach. But she’s also announced that Labour is going to rewrite it, reverting to the failed skills-based approach that has turned Welsh education into a basket case. In addition to making schools teach ‘creativity’ and ‘problem solving’ – neither of which can be taught as stand-alone skills, according to the eminent cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham – Phillipson wants to add ‘speaking skills’, which she says ‘should be taken as seriously as reading and writing’.
This odd addition has been made at the behest of Peter Hyman, a senior adviser to Keir Starmer, who founded a free school in 2012 that placed ‘oracy’, a fancy term for ‘public speaking’, at the heart of its curriculum. But the school he set up has not been a success. Its Progress 8 score is negative, meaning the progress pupils make between 11 and 16 is below average, and its most recent Ofsted report said it ‘requires improvement’. The percentage of students who got a grade 5 or above in their English and maths GCSEs last year at the school was 45 per cent, compared with 93 per cent at Michaela, which also favours the knowledge-based approach. Yet the Labour party has decided that Hyman’s ‘oracy’ curriculum is the one that all state schools in England must follow.
This education policy has received far less attention than Labour’s plan to impose VAT on school fees, but it will affect 20 times as many children. It’s also something parents no longer able to afford school fees should be concerned about, since their children will be taught ‘speaking skills’ rather than, say, a foreign language. In addition, expect the curriculum in England’s state schools to be ‘decolonised’, i.e., colonised by the radical progressive left. Perhaps that’s why Labour is so untroubled by the prospect of 25 per cent of private-school pupils defecting to the state sector: all the more children to indoctrinate. Starmer’s proposal to lower the voting age to 16 begins to make more and more sense.
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