Tony Blair has always had the remarkable ability to give the appearance of engaging in an heroic struggle with the intransigent Left of his party — while on closer inspection his proposals present at best a minor departure from old Labour dogma. He promised to ‘think the unthinkable’ on social security: the unthinkable result being that we now have record numbers of citizens — including almost all parents earning less than £60,000 a year — claiming state benefits. He promised to bring market reforms to the NHS, yet it has ended up even more of an unwieldy monolith than before; the main ‘market reform’ being that its doctors now sting taxpayers for Harley Street rates of pay.
This week the Prime Minister proved that he has lost none of his talent for deceiving conservative-minded folk. His news managers cannot have been more pleased with the headlines: ‘All state schools to go independent’ and ‘Blair takes a cane to the Left over school reform’. On the surface, the meaning of Mr Blair’s 12th education White Paper since 1997 could not be clearer: comprehensive schools are to be ditched. No more shall well-meaning but muddle-headed educationists be allowed to dictate how and what Chloe and Josh learn at their state school. You can almost hear the sighs of relief from parents as they lay aside the brochure for pricey St Cake’s and wonder whether, finally, it is safe once more to consider putting their sprogs on a bus to the local state school, and spending their hard-earned cash instead on a villa in the Algarve.
The word ‘independent’ was quite deliberately placed in Mr Blair’s speech on Monday to appeal to middle-class parents. But it was an appallingly dishonest word to have used. If you read the small print of the education White Paper, it becomes clear that Mr Blair’s new, improved state schools will be no more independent of the state than Czechoslovakia was independent of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They will be allowed to do the equivalent of printing their own postage stamps but, should they attempt to diverge from the ruling dogma, they are left in no doubt that a legion of tanks will swiftly follow.
The true nature of Mr Blair’s ‘independent’ state schools is revealed in the following passage from this week’s White Paper: ‘Trust schools’, as they will be called, ‘will be, in effect, independent schools, but will remain part of the local authority family of schools…. The national curriculum, the assessment regimes and the usual provisions on teachers’ pay will apply except where the Trust has agreed flexibility. Trust schools will be funded in exactly the same way as other schools. They will be subject to the Code of Practice on Admissions and to all of the accountability mechanisms that apply to state schools…. Should a Trust school be judged inadequate by Ofsted, the local authority will have the same range of intervention powers as with any other failing or underperforming school. In the case of severe failure the local authority will be able to propose its closure and to hold a competition for a new school to be established. In such circumstances the assets of the school will revert to the local authority.’
In other words, the local government busybodies who run education need not worry. There will still be a job for them, even if they are freed from the day-to-day business of procuring exercise books. They will still enjoy the powers to boss around headteachers, threatening to seize their classrooms and playing fields if they step out of line. The functionaries employed by the Department for Education and Skills will still have the power to lay down a politically inspired national curriculum and to dictate which children attend which schools. In the same breath as saying he was making state schools ‘independent’, Mr Blair assured his backbenchers, ‘there will be no return to selection at 11’. In fact, a careful reading of the White Paper suggests that schools will have even less power over admissions than they do already; as now, they will be allowed to select 10 per cent of their pupils according to their aptitude towards sport, performing and visual arts and ‘modern’ foreign languages (i.e., selecting according to an aptitude for the classics will be prohibited).
But as for the other 90 per cent of places, schools will be put under pressure to adopt a system of ‘banding’, whereby prospective pupils are put into four ability bands. The school then admits an equal quota of pupils from each ability band — so that its intake reflects the same intelligence range as the national population. Moreover, oversubscribed schools in wealthy areas will be put under pressure to operate quotas of socio-economic groups. They will be expected to reserve places for pupils bused in from distant council estates: children who will be chosen not on academic merit but simply on their ability to add a dash of social realism to high-achieving classes.
The aim of Labour’s schools reform is not to encourage excellence, only equality of outcome. It is simply an extension of the social engineering which has already hugely damaged the state education system over the past four decades. The levellers on Labour’s backbenches who this week have expressed anger at Mr Blair’s proposals will, on closer inspection, find much to please them.
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