There’s a new man about Whitehall. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has appointed Oli de Botton – ex-adviser to David Miliband and the husband of former No. 10 communications chief Amber de Botton – as his Expert Adviser on Education and Skills. The role of the new skills guru will be to advise ministers on the government’s education vision but Mr S is more than a little sceptical of de Botton’s track record in the field. Not least because the adviser also happens to be the co-founder of School 21 – a progressive free school that has produced some rather underwhelming results…
Working with ex-Tony Blair SpAd Peter Hyman, the government’s new education expert set up the radical education project in 2012 to deliver a programme of teaching that focused on ‘head, heart and hand’. The dynamic duo pushed a programme of oracy-based education that currently includes ‘mastery lessons’, problem-based learning scenarios and creativity to ‘develop students who create beautiful work which makes a difference to the world’. How inspiring.
The only problem is that School 21’s outcomes aren’t all that rosy. The school has been marked as ‘average’ on the government website and falls short by almost ten percentage points of other schools in the local authority when comparing pass marks in English and maths GCSEs. More than that, schools watchdog Ofsted warned bosses at the end of last year that the institution ‘requires improvement’ – with criticism directed at the quality of its teaching, as well as its behaviour, attitudes, leadership and management. Crikey!
Appointing the founder of a failing school as skills adviser is just another of the baffling decisions made by Starmer’s army since they came to power. Not that the new party of government seems all that interested in its own academic prowess either. A response to Tory MP Charlie Dewhirst revealed that, since Sir Keir’s crowd won the election, Labour’s war on education extends to the degree the PM isn’t even making use of his own library – with the number of donations made by the UK leader or his ministers to the official collection coming to a grand total of, er, zero. What a set of role models for Britain’s schoolchildren, eh?
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