The schools revolution

This time next week, we’ll hold the third Spectator School Revolution conference, and it’s our best-ever lineup. If any CoffeeHousers are in the world of education, or know anyone who is, then I’d strongly recommend coming (more for details can be found by visiting spectator.co.uk/schools). The keynote speaker is Michael Gove, the education secretary, who needs no introduction here. But I’d like to say a little more about the others.
 
Michelle Rhee is best-known for her three years time as head of schools in Washington DC, where school reform is a battleground. She fired a thousand teachers in her time there, which made her No.1 on the unions’ target list. (In Britain, only 17 teachers have been struck-off for incompetence in the last ten years). She is now one of America’s leading school reform advocates. Here Michelle is interviewed in the film Waiting for Superman.
 
Barbara Bergstrom set up one of the very first free schools in Sweden: English School North. She believed in the profit motive; her partner didn’t. They eventually parted ways and Barbara set up International English School, a chain which teaches 11,000 pupils in 20 new schools. Her partner stayed in the old English School North; it is still very respected, but has not been replicated. To me, this is a key example of why the profit motive is the surest way of expanding a successful formula. As she says, ‘The often-excellent schools handled by foundations and cooperatives in Sweden have not expanded. Expansion of free schools in Sweden is mostly due to companies being allowed to do so.’
 
Andrew Adonis is the reason that we’re even having a conference about school reform. The hardest steps are always the first ones, and, as Tony Blair’s school adviser and later education minister, Adonis fought school by school for a new breed of City Academies. His were different to the 1,800 that Gove has produced. Almost all of Gove’s are ‘converting’ schools, where the management of  a council-run school simply changes status. That’s relatively easy. The Adonis Academies were when Harris and ARK would take over failing schools and turn them around, with stunning results. Gove once told me that he’d hire Adonis ‘like a shot’, but what does Adonis think of what Gove has done?
 
There will be plenty more speakers at our symposium, and tickets are still on sale.