by
DAVID WILLETTS MP,
Shadow Education Secretary /
The North of England Education Conference is one of the most highly respected events in the education calendar. It has a reputation for tackling the big issues on educational policy away from the day-to-day hurly-burly of educational debate. This year’s conference is no exception. I therefore want to take this opportunity of inviting you to step back and review the way in which the shape of education is changing in this country. It is changing fast, it is changing significantly, and we need to assess very rigorously whether these changes are in the best interests of pupils and teachers.
From my vantage point in the House of Commons, I see a remorseless flow of regulations, directives, and initiatives which add up to an ambitious centralising agenda. And as I visit schools and LEAs and meet with representatives of the teaching profession and governors, they all say the same thing – that under this Government there is dramatic increase in central intervention and control from Department for Education and Employment.
All the evidence – legislation, finance, politics – points the same way. Let me look at these three areas in turn. First, the School Standards and Framework Act contains an extraordinary array of new powers for the DfEE to interfere in the activities of schools and indeed LEAs, to set up education development plans, Education Action Zones, powers even to set, very topically, school attendance targets. The Regulations following on from that legislation are still emerging from the Department and they all show a significant increase in the power of the Department to interfere in schools and LEAs.
This new legislative framework is reinforced by the second big change – a dramatic shift in the financing of schools. The Standards Fund enables Ministers to influence more strongly than ever before the way in which money is spent by LEAs. Many people in LEAs are finding it increasingly difficult to live with the Government’s 50-50 partnership funding. It means thay they have to put in money from their own limited resources in order to get matching money from the Government, all of it to go on the Government’s priorities which may not be their own.
Then thirdly, there is the central political pledge in the election manifesto – cutting class sizes for 5-7 year olds. It sounds attractive until you begin to see what it means once it is embodied in legislation and implemented rigidly in every school in the country. It cuts across all the principles of local management of schools and draws LEAs into much more detailed micro-management of individual classes.
It is therefore no exaggeration to say that there has been more centralisation in the 18 months of this Government than in the 18 years during which Conservatives were in office. It is by far the most significant change to have occurred in education since the election and it needs to be debated and scrutinised much more thoroughly. We must not let it happen by default.
There are four ways in which people respond to this analysis. I want to look at each of them in turn.
First, there is the thought that may well have passed through the minds of many people in this hall as I have been speaking. "It may be happening but it is no worse than it was under the Conservatives." I could devote the rest of this speech to addressing that concern and appraising our record during our years in office. Of course we made mistakes and the heavy-handed introduction of the National Curriculum still rankles in many a staff-room. But I came into politics to help shape the future of our nation, not participate in an oral history seminar. When William Hague appointed me to this post he did not say that Conservative education policy was perfect and all we need do was explain it better. We have both made it clear that we need to listen and learn and formulate a Conservative approach for education which escapes the mistakes of the past.
Some of the commentators like to play the game of spotting the connection between some of David Blunkett’s initiatives and work which was underway during our time in office. The Standards Fund is son of GEST. We launched research into teaching literacy and then the literacy strategy came along. We encouraged home school contracts and now this Government is making them compulsory. Some may think this proves that we are all in the same boat. But on closer analysis each of these specific examples actually goes to prove my point. Even if an idea is shared by the parties it is now being pursued in a far more heavy-handed and centralising way.
So let us move on to the second challenge to my analysis. There are some who still want to believe that this Government’s education policies are all about decentralisation, diversity, and experiment. Rightly or wrongly, Stephen Byers was seen as the man behind this approach. He was not averse to a bit of briefing that he and Tony Blair really wanted more liberalisation but they just had to get it passed the Secretary of State.
The crucial piece of evidence which is often cited by those who detect a radical liberalising agenda from this Government is Education Action Zones. They were supposed to be areas where there could be experiment, free from many of the regulations which inhibit it across the rest of the country. They were also supposed to be an opportunity for private sector providers to show what they could do.
But the reality is that the bids for EAZs were dominated by LEAs, not least because they were the only organisations which had the information which the DfEE required to back up a bid. And as for the private sector involvement, it has been largely confined to non-educational firms – Shell or BT, for example – providing assistance as part of their established community programmes. This has been going on for a long time and is admirable but it falls far short of what we were led to expect from EAZs – not least from a previous North of England Education Conference. So the evidence from the EAZs does not suggest any radical agenda here.
Then there is the third response to my analysis and again, I suspect that many people in this hall may have thought it – "At least the DfEE is showing signs of life and David Blunkett’s heart is in the right place so let’s give all these initiatives the benefit of the doubt." It is a very understandable reaction but also very dangerous if it means the suspension of any critical judgement in the face of the flurry of initiatives. For a start, all the activity may actually get in the way of raising educational standards. I spoke to one headteacher recently who said the only way she could focus
on raising standards in her school, which she thought the Government really cared about, was by ignoring most of the letters which came across her desk from the Department. If she tried to keep track of all of the Government’s initiatives then her school would be totally distracted from its core responsibilities.
The overall result of all these initiatives can be very damaging indeed if their effect is to fragment the responsibility of LEAs and individual schools to manage an aggregate budget in what they judge to be the best interests of local children. That seems to me to be the task of democratically-elected councillors and professionally-accountable headteacher. They cannot discharge that core responsibility effectively if they have to spend all their time applying for penny packets of money earmarked for the latest departmental initiative.
There is a fourth reply to this critique of centralisation and perhaps it is the most honest one. "So what?" There are some very thoughtful people who care about education who have basically given up on freedom for schools and a big role for LEAs. What they say to me is "You Conservatives did not go far enough. You set up OFSTED and collected all this information about school performance. You sponsored all the experiments to show what worked and what didn’t. And then you failed to put in a mechanism to force schools to do what is right. So David Blunkett is right to be a centraliser because what he is doing is instructing schools to act on the information about good practice garnered during your years in office".
Now the presidential address at this conference was given by Charles Handy who has thought long and hard about how to steer large-scale organisations into the new millennium. Imagine if someone came up to him and said "We have got a network of 24,000 local units. They have to operate in every part of the country providing services to every conceivable type of individual. They depend on the professional commitment and expertise of 450,000 staff. We are working out how to take them into the next century and we have decided that the way forward is to increase control from the centre, increase the staffing at the centre, send out more instructions from the centre, specify what goes on in those units in greater detail and require them to submit their plans through intermediate tiers up to the centre".
I do not want to put words into Charles Handy’s mouth but I think he would be amazed at the suggestion that this could be remotely an agenda for taking any organisation into the next century. It is not an agenda for 2000. It is the sort of agenda you would have had in an old-fashioned manufacturing firm circa 1950. The agenda for the next century is the exact opposite. It is about encouraging local decision taking. It is about trusting professional judgment to match teaching practices to local circumstances. It is about motivating staff by giving them responsibility. That is the challenge for the future of education and I am afraid that precious little of the regulations and directives that come from Westminster and Whitehall rise to that challenge.
So as I listen and learn and reflect on what should be the Conservative education policy for the new millennium, I am convinced that it has to be one which creates the greatest possible scope for local initiative and diversity and it means politicians exercising something which we find rather difficult – self-restraint- so that we do not get in the way of local schools trying to raise standards.
BASED ON THE TRANSCRIPT OF DAVID WILLETTS'
KEYNOTE SPEECH TO THE NORTH OF ENGLAND EDUCATION
CONFERENCE, SUNDERLAND : JANUARY 1999
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