Education in England - A Tragic Story of Conflict and Confusion
When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he promised the nation that his three priorities were: 'Education, education, education.
' Since he was a father of young children himself, many gave him the benefit of the doubt and believed that this would indeed be one of his major concerns.
But now, thirteen years later, what exactly has been achieved? Has the reality lived up to the inauguration rhetoric? Politicians are always at a disadvantage when they set themselves up as experts on educational reform, because while they've almost certainly been to school, there's absolutely no need for them to have gained any knowledge of the educational process.
Lawyers, doctors, accountants and teachers are examined, and go through a lengthy training procedure, before they're admitted to their professions.
This doesn't apply to politicians, who enter their secure, highly paid jobs without any formal qualification whatsoever.
They learn on the job, like brick layers and used car salesmen.
Their major hurdle is to win the support of the local party bosses and get themselves elected to parliament.
After that the sky's the limit.
If they exercise guile and Machiavellian cunning they may eventually gain a junior ministerial post.
The chosen few, with chutzpah and clout in the corridors of power, may then progress to become heads of major departments, like DEFRA, the Home Office, the Treasury or the Ministry of Education, which has now been reclassified as the Department of Children, Families and Schools.
The staggering fact is that they attain these exalted positions without having any specialist knowledge whatsoever of farming, policing, banking, economics or education.
If this lack of expertise is revealed, a cabinet reshuffle is quickly made to move them to another department, or elevate them to the House of Lords.
There's no question that more tax payer's money is being spent on education today than ever before.
The upkeep of state schools now costs the country more than £77 billion a year, an increase of two thirds in real terms since Tony Blair came to power in 1997.
This statistic is regularly quoted by spin doctors to demonstrate the government's clear commitment to the vital cause of education.
But anyone can spend money, particularly when it comes from someone else's purse.
What matters is the scale of improvements that this vast outlay has purchased.
Are we getting value for money? On this issue the all-party Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons has recently expressed serious doubts.
In a recent statement it suggested that a decade of additional expenditure has not resulted in a commensurate improvement in educational standards.
One in every five children is still unable to read when they leave school.
Over a billion pounds has been spent in the last thirteen years on initiatives to counteract truancy, yet more children are absent from school than ever before.
The number of teachers flocking to join the private sector, where they can enjoy greater freedom and smaller class sizes, has quadrupled in the last fifteen years.
One in four schools has been unable to fill vacancies for head teachers because of the unpopularity of the post.
Teachers are voting with their feet, because they're generally too scared to give public voice to their anger and frustration.
Those that do are ruthless in their condemnation of the endless bureaucracy and red tape.
Kevin Bullock, the head teacher of a top-performing primary school in Cambridgeshire, claims that children's education is being severely undermined by a bombardment of more that 30,000 government rules and regulations.
He estimates that the government 'has quadrupled the amount of information handed down to schools with the effect that heads can no longer get into the classroom, interact with the children and help inspire their staff.
' Bureaucrats feed on paper.
They are essentially number crunchers, which means they can only carry out their jobs if they're given numbers to crunch and data to process.
Most of this information comes from the return of forms where boxes have been ticked relating to KPAs and CVAs, which is Whitehall speak for 'Key Performance Indicators' and 'Contextual Value Added' scores.
Head teachers are bombarded by a never ending stream of reports, surveys, discussion papers, circulars, pilot schemes and consultation documents.
Government officials rarely have a well developed sense of humour, and no doubt failed to spot the irony when they sent head teachers a ninety-page document telling them how they could reduce their load of paper work! That was in addition to the almost four thousand pages of other government guidance sent to schools every year, a mountain of documentation that carries one and a half times as many words as the King James Bible.
This red tape has a stranglehold on all levels of education.
Infants once went to kindergartens where they learnt through playing with other children.
Now they go to nurseries, run by registered school minders, who since September 2008 have been forced to follow a state imposed curriculum, designed to ensure that children meet a series of sixty-nine targets of literacy, numeracy, social development and problem solving skills before they reach their fifth birthday.
As a direct result of this mounting government interference child minders are now closing their nurseries in droves, their numbers having dropped by nearly half in just over ten years.
This leaves many dual career couples with nowhere to send their offspring when they go to work.
It's not difficult to trace the origin of these problems.
Most stem directly from the Education and Inspections Act of 2007, which set up a new behemoth regulation body called the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, more commonly known as Ofsted.
It's this body which is making life intolerable for child minders, parents, teachers and pupils.
It's Ofsted which is insisting that schools should observe ridiculous health and safety regulations.
As a result one school has ordered children to wear goggles when they're using Blu-Tack, another to eliminate the sack race from the school sports programme because it was judged to be too dangerous.
Because of safety concerns, more than forty per cent of schools have now either cancelled school trips, or made them less challenging.
Officialdom lives in a protected cocoon, and clearly doesn't realise that life is a risky business, and children from the cradle onwards must learn how to handle these risks.
Far better for their long-term security that they should be brought up in an adventure playground than in a padded cage.
In its drive to control and micromanage, Ofsted has also introduced the highly unpopular SAT tests, which children must sit before they leave their primary schools.
As a direct consequence ten and eleven-year-olds spend approximately half their classroom time studying English and Maths.
The emphasis on these core subjects denies them the chance of getting a broad-based education designed to help them develop their full potential.
By passing these tests they may help their schools hold their place in the performance tables, but as a result they'll look back on their years at school as a period of drudgery rather than the best days of their lives.
With their noses to the 3Rs grindstone, children have little opportunity to develop their own personalities; to work as a team; to cultivate communication skills and learn about wider world of culture, music, art and science.
(For the uninitiated, SATS is a registered trademark which stands for either Standard Assessment Tasks or Scholastic Assessment Tests.
Nobody quite knows which.
) Children are now being tested to destruction, which is why the two main teachers unions are threatening industrial action if Sats are not abolished.
Significant cuts must be made in public spending if we're to reduce the unprecedented level of our national debt, but this mustn't be done in a way which impairs our educational system.
In 2005 Ofsted pledged to reduce its expenditure by a fifth over a period of three years.
This it failed to do by a wide margin.
With its ever expanding hegemony it continues to spend £222 million a year, while presiding over a sharp decline in educational standards and morale.
Ofsted is an experiment which has failed, and should be binned.
That appears to be the view of the House of Commons all-party education select committee, whose chairman recently asked 'What is the real value of Ofsted?' What does it actually deliver? 'Other countries don't have a vast inspection system but seem to be doing just as well as ours.
' One thing is certain, that education must be totally divorced from party politics.
It must never become a political football, otherwise it will be subject to constant instability and change, with the curriculum modified so that children are trained to be either young Tories or minor league socialists.
Christine Gilbert, the current head of Ofsted, is the wife of a labour MP who was recently called upon to apologise for financial irregularities.
How can she be considered politically neutral? And is she liable to be axed and replaced by a true blue leader if the Tories are returned to power at the coming election? To achieve stability, freedom and growth the control of education must be devolved.
Power must be decentralised.
Less is always more, when it comes to the scale of government involvement in the educational process.
There are currently eleven educational quangos working under the aegis of Oftsed, at a total cost of £1.
2 billion a year.
The Centre for Policy Studies suggests that two-thirds of these quangos should be scrapped, which would free schools of needless red tape and save the taxpayer more than £600 million a year.
I would go one step further, and replace Ofsted in its entirety, with the exception its key ingredients: Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Schools.
This proposal will be elaborated in the second in my trilogy of investigative reports on the state of Britain's education system, which will be posted early next week.
The proposal won't be popular with power hungry Whitehall mandarins, who will do anything for the British people - except get off their backs.
But the paradigm shift will benefit teachers, pupils, parents, local communities and the general cause of broader based, life style education.
It may sound a radical change, but I rest my case of the words of a nineteenth century Chief Inspector of Schools who said: 'Is it so small a thing to have enjoy'd the sun, to have lived life in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done; to have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes?' That's the sort of person I'd like to have in charge of the character development of my great grandchildren, whether or not he gets them to graduate cum laude from their kindergartens, schools and universities.
His name was Mathew Arnold, a poet and educational reformer who, not having to answer to quangos and politicians, had time to travel, read, reflect, write and study - luxuries which few teachers have time to enjoy today.
' Since he was a father of young children himself, many gave him the benefit of the doubt and believed that this would indeed be one of his major concerns.
But now, thirteen years later, what exactly has been achieved? Has the reality lived up to the inauguration rhetoric? Politicians are always at a disadvantage when they set themselves up as experts on educational reform, because while they've almost certainly been to school, there's absolutely no need for them to have gained any knowledge of the educational process.
Lawyers, doctors, accountants and teachers are examined, and go through a lengthy training procedure, before they're admitted to their professions.
This doesn't apply to politicians, who enter their secure, highly paid jobs without any formal qualification whatsoever.
They learn on the job, like brick layers and used car salesmen.
Their major hurdle is to win the support of the local party bosses and get themselves elected to parliament.
After that the sky's the limit.
If they exercise guile and Machiavellian cunning they may eventually gain a junior ministerial post.
The chosen few, with chutzpah and clout in the corridors of power, may then progress to become heads of major departments, like DEFRA, the Home Office, the Treasury or the Ministry of Education, which has now been reclassified as the Department of Children, Families and Schools.
The staggering fact is that they attain these exalted positions without having any specialist knowledge whatsoever of farming, policing, banking, economics or education.
If this lack of expertise is revealed, a cabinet reshuffle is quickly made to move them to another department, or elevate them to the House of Lords.
There's no question that more tax payer's money is being spent on education today than ever before.
The upkeep of state schools now costs the country more than £77 billion a year, an increase of two thirds in real terms since Tony Blair came to power in 1997.
This statistic is regularly quoted by spin doctors to demonstrate the government's clear commitment to the vital cause of education.
But anyone can spend money, particularly when it comes from someone else's purse.
What matters is the scale of improvements that this vast outlay has purchased.
Are we getting value for money? On this issue the all-party Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons has recently expressed serious doubts.
In a recent statement it suggested that a decade of additional expenditure has not resulted in a commensurate improvement in educational standards.
One in every five children is still unable to read when they leave school.
Over a billion pounds has been spent in the last thirteen years on initiatives to counteract truancy, yet more children are absent from school than ever before.
The number of teachers flocking to join the private sector, where they can enjoy greater freedom and smaller class sizes, has quadrupled in the last fifteen years.
One in four schools has been unable to fill vacancies for head teachers because of the unpopularity of the post.
Teachers are voting with their feet, because they're generally too scared to give public voice to their anger and frustration.
Those that do are ruthless in their condemnation of the endless bureaucracy and red tape.
Kevin Bullock, the head teacher of a top-performing primary school in Cambridgeshire, claims that children's education is being severely undermined by a bombardment of more that 30,000 government rules and regulations.
He estimates that the government 'has quadrupled the amount of information handed down to schools with the effect that heads can no longer get into the classroom, interact with the children and help inspire their staff.
' Bureaucrats feed on paper.
They are essentially number crunchers, which means they can only carry out their jobs if they're given numbers to crunch and data to process.
Most of this information comes from the return of forms where boxes have been ticked relating to KPAs and CVAs, which is Whitehall speak for 'Key Performance Indicators' and 'Contextual Value Added' scores.
Head teachers are bombarded by a never ending stream of reports, surveys, discussion papers, circulars, pilot schemes and consultation documents.
Government officials rarely have a well developed sense of humour, and no doubt failed to spot the irony when they sent head teachers a ninety-page document telling them how they could reduce their load of paper work! That was in addition to the almost four thousand pages of other government guidance sent to schools every year, a mountain of documentation that carries one and a half times as many words as the King James Bible.
This red tape has a stranglehold on all levels of education.
Infants once went to kindergartens where they learnt through playing with other children.
Now they go to nurseries, run by registered school minders, who since September 2008 have been forced to follow a state imposed curriculum, designed to ensure that children meet a series of sixty-nine targets of literacy, numeracy, social development and problem solving skills before they reach their fifth birthday.
As a direct result of this mounting government interference child minders are now closing their nurseries in droves, their numbers having dropped by nearly half in just over ten years.
This leaves many dual career couples with nowhere to send their offspring when they go to work.
It's not difficult to trace the origin of these problems.
Most stem directly from the Education and Inspections Act of 2007, which set up a new behemoth regulation body called the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, more commonly known as Ofsted.
It's this body which is making life intolerable for child minders, parents, teachers and pupils.
It's Ofsted which is insisting that schools should observe ridiculous health and safety regulations.
As a result one school has ordered children to wear goggles when they're using Blu-Tack, another to eliminate the sack race from the school sports programme because it was judged to be too dangerous.
Because of safety concerns, more than forty per cent of schools have now either cancelled school trips, or made them less challenging.
Officialdom lives in a protected cocoon, and clearly doesn't realise that life is a risky business, and children from the cradle onwards must learn how to handle these risks.
Far better for their long-term security that they should be brought up in an adventure playground than in a padded cage.
In its drive to control and micromanage, Ofsted has also introduced the highly unpopular SAT tests, which children must sit before they leave their primary schools.
As a direct consequence ten and eleven-year-olds spend approximately half their classroom time studying English and Maths.
The emphasis on these core subjects denies them the chance of getting a broad-based education designed to help them develop their full potential.
By passing these tests they may help their schools hold their place in the performance tables, but as a result they'll look back on their years at school as a period of drudgery rather than the best days of their lives.
With their noses to the 3Rs grindstone, children have little opportunity to develop their own personalities; to work as a team; to cultivate communication skills and learn about wider world of culture, music, art and science.
(For the uninitiated, SATS is a registered trademark which stands for either Standard Assessment Tasks or Scholastic Assessment Tests.
Nobody quite knows which.
) Children are now being tested to destruction, which is why the two main teachers unions are threatening industrial action if Sats are not abolished.
Significant cuts must be made in public spending if we're to reduce the unprecedented level of our national debt, but this mustn't be done in a way which impairs our educational system.
In 2005 Ofsted pledged to reduce its expenditure by a fifth over a period of three years.
This it failed to do by a wide margin.
With its ever expanding hegemony it continues to spend £222 million a year, while presiding over a sharp decline in educational standards and morale.
Ofsted is an experiment which has failed, and should be binned.
That appears to be the view of the House of Commons all-party education select committee, whose chairman recently asked 'What is the real value of Ofsted?' What does it actually deliver? 'Other countries don't have a vast inspection system but seem to be doing just as well as ours.
' One thing is certain, that education must be totally divorced from party politics.
It must never become a political football, otherwise it will be subject to constant instability and change, with the curriculum modified so that children are trained to be either young Tories or minor league socialists.
Christine Gilbert, the current head of Ofsted, is the wife of a labour MP who was recently called upon to apologise for financial irregularities.
How can she be considered politically neutral? And is she liable to be axed and replaced by a true blue leader if the Tories are returned to power at the coming election? To achieve stability, freedom and growth the control of education must be devolved.
Power must be decentralised.
Less is always more, when it comes to the scale of government involvement in the educational process.
There are currently eleven educational quangos working under the aegis of Oftsed, at a total cost of £1.
2 billion a year.
The Centre for Policy Studies suggests that two-thirds of these quangos should be scrapped, which would free schools of needless red tape and save the taxpayer more than £600 million a year.
I would go one step further, and replace Ofsted in its entirety, with the exception its key ingredients: Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Schools.
This proposal will be elaborated in the second in my trilogy of investigative reports on the state of Britain's education system, which will be posted early next week.
The proposal won't be popular with power hungry Whitehall mandarins, who will do anything for the British people - except get off their backs.
But the paradigm shift will benefit teachers, pupils, parents, local communities and the general cause of broader based, life style education.
It may sound a radical change, but I rest my case of the words of a nineteenth century Chief Inspector of Schools who said: 'Is it so small a thing to have enjoy'd the sun, to have lived life in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done; to have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes?' That's the sort of person I'd like to have in charge of the character development of my great grandchildren, whether or not he gets them to graduate cum laude from their kindergartens, schools and universities.
His name was Mathew Arnold, a poet and educational reformer who, not having to answer to quangos and politicians, had time to travel, read, reflect, write and study - luxuries which few teachers have time to enjoy today.
Source...