Studios, Schmudios …

Mimsy Gove’s latest wheeze, following in the footsteps of his predecessor Baker, the great wheezemaster, discovers the virtues of some new ‘studio schools’ where learning is to be geared to ‘the world of work’ (differing from the normal run of schools whose pupils presumably are not expected to have regard to that banausic way of life?). He is quoted in one newspaper as “incredibly excited by the studio schools movement”.

‘Studio schools’ look to be another add-on to the chaotic array of schools Mimsy already presides over. Lost in the mire of his ideology he seems happy to stumble into anything that looks ‘exciting’. For us impotent observers bemused by his antics, however, it would be rather more exciting if he were to offer some thoughtful view of where his rag-tag school empire is heading – more strategy, less of coups de foudre.

To judge by his remarks of the moment, his studios seem designed for the gammas – to make up for our national deficit of plumbers perhaps. His lofty academic principles don’t seem to allow him so far to untangle the differences, or connections, between academic education, vocational education and vocational training. Maybe he should use some vacation time to read up on processes of learning, in all its width and depth. If he can’t find time to get as far back as Aristotle, or even to bone up on Tomlinson, he could do worse than start by casting an eye on Richard Pring’s recent Oxford-Nuffield review of ‘Education and Training for the 14 to 19s’. It has obviously escaped his attention till now.

Juvenile

AN OPEN LETTER TO MR MICHAEL GOVE MP

Dear Michael

You are so often in my living room with your fellow News Night Review panellists I feel we are old friends. It’s always fun to hear the sparky late night chat about books, theatre and the arts.

So I hope you won’t mind my mentioning another matter you seem to take an interest in, the future of our nation’s schools. You are reported as saying you would like schools to be free to determine their own curriculum and their own budgets, answerable to parents not the local council.

Some of what you suggest is well within the main tradition of English education. In the nineteenth century it was the state which determined the curriculum, not local school boards. For most of the twentieth century central government and the exam boards influenced the curriculum through their regulations and teachers were free to choose their own methods. A few local authorities developed what might be called specialist schools, but curriculum and teaching methods were pretty well no go areas for local councils. At the same time, councils like Cambridgeshire, Sheffield and Inner London allowed their schools discretion to spend funds as they chose. Ken Baker seized on these examples and mandated local financial management for all schools. 

At the same time he took control of the curriculum. Only since his day has the Orwellian term “state school” come into common use. But like Thurber’s man who fell over backwards in trying to avoid falling forwards, you make a great mistake in supposing that parental power is the antidote to state power.  The recent brouhaha in Woking shows what can happen when a strident faction comes to dominate a parent body or a governing body. Facing similar problems many schools have enjoyed disinterested support from their local authority. Serving the whole community in their area the local council have a broader and more permanent interest in creating successful schools than the ephemeral group of parents who happen to have children at a school at any time.

I’m sorry to write at length, but with your Scottish independent school background and your heavy commitments to News Night, I thought you might appreciate a quick resume on England’s maintained schools.

DIOGENES

Baker to Balls: Coxcomb to Cock-up

Budget Day 2009: a day to remember for its revelations: in Parliament, of the government’s fiscal profligacy: in the Commons’ Select Committee on Education, of bitter recrimination over the last SATs fiasco. The Treasury gives us a tale of financial overextension and a mountain of national debt: the Edukremlin sits on a growing bric-a-brac of incompetence.

The government has been spending (our) money beyond its (and our) means and now must pinch public expenditure. In particular, for twenty years money, money, money has been flung gaily at education, education, education with scarcely a thought and with far too little result, starting from the specious grounds for ‘reform’ invented by the ‘88 Act. The result since then of brushing professional advice aside has been misjudgment, miscalculation and the noise of crashing programmes.  Somebody should list them and then calculate the total cost of all this reckless adventure.

The Chancellor wants to encourage professional talent to reinvigorate the economy and social progress. How about calling in the professionalism of educationists at all levels – first the massive resource of all teachers, and going on to academics, researchers, local authority education officers and advisers?  All this was for the asking in ‘88 but it was spurned – to be replaced by armies of bureaucrats, agencies, consultants and other privateering buccaneers who have multiplied on the fat of the land for decades. You want to cut waste, Mr Chancellor? Ask us old hands about it since you don’t seem to know about it, and we’ll tell you, gratis.

Mr Baker inherited a huge potential for rapid development in public education on sound foundations and then with glib self-congratulation in ‘88 he ditched it; the pitiable Mr Balls is now floundering in the mud at the bottom of the Baker ditch as its walls cave in under the pressure of layers of bureaucratic ineptitude.

Juvenile

PS. Those who know their Cumbrian Lake District intimately will recognise that minor eminence at the back of Skiddaw known as Great Cock-up Fell (OS coordinates available on request). I intend to take a photo of it soon. It will do nicely as a memento for Mr Balls to hang on his wall at home whenever he cedes office (there is a Little Cock-up as well, but Mr Balls surely deserves the view of the higher peak).

BANKERS 0 – EDUCATION MINISTERS 2 [after extra time]

The Select Committee unearthed one nugget. The four dejected bankers they carpeted had not a single banking qualification between them.  But we didn’t know that. And we trusted them.

Are the 30 men and women who have been Education Ministers/ Secretaries of State any more fit for purpose? Of the 16 Conservatives who have held this high office since 1944 Margaret Thatcher and Gillian Shepherd went to their local grammar school, Ken Baker’s school went independent, and poor John Patten went to a state funded Jesuit college.  All the rest were educated privately. And twelve of the 16 went on to Oxford or Cambridge.  Not much built in awareness here of what schools mean for the hoi polloi, the six in every seven among us who go to the local comprehensive.

The Labourites are slightly more in touch. Only seven of their 14 ministers were privately educated; only six went to Oxford or Cambridge.  Edward Short was briefly head of a secondary school, and Estelle Morris taught in local community schools for 18 years before she took to full time politics. Some triumphed over huge obstacles. Fred Mulley took his first degrees while a Prisoner of War.  David Blunkett was blind and fatherless, and Alan Johnson had to leave his grammar school at 15.

But perhaps the wisest of all was George Tomlinson, even though he left school and went to work at 12. “Minister”, he said 60 years ago, “knows nowt about t’curriculum”; that and how to teach were for the professionals.  Would that his successors were as aware of their own limitations.

Diogenes