The new Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson, addressing her civil servants in Sanctuary Buildings, called her new post “the greatest job in Government” and her appointment her “proudest moment”. I wish her well. She has a big agenda, some of which deserves not to be contentious: strengthening apprenticeships and further education colleges, raising the status of the arts, improving outcomes for pupils with special educational needs, promoting school sport, providing more “expert teachers”. Who could disagree with any of this?
She promises, as she should, to build on the work of the last Government. There are Conservative achievements she would do well not to undermine, above all the introduction of academically robust GCSEs and A levels and rigorous pedagogies to improve literacy in primary schools. She should also learn from the past Government’s mistakes and in particular its failure to stop education being distorted by the intrusion into schools of EDI, Critical Race Theory, gender ideology and the whole decolonisation and white privilege agenda – including the abuse of school budgets to subsidise the work within schools of bodies such as Stonewall or Schools of Sanctuary promoting all this. Bridget Phillipson’s criticism just before the election of the last Government’s ban on teaching gender ideology in schools suggests worryingly that she may be relaxed herself about some of these practices but she must realise that they are widely seen as antithetical to an education which frees rather than closes minds and are not what most parents want for their children.
As someone who (like the author of this article) read modern history at Oxford I also hope the new Secretary of State will look back at the historical record of previous Conservative and Labour holders of her post and see what it takes for a Secretary of State for Education to leave behind an enduring legacy. Of the 22 Secretaries of State for Education since 1986 only three stand out for having done this: two Conservative and one Labour.
Kenneth Baker (1986-89) had a strong belief in education as the transmission of Matthew Arnold’s “the best that has been thought and said” and succeeded in incorporating this notion, for the first time in this country, in a national curriculum which in its essence is still with us. David Blunkett (1997-2001) had two clear priorities which he drove forward ruthlessly: a radical improvement in literacy and numeracy at primary level and the introduction of a citizenship curriculum designed to turn children into reflective members of a democracy (not slavish adherents of modish ideologies, as some Left-wing educators currently might wish). Michael Gove (2010-14), ably supported by an impressive Minister of State Nick Gibb, built on Baker’s achievements through improvements to the national curriculum and qualifications and, of the three, had the clearest vision of a ‘liberal education’ that exists for its own sake, as something of value in itself for the moral and intellectual improvement of the individual, rather than as a tool in the hands of a Government intent on turning the world upside down.
In addition to her recent predecessors I hope the new Secretary of State may also find a moment to reflect on the record of the first woman to hold her post: Ellen Wilkinson, a socialist and one-time Communist, appointed to Attlee’s post-war Labour cabinet in 1945 and only the second woman to serve as a Cabinet Minister. Chiefly known for her role in extending the school leaving age, she advocated the kind of knowledge-rich education she had as a girl managed to provide for herself at home through reading writers like Huxley and Darwin. It was this “grammar school education” she wanted to make available for all with the aspiration of turning England into “a Third Programme nation”, one that valued high culture and serious writing. As with many other leading figures of the Left in the last century – and “Red Ellen”, a.k.a. “The Fiery Particle”, was the Left of the Left – support for a traditional subject-based curriculum focused on transmission was unwavering and felt not just to be compatible with her thirst for ‘social justice’ but a means to its attainment.
There is little in the Labour Manifesto to suggest that a deeper embedding of the Arnoldian “best that has been thought and said” is likely to be central to the new Government’s five-year or 10-year plan. The manifesto’s overwhelming message is of a utilitarian view of education, one judged by how far it breaks down “the barriers of opportunity”, improves “the life chances of all of our children”, supports the economy, makes young people “ready for work” and, in the case of universities, brings economic benefits to local communities. I am not suggesting for a moment these are not worthy outcomes of an education, just that they are more likely to be achieved as unintended rather than intended outcomes. Put forward as the main purposes of education they lead to a preoccupation with topics that are relevant and contemporary, a concentration on socialisation at the expense of education and a use of history merely as source material for discussing contemporary causes.
Particularly worrying in the Labour Manifesto is the “expert-led review of curriculum and assessment” aimed at delivering in due course a curriculum which is “modern” as well as “rich and broad, inclusive and innovative”. I have three concerns.
First, it is taken for granted before it even starts that the review will lead to a major revision. There have been too many of these over the last 30 years, not least for the sake of the sanity of those who teach in and run schools. Do we really need another one just because this is what new Governments or new Secretaries of State feel they have to do, even before they have heard the “expert” arguments for and against?
Second, the enticing words “modern”, “innovative” and “inclusive” usually signify a barely hidden intention to remove something of value within current practice. For example, wouldn’t it be “modern” to merge history and geography into a new contemporary-focused “social studies”, or to get rid once and for all of what many years ago the Chair of the National Association for the Teaching of English denounced as “the arse-achingly boring” requirement to study two Shakespeare plays by the age of 14?
Third, can we be reassured that the “experts” involved in the review include some of those who helped a previous Government shape the “knowledge-rich” curriculum on which the manifesto claims it wishes to build (or people with similar views) so that what emerges does so from a genuine debate among people who differ and not just from an educational clique that happens to be flavour of the month for a new Government?
School education in this country is at a turning point. Under previous Conservative Governments, despite major improvements to the national curriculum and qualifications, it was allowed to drift away from its core purpose of transmitting knowledge into areas such as social and emotional learning, relationship education and a far from value-free induction into contemporary issues and causes. Any curriculum review panel needs to look very carefully at the pros and cons of the various directions in which it might move.
England is not alone in facing choices between widely differing educational ideologies, as an Education Summit organised earlier in the year by MCC Budapest, Hungary’s largest private education provider, that I attended has shown me. One does not have to learn what is happening in Slovakia, Spain or Paraguay, however, as I did at this event, to understand what the pressure to be “modern”, “inclusive” and “innovative” might involve. A journey north of the border into Scotland, where the SNP’s 2010 “Curriculum for Excellence”, which can most certainly claim to be “modern”, “inclusive” and “innovative”, would suffice. History and geography are merged into “social studies”, the curriculum relating to “the past” includes not a single date or named individual, and student activism is an integral part of the programme. The use of this transmission-light curriculum, in a country once at the centre of the Enlightenment, is unlikely to be disconnected from Scotland’s declining performance in PISA in recent years.
Fortunately for Scotland, the last couple of years have seen a powerful backlash against this educational vandalism from a grassroots body of teachers, lecturers and parents – the Scottish Union for Education (SUE) – which is giving heart not just to people in Scotland but also to those elsewhere keen to defend what is left of a traditional liberal education. If there is one final piece of advice I might be presumptuous enough to give to the new Secretary of State, it is that she ask her officials to monitor closely reports from this group about the reality of what is happening in classrooms and schools in Scottish education, not least to ensure that similar policies and practices in England do not lead to her having to face a similar backlash here.
Dr. Nicholas Tate was Chief Executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (1994-7) and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (1997-2000). In that capacity he was chief adviser on the school curriculum, assessment and qualifications to both Conservative and Labour Secretaries of State for Education. He is the author of What is education for? and The conservative case for education.
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