Daily Sceptic Editor-in-Chief Toby Young has written in today’s Standard about the insanity of Bridget Phillipson trying to undo all the education reforms, some of them dating back to the Blair era, that have transformed England’s state education system into one of the best in the world. Here’s an excerpt.
In 2010 I debated Ed Balls on Newsnight about the Conservatives’ education plans. “The danger is that there will be winners in this policy,” he warned, a line later quoted by David Cameron to ridicule Labour’s attitude to his Government’s education reforms.
Fifteen years later, those reforms have proved to be the Tories’ proudest legacy. The performance of English schoolchildren in the international PISA league tables between 2009 and 2022 improved dramatically, rising from 21st to seventh in maths, 19th to ninth in reading and 11th to ninth in science.
Compare this with the performance of children in SNP-run Scotland and Labour-run Wales, which stubbornly resisted every reform. In the same period, Scotland slumped from 15th to 25th in maths, while Wales fell from 19th to 29th in science. Their results in the other subjects weren’t much better.
As Michael Gove — the politician responsible for these reforms — says, it is like one of those famous studies involving twins separated at birth. Over the past couple of decades we have carried out a twin study on an epic scale, educating children in England according to one philosophy and children in Scotland and Wales according to another. The results are in and there’s a clear winner. Which begs the question: why does Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s current Education Secretary, want to dismantle the reforms that have turned English state education into the envy of the world? …
But Gove went much further that his Labour predecessors, granting academies the right to employ ‘unqualified’ teachers (e.g. retired nuclear physicists), set their own pay and conditions, vary the length of the school day, manage admissions and — crucially — depart from the National Curriculum. …
Alongside the turbocharged academies, Gove allowed groups of parents and teachers to set up free schools — the most controversial of his reforms, but also the most successful. …
Children make more progress at England’s 600 or so free schools, on average, than at any other type of school. They’re more likely to be ranked good or outstanding by Ofsted and more likely to be oversubscribed. And needless to say, the school that gets the best A-level results in the country — better than Westminster, Winchester or St Paul’s — is a free school.
Yet Phillipson has pulled the plug on the programme, in what I can only describe as an act of wanton vandalism. No more free schools will be set up on her watch and those that were due to open soon, including a new chain of sixth forms jointly sponsored by Eton and one of the best multi-academy trusts in the country, will be throttled at birth.
If the education bill is passed academies will lose all the freedoms granted to them by Gove, while Ofsted will be rendered toothless. Control over state education will be handed back to local authorities so they can take up where they left off, driving standards down and consigning generations of schoolchildren to the scrapheap.
But none of that matters in Phillipson’s eyes. The important thing is that there should be no winners — and when she’s finished wrecking our state education system, there won’t be.
Worth reading in full, obviously.
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