John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector and vice-chair of the Conservative Education Society.
At a presidential candidate meeting in Hertfordshire (not Cambridgeshire, as he thought) in 2019, Jeremy Hunt replied to my question about the Academy scandals that “I should concentrate on what was going right, not what was going wrong.” Now we see where that kind of thinking has led us. In my last article, I listed what I think we have achieved since 2010. This one will focus on what has gone wrong, why, and how similar mistakes can be avoided in the future.
The first mistake was cutting education far more than was necessary to meet Treasury targets and fund the transition to academisation. Something had to be done to combat the complacency of local authorities, who were content to do nothing about failing schools and blame all the problems on the evil Tories. Mossbourne Community Academy, which I led to the first Conservative seat in 2005, had an immediate and dynamic effect on local schools, which were forced to look at their own results and start competing.
Michaela has achieved even more. Her philosophy of “fee-free public education” and her motto “Work hard, be kind” are spreading to other schools and becoming a national principle. Allowing almost anyone to open a free school – and the government was specifically warned not to extend this to Steiner schools – discredited the idea of Free Schools and strengthened the resistance of local authorities, who set about making life as difficult as possible for them with every weapon at hand, including tolerating bad behaviour in the name of special needs and disabilities (SEND). Forcing other schools to become academies and using Ofsted as a weapon to suspend them for minor offences to speed up this process was worse, and antagonised the entire education profession. This policy, developed in secret and made public by Nicky Morgan in 2016, has seen Conservative support among teachers fall from 13 per cent in 2019 to less than 5 per cent in a recent poll. Conservative policies have never enjoyed majority support among teachers. This is no reason to eliminate this support altogether.
Ofsted’s trouble began with the appointment of Sir Michael Wilshaw, one of the most distinguished headteachers in history, as chief inspector. Sir Michael told the Education Select Committee that he was wholly unprepared for the task and that it was not the right job for him. The skills of a headteacher – primarily a leader and manager – and a chief inspector – an assessor of other people’s work and the effectiveness of policies – are different. Labour gutted the inspectorate in 2005 by replacing its emphasis on first-hand evidence with adherence to a new set of government policies. Instead of a return to HMI inspection principles, the government doubled down on unconstitutional Labour tyranny and set us on the path to Caversham.
The next loser is David Willetts’ proposal to treble university fees, along with a crippling interest rate. Willetts ignored the advice of senior figures about the devastating effect this would have on young people, and at the same time forced the Open University to increase its fees in line with the Liberal Democrats’ idea of a graduate tax, thereby restricting access to older students. Compared with this, replacing the NGOs we had worked so hard to abolish with one big NGO, the Education Endowment Foundation, staffed by New Labour officials and people opposed to Conservative principles, seems a trifle. It has done nothing, given our opponents a lever for debate, and cost hundreds of millions.
A longer list of errors stems from a lack of attention to detail. I was on the side of phonics as the basis of reading during the reading wars of the 1980s, and I have the scars to prove it, but the approach backed by this government and the Labour Party does not take sufficient account of the influx of French into English since the Norman Conquest, and the fact that around a third of English letter patterns originally represented the sounds of other languages. The reintroduction of grammar, spearheaded by the Labour Party adviser, was hampered by terminology such as the notorious “frontal adverb”. Most teachers had to look it up in the dictionary and were forced to use it against their better judgment. Ebacc, which saved languages from oblivion, was overloaded from its basic core to the point of driving other subjects out. It may not last until Christmas. Forcing GCSE retakes on 16-year-olds, rather than designing courses to meet their basic skills needs, led to a catastrophic failure rate and huge pressure on their teachers.
Finally, Cummings, Truss and the neoliberal agenda. Cummings, intelligent but impulsive, appealed to Tory politicians for his ability to demolish the mould and think outside the box, but he lacked a clear vision of the consequences of his ideas, as did Truss with the wider impact of her neoliberal economics. They, the donors who sponsored them, and David Cameron, who bought into Truss’s agenda and promoted it, are the main authors of our rejection by voters. We must learn from their mistakes as we rebuild.
