More class war in the classroom. The Times reports the Government is determined ‘to end middle-class domination of top schools’. It says:
The education secretary Bridget Phillipson’s reforms will make it easier for poorer children and those with special needs to get a place at popular schools.
The education White Paper declares:
The school admissions code will ensure fairness for all families, particularly the most disadvantaged and children with additional needs. Access to high-performing local schools should not be dependent on factors such as families’ household income or local house prices. We will develop new resources to encourage schools to adopt more inclusive admission arrangements.
Certainly, it is true that there are still significant ‘attainment gaps’ between different schools. The problem comes with the Government’s mentality. It ought to be looking at good schools, celebrating their success and considering how it could be replicated. Instead, there is indignation at the ‘unfairness’ of such schools existing and a determination to attack them.
Thus with the independent schools, it is regarded as unfair that only the rich can afford to send their children to them. So VAT is imposed, resulting in only the very rich being able to afford them. What a perverse response. Margaret Thatcher widened opportunity with the assisted places scheme. Phillipson believes independent schools to be immoral and seeks to punish such aspiration.
Or if church schools are oversubscribed, that ‘unfairness’ is challenged and demands made that their religious ethos be diluted with non-denominational admissions.
The whole point of academies is that they have independence from local authorities and that good schools are able to expand. This is being undermined. Local authorities will be encouraged to establish themselves as academy trusts. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill gives more power to local authorities for ‘managing admissions’. This is code for avoiding the bureaucratic inconvenience of bad schools closing by forcing parents to send their children to them by blocking the expansion of good schools.
For example, the philanthropist Lord Harris of Peckham has made a wonderful contribution in sponsoring academies. Is it to be derided as ‘unfair’ as his schools get better results than others?
Free schools have been a success. So that is resented too, and planned openings have been cancelled. The BBC reports:
Plans by world renowned Eton College to open a free sixth form college in the north-east of England have been cancelled. The college in Middlesbrough was proposed in 2022, with the previous Conservative government giving plans the green light in 2023.
That was paused by Labour a year ago as part of a wider review into state schools and now a ‘minded to cancel’ decision has been made by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson.
Andy McDonald, Labour MP for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East, said it was the ‘right decision for our area’ as it would ‘undermine existing colleges’…The proposed school, which was led by Eton College and Star Academies, aimed to enrol 480 students as part of plans to open selective sixth-form centres in Middlesbrough, Dudley and Oldham.
In fairness, some of the content of Phillipson’s speech launching the White Paper was welcome. Her delivery, to put it kindly, lacked passion. Part of the time it felt like a hostage video with her being forced to read out claims at odds with her beliefs. ‘Standards’ and ‘excellence’ cropped up a few times. She even used the phrase ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’. That was the powerful condemnation from President George W. Bush of the patronising teaching practice of accepting that ‘disadvantaged’ pupils will do badly.
Yet the reality is not brave reform in the pursuit of excellence but Phillipson hurtling towards the lowest common denominator. Mush and mediocrity are embraced. The Blob and the teaching unions are being appeased. The ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ is being applied not just to pupils but to their parents too. League tables and Ofsted reports are viewed with suspicion as the parents might not ‘interpret’ them correctly. Phillipson feels parental choice should be curtailed as the educationalists know best.
The Michaela School in Brent flips this attitude on its head. There is no wallowing in victimhood there. The focus is not on the children being told how much difficulty they will face for being black, or from a council estate or from a single-parent household. Instead, they buck up, sing the national anthem and express gratitude for their good fortune. The academic results have, of course, been fantastic. Any decent Education Secretary would be thinking how could we have hundreds, or thousands, of such schools across the country. That is not Phillipson’s outlook. She is too overcome with sour, egalitarian defeatism to praise Michaela’s accomplishments.
The last Conservative government talked about ‘levelling up’ as an aim to regenerate towns and regions that had experienced economic decline. That was largely ineffective – relying on interventionist gimmickry and spraying around some subsidies. But when it came to schools, levelling up was very much the reality. Rather than good school places being a finite resource for the privileged, they should be available for all. What a tragedy that we are now sliding back to the resentful miserabilism of levelling down.
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