Training | 2009.09.03
Old Tories in disguise | Ed Balls
Michael Gove\'s Swedish flirtation masks a deeply unfair, laissez-faire approach to education
The first group of young people to have been entirely educated under Labour pick up their GCSE results today. No doubt this will provoke some commentators into even greater efforts to do down their achievements – claiming more young people succeeding must mean exams are getting easier.
In the early years of David Cameron\'s leadership, the Tories didn\'t join in this annual "dumbing down" chorus. But over the past year, they\'ve changed tack with a concerted campaign to criticise the state education system and rubbish the achievements of young people.
Of course, making the case for cutting investment in our schools, even in the middle of a recession, is easier for the Tories if they also deny the huge improvements of the last decade. But also reflects something more worrying – the emergence of Michael Gove \'s increasingly narrow and deeply conservative view of education policy.
My ambition is a state education system in which every child can succeed and can fulfil their potential. That requires a choice of excellent qualifications for all young people – whether their strengths are practical, academic or both; whether they want to go to university, get a job or an apprenticeship.
It means attracting the best graduates into teaching, backing strong headteachers to combine tough discipline with inspirational leadership, but being uncompromising when performance isn\'t good enough. And it demands, as our children\'s plan sets out, that schools work with parents and other professionals to tackle all barriers to children succeeding – inside and outside the school gates.
Over the past year, Gove has set himself against this vision of excellence for all. He dismisses our children\'s plan as a distraction. He opposes our radical reform to raise the education and training age to 18. And he refuses to match our guarantee this September of a place in school, college, training or an apprenticeship for every 16- and 17-year-old who wants to stay on.
But it\'s on qualifications and school improvement where his views are fully revealed. Now Gove has entrenched his opposition not just to diplomas but all vocational qualifications, saying they should be excluded from comparisons of schools\' overall performance. I find this baffling. Time after time I\'ve visited schools where heads have proudly shown me design and dance lessons and told me those subjects have inspired young people and improved their maths and English results too.
Instead of destroying the damaging old divide between "excellent" academic qualifications for some and "second class" for the rest, the Tories seem determined to turn back the clock. It is the wrong approach for the 21st century.
Our diplomas, combining theoretical and applied learning, are our best chance to break this historic divide. They are widely backed by employers and universities and I\'m determined to do everything we can to make them a success.
Our schools white paper set out how we will establish chains of schools so our best school leaders can help transform other schools. And our national challenge means there is now extra investment and an action plan for all schools where less than 30% of pupils get five GCSEs at A*-C grade, including English and maths. Over half of all secondary schools, over 1,600, were below this standard in 1997. That\'s now down to 440 – just one-in-seven schools – and we expect that to fall below 280 following today\'s results, on track to the national challenge target of zero by 2011.
Michael Gove says this approach is too "centralist". Instead of local government being the strategic commissioner for education in their area, his approach – the so-called "Swedish model" – is to sit back, tell parents who want better schools they must set them up themselves and wait for the market to decide.
But this free-market approach is unfunded, unfair and unworkable. As the Observer reported this week a major study by the Swedish education agency shows that far from driving costs down, as the Tories have tried to claim, their system of independent school providers actually drove costs up. At a time when the Tories are already committed to cutting frontline spending on schools, their uncosted and expensive experiment would create thousands of extra surplus places and inevitably mean big cuts to existing schools as their smaller education budget is spread more thinly.
While parents want action to raise standards and guarantee choice, the Tories would leave underperforming schools, disproportionately in poorer areas, to decline and slowly wither away. As for their bold talk of 3,000 new schools, that would mean one new school opening every working day for 15 years. No wonder senior Tories are whispering that the policy is unworkable and unrealistic.
By dressing up his policy in Swedish clothes in the hope it looks progressive and socially democratic, Michael Gove is trying to hide the true nature of his deeply conservative, unprogressive and laissez-faire approach to education.
Labour\'s education policies will rightly be scrutinised this week. But so too must Michael Gove\'s Conservative alternative.
Ed Balls MP is secretary of state for Children, Schools and Families www.edballs.com
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ed-balls-education-policy-gcse
