Training | 2010.01.17
Slushy indecision | Peter Preston
Why did schools take wildly different decisions about the snow? Because Ed Balls passed the buck
It\'s Friday lunchtime in my local burger joint. Winter sun shines bright from a chill blue sky. Outside the pavements are clear of snow. Buses chug up and down the high street. But wait a moment! Something\'s wrong. The restaurant is chock full of mums and kids, big kids not toddlers. Why aren\'t they at school? A question that answers itself: I\'m only here feeding chips to my grandson because his school saw another nerve-jangling weather alert coming.
You probably read the headline figures : 9,000 UK state schools closed on Wednesday, with maybe 8,500 closed two days later. Equally probably, you watched TV pictures of drifts piled high along impassable country roads. So chambers of commerce and local businesses grew hot and bothered: so what? Surely – in a world where parents have to beg to take children out of school for a day – everyone was trying their best to keep the textbook pages turning?
Except the figures turn a touch contradictory when you dig more deeply. Southwark, where I live, had 40 schools (out of nearly 100) shut on Friday. But Lambeth, just over the road, had only 11 gates chained shut. And Islington reported a mere six closures. My nearest junior school was out of action all week. It stands beside a well gritted, utterly clear, main thoroughfare. The junior school 500 yards away was open.
Why the disparities? "The main reason schools told us they closed [on Friday] is because their staff were unable to get in," said Southwark defensively. On buses, trains, all running? By car, bike, on foot? The man next door, who cycles to work come white hell or drenching water, did his 20 miles to Shepherd\'s Bush every day. What so blighted 40 staff rooms around the borough?
The point about those 8,500 shut schools is that really nobody\'s in charge. Not Ed Balls\'s grand department of state, which staunchly believes that "essential travel includes pupils going to school" – but turns slushy at the thought of "unnecessary" safety risks . It "wants headteachers, who are very good at managing risk, to continue making sensible decisions. It wants parents to feel reassured that schools will stay open where risks of less supervision, late journeys home or minor bumps are less than the disruption to pupil learning".
Even Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon could contrive a more meaningful plot than Ed\'s damp scenario. It says what\'s hugely important, then passes the buck. It leaves tough calls to heads in their studies, but gives them no specific advice when they need it (or fear a no-win no-fee injury lawyer slithering round the playground corner).
Individual heads taking "sensible" but wildly different decisions is the name of the buck-passing game, then. It\'s a condition that says a lot about the state of British education – about a central government that wrings its hands in crisis, about local government too local to get its act together, and about schools left alone when they most need help.
Education, education ? The current chat is all about pushing power down to Cameron community level, of "letting local people decide". But the real problem is that nobody decides, that Southwark shuts while Lambeth stays open (and so on, from council to council). If you\'re a doctor who can\'t attend surgery because her kids\' school is closed, you want something better than mush. If you\'re a shopkeeper devoid of assistants, you want certainty, too. If you – ultimate irony – are a teacher who misses work because your children\'s school is closed, then the circle of potty indecision comes complete. And, if you\'re a class warrior picking up points, you can\'t miss the fact that private schools on the same road as shuttered state ones were open throughout.
Can we do it better? Yes, surely we can. And no, you can\'t have any more ketchup on your chips.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]hools-snow-indecision-ed-balls
