There is Nothing Like A Dame (School)

Amongst the many preposterous things about this misbegotten coalition (if you can call the Literal Dimwits becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Tory Party a “coalition” in any meaningful sense of the word) surely the most preposterous is that Michael Gove is now the Secretary of State for Education. Almost his first act was to ordain a (presumably expensive and completely unnecessary) re-branding of the DCSF back to the Department for Education.

At a time when the rest of us are being asked to tighten our belts, and given that it would have been perfectly feasible to have had a different policy, but kept the name the same, this is a waste of public money. How much public money, remains to be seen. I have written to my MP to ask, and if I get a reply, I will post it on this blog.

His capacity to cause havoc to the educational system, however, extends far beyond his choice of logo, colour swatches, web site and stationery. Because the Queen’s speech has shown us that the Tories are determined to press ahead with their policy of “Free Schools” and also they have demonstrated their intention to increase the number of Academies.

The “Free School” idea is the misbegotten spawn of that most nebulous and amorphous of Tory policies, “The Big Society”. What it means is that the government, in effect, is abdicating responsibility for large swathes of what it used to do, ie “governing”. And abdicating funding, as well.

So, from now on, if your local park is full of dog poo, instead of the government funding your local authority to clean it up, you are expected to round up a like minded citizen possee of pooper scoopers, to clean up this durn town! If Granny Smith can’t get out to do her shopping, you’re supposed to alert the social services or the WVS. The Social Workers can’t do it, because, fed up with cuts; low pay and hiring freezes, they are all now stacking shelves at Tescos for more money and less chance of getting crucified by the Daily Mail and the Conrad Blackshirts if they make a mistake.

So much for the Big Society. In education terms, specifically, what it means is, if you don’t like the school your state provides for your kids, then go and start your own school, and stop bothering us, we’re too busy filling in our expenses to run the country as well, you know!

There are, of course, already lots of schools that already are schools that were started in this manner. They are private schools, misleadingly called “public” schools, although Joe Public has about as much chance of going to one as I do of flying to the moon. But these public schools are not publicly funded. They are education’s private sector. What Gove proposes, however, is not only to allow people to form their own schools, for whatever reason, but to be allowed to use public money doing it.

In practice, I can think of only three categories of people who are going to be even faintly interested in the idea. The vast proportion of parents, it has been demonstrated time and time again, just want a good local school to teach their kids. Some of them, of course, also extend their definition of “teaching” to include parenting, baby sitting, moral guidance and discipline as well, because they are too lazy or inept to do it themselves.

But the categories of people who are going to be most interested in this proposal are Religious Nutters, Big Business, and Yummy Mummies in West London, who don’t want Tarquin and Jocasta mixing with the common children at a comprehensive. The Religious Nutters element worries me the most, to be honest, since it will inevitably mean schools run as Madrassars, and schools run by whirly-eyed fundamentalists who think that Darwin faked the fossil record. Using public money, let us not forget.

There is already too much interference in schools from Religion. Faith schools get a massively disproportionate amount of resource pumped into them (see also under Academies) and, to be honest, prolong the existence of religious differences and divides. I would much rather see all faith schools, and all schools for that matter, forced to abandon their faith status and instead to teach comparative religion as a compulsory subject. That would do much to dispel fear, distrust, and xenophobia in society at large.

Big Business, of course, is only interested in producing cannon-fodder for the factories, the fast food outlets, and call centres. When questioned, in a radio interview on the Today programme about what he would do to ensure that the Free Schools idea was not hijacked by those with their own agenda, Gove replied that they would have to demonstrate they had a “robust business plan” and that anyone who had what he called a “dark agenda”, would be prevented from going ahead. Leaving aside the fact that this answer showed that he is more interested, seemingly, in their business plan than in their proposed curriculum, I am intrigued by the idea of a “dark agenda”.

Who decides what is a “dark agenda”? How dark is dark? Obviously, anyone wanting to set up a “Free School Taleban Training Camp and Islamic College” is going to be seen to have a “dark agenda”. But supposing I decided to set up a school to teach children a curriculum based on, oooh, let’s say Socialist principles, relative morality, ethics and animal welfare. Given its pro-hunting stance, I would imagine the government would regard that as a dark agenda. But if McDonalds, whose slash and burn antics have been widely discussed in ecological circles, wanted to set up the Ronald McDonald Free School and Burger Flipping Academy, would that be dark? Because it bloody well should be! And how would the darkness vary if they promised to employ all of the alumni of such an establishment?

None of this would matter, of course, or it wouldn’t matter so much, if it wasn’t public money. People have a right to their own opinions, however dopey or bizarre, and they are perfectly at liberty to start schools, using their OWN money, which would then stand or fall by their own merits, ability and reputation, depending how many gullible parents they can find to pay the fees. But this Quixotic enterprise, where every whirly-eyed demagogue can cause further fragmentation and unnecessary waste and duplication in public education, is going to be funded by us. At a time when, if money is that tight, economies of scale should be the way to go, surely.

Which brings me to Academies. There seems to be an ongoing recent idea in education, which survives with a dogged and insidious persistence, akin to that of Japanese knotweed, that elitism in education for its own sake is a good thing. Inequality of opportunity is something to be striven for, apparently. Every time this idea is shown up to be bogus rubbish, it springs up again in another form, like the many-headed Hydra.

Its latest manifestation is the philosophy behind Academies. I would still mind, though I wouldn’t mind so much, if they just admitted that the prime driver behind Academies is once more to shift some cost off the public sector and on to the private sector’s balance sheet. But it’s always dressed up in the claptrap of Academies good, failing Comps bad. The latest philosophy is that each Academy, as it speeds unerringly upwards in its ceaseless progress through the concentric spheres of academic excellence, should “take a failing school with it”. I suspect that this , in practice, will devolve down to letting the oiks use the Academy’s playing fields once a week.

To those who believe that Academies have some sort of intrinsic superiority over all other forms of school, I lay down this simple challenge. Take the average, bog standard, failing inner city comp, and lavish upon that school for three years all of the advantages and the resources of an Academy. Then, at the end of that process, we will be able to see, once and for all, whether it is the format, or the funding, that makes the difference.

In the nineteenth century, well-meaning old women started schools to keep the children of those who could afford it, occupied, while the parents earned a living, combining in effect babysitting with a rudimentary study of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Every time I think of Mr Gove, which is as infrequently as possible, and his proposals, I am inextricably drawn back to this: Mr Gove may not himself be a dame, but his educational policies are almost certainly a pantomime, and a pretty Widow Twanky one at that, as the late, great, Dr Spooner might have observed, had he been there to observe it.