The new Labour government continues to bask in the afterglow of its landslide victory.  Perhaps because they haven’t actually done anything of real substance yet, intangible and fragile measures — such as how optimistic people feel — are said to have increased since July 4th.  Admittedly, given the mood of the country leading up to the election, a whole day without rain would probably result  in the same uplift, but in politics today you’ve got to grab any good news you can.  And it is undeniable that even those who did not vote red are relieved they no longer have to think about Sunak’s exhausted and morally empty government anymore.  The blues have gone away; things really seem to have got better.

Education at both primary and secondary school levels is riven with ideologues who believe that schools are places of cruelty

Except in education.  Early days it may be, but the signs so far are that the new government is going to have a damaging impact on schools.  Of course, the headlines the new Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, wants us to see are those that were flogged to death during the campaign: most notably the promise to impose VAT on independent school fees to help fund an additional 6,500 teachers. There are many who argue that the sums promised by Labour do not make financial sense, but this was always about politics, not money and most (but not all) independent schools will survive.  Such damage is serious, but contained to one relatively small sector.  The bigger, more worrying, implications for schools lie in those dry-as-dust areas that have been overlooked since July 4th: inclusivity and curriculum reform.

They don’t grab the headlines as much as hitting the toffs in their Hogwarts-like schools, but we all need to pay attention to what — and who — is going to be involved in shaping not only what our children are going to learn under Labour, but in what sort of classroom they are going to be expected to do this learning in. You would think that in education there would be a consensus view: namely, that schools should be orderly places which allow all children to get a good education before moving on to either university or employment. You couldn’t be more wrong. The truth is that education at both primary and secondary school levels is riven with ideologues who believe that schools are places of cruelty, that rules are oppressive, and that a knowledge-rich curriculum should be abandoned in favour of less prescriptive, more creative, skills-based courses.

Take this abstract from “Schools as damaging organisations”: In it the authors argue that “schooling in the Global North damages young people (and their teachers). The range of damage includes: the reproduction of social inequality via schooling and the psychological injury and practices of harassment and exclusion this involves for pupils; institutional structures of discipline and surveillance; brutalisation of young people; and the effects of participation and experiences of these practices for teachers.” My own optimism levels dropped quite considerably after reading that.

In this essay schools sound more like Gradgrindian institutions, rather than the mostly liberal and compassionate places they are. But many on the left seek to characterise schools today as trauma-inducing organisations that need to be reformed and made more “inclusive” and child-centred. What is worrying is that one of the authors of this article is Professor Becky Francis, who has just been put in charge of “refreshing” the National Curriculum by the Secretary of State.  Professor Francis sees structural inequalities everywhere: she is a strident critic of setting by ability, characterising it as “symbolic violence”, which is “incompatible with social justice”. Professor Francis’s research areas are ideological and principally focused on social disadvantage; it is difficult to imagine how they will not transfer to the “refreshed” curriculum that she will be so instrumental in shaping. Indeed, the main areas of focus for the review makes it clear that the new National Curriculum will have to reflect the “diversities of our society” so that “all children are represented”, coupled with an assessment system that “captures the full strengths of every child”.  If you try to argue against such wording you are immediately accused of being pro-exclusion and anti-inclusion,and who’d want that? The problem is that an examination system can’t be fully inclusive: it has to reward those who do well more than those who do not. If you try to bend the final outcomes so that more pupils are able to get more qualifications you have to work backwards and make what is taught in the classroom more accessible — or easier — as well. Standards, inevitably, will fall, as they have done in both Wales and Scotland when both countries, disastrously, reformed their own curricula to make them more inclusive.

“That’s fine in practice, but does it work in theory?”

That apparently innocuous, but much-overused term, inclusivity, is the bridge between what is taught, and how it is taught. Rumours emerged over the weekend about Labour seeking to curb powers that Headteachers have in sanctioning disruptive behaviour, and although much of the claims have been dismissed what does appear to be true is that the Secretary of State for Education has been in consultation with Anne Longfield, the founder of the Centre for Young Lives, a pressure group which actively seeks to ban permanent exclusions in schools. Longfield believes (inevitably) that we need “a much more inclusive education system” and that “children need to be in school learning”, even if this means that the education of other children is damaged.

Many on the left dislike permanent school exclusions, just like they don’t like school rules and public examinations. It is for this reason that Sadiq Khan appointed Maureen McKenna, as a consultant for London’s Violence Reduction Unit.  McKenna has stated that disruptive behaviour is “communication of a deeper issue”, but when school exclusions are reduced by ideology not good practice then, as we have seen in Scotland, poor behaviour increases.  Inclusion, both in practice and in pedagogy, has resulted in that country’s schools tumbling down the PISA league tables which measure achievement across school systems. It is a luxury belief system carried out at scale by the most privileged and damaging the most vulnerable.  

When I was doing my teaching practice I remember a left-wing Oxford academic turning to his class of aspiring Mr (and Miss) Chips and, when questioned about a new policy for schools which seemed to be doing well, asked: “that’s fine in practice, but does it work in theory?” He was only half-joking. The fear for many in schools today is that what we have seen in Scotland and Wales, which looked fine in theory but has proven to be terrible in practice, could be just a taste of what Labour will do in England.  I hope I am mistaken because if you get it wrong in the classroom then society, eventually, pays, and the price will be considerably higher than the money raised by sticking VAT on a few thousand independent schools.