The government has been falling badly behind in the popularity stakes. But the new education white paper is earning it brownie points
It might be too early to call, but the rather bold education white paper, published this week, looks like giving Labour a surprise lead in the political battle over public service reform.
Only a week ago, the idea of a fresh vision from Labour on any policy area was being belittled by a largely cynical commentariat, who have got into the habit of seeing everything Brown does as the last gasp of a desperate beast.
At the same time, an increasingly jumpy Opposition had got the bit between its teeth on arguably unrealisable pledges to increase spending, particularly on popular issues such as social housing and schools.
Yet by Wednesday morning, the headlines and commentary were cautiously welcoming. The positive spin was helped by some last minute, headline-grabbing surprises, like the MOT-style idea for teachers and the misguided plans to fine parents of misbehaving children.
To be fair to the government, most of the ideas in the white paper have been around for a while. The school report card, for instance, was the subject of lengthy consultation in the autumn, as was the move towards a more collaborative, localist model, which lies at the heart of the white paper.
In terms of the internecine struggles of the New Labour era, the paper marks the moment when Prime Minister Gordon Brown finally left the Blair years behind and stamped his authority on this key area of public service reform. There will be no more talk of targets; now the focus is on entitlements and guarantees. This is an engaging idea, despite the alarming possibility of litigious, disaffected parents lining up to seek legal redress.
More substantive is the redirection of resources to those who need them, scant as these resources now are. Four troubled local education authorities are to come under central government direction. There will be extra catch-up tuition for those who have fallen behind, up to one in five pupils in the early secondary years. And if the offer of a personal tutor for every child goes beyond a token promise, it will mark an extraordinary shift towards personalisation in state schools.
Gone are two of the key linchpins of the Blair era. The much disliked league tables, which always favoured selective schools and were increasingly hard to make sense of, even by professionals, are to be scrapped in favour of the report card. These will evaluate schools on a broader range of criteria, including pupil attainment, wellbeing and how well they are closing the gap between rich and poor pupils.
Gone, too, are the literacy and numeracy hours, another piece of classy political footwork. The decision will please bored and frustrated pupils and teachers, dissolve central control of schools in a key area and save hundreds of millions of pounds a year by not renewing contracts with the consultants who support this part of the primary school curriculum.
Here, however, the headline does not tell quite the whole story. A lot of those consultants were recently retired heads of English and maths departments or senior teachers, who travelled round the country helping teachers to raise standards in the three Rs. Who will now help teachers in need of a bit of outside school support, especially as teaching professionals face the five-yearly MOT?
Can the funds be found for all this change and consolidation? The government is as determined as a terrier to argue that it can and will. However, there has been something almost absurd about recent press interviews detailing the labyrinthine shifts of money that will take place within and between departments, especially without full public transparency on the nation’s finances as a whole.
But that a government in its twelfth and undoubtedly most difficult year can still take the initiative on public services is no mean feat. As one commentator observed yesterday: ‘[Schools Secretary] Ed Balls’s kaleidoscope prescription of academies, federations, local autonomy and central direction is not an easy political sell.’ It has many potential weaknesses and loopholes, but it is without doubt a seriously thought-out plan, ‘a complex response to an immensely complex service’.
Just for now, it has left the Opposition, – already weakened by uncertainty over whether to admit cuts in school budgets and its plans for Swedish-style free schooling – looking vulnerable for the first time in months. More significantly, the Opposition’s faith in the free market to provide education, particularly for the poorest, looks tired, inefficient and old-fashioned. In our current fast-moving political culture, this last charge is surely the most damning of all.
Melissa Benn is a writer and journalist
