The spat with Michael Gove over the teaching of First World War history shows it’s time Labour’s Tristram Hunt seized the high ground on education policy
You are shadow education secretary. Interviewed by the Times, you wear a navy blue Barbour and say teachers should be re-licensed every five years. Offered space by the Sun, you write short sentences and promise ‘behaviour experts’ to stop kids messing about in school. Invited to contribute to the Observer, you quote four scholarly historians and put the boot into Michael Gove over his ‘crass’ comments on teaching the First World War.
In the age of round-the-clock media, Labour’s Tristram Hunt plays his part with more confidence and style than his predecessor Stephen Twigg who, when I interviewed him last year, pleaded guilty to nuance, thus summing up in a word why he made little impact. Gove, a journalist by trade, approaches the position of Education Secretary as though he were still writing columns for the Times. He spins thin ideas, fit for 800 words on a quiet Monday morning, into pompous homilies that can be dressed up as policy. Hunt strives to match him, column for column, headline for headline.
Only one of them has power but it is less than he pretends. Gove may have taken more control over schools than any single person in English history but even he cannot bug every classroom to ensure that the First World War is taught as a patriotic triumph. Nor can he order the destruction of every recording of Blackadder with its incorrect (in Gove’s view) portrayal of the war as ‘a misbegotten shambles’.
As for Hunt, his position is impossible. Education policy has been essentially bipartisan for more than 25 years. Parental choice of schools (within limits); a high-stakes regime of tests and exams, with published league tables; a growing role in state education for the private sector; a diminishing role for local authorities and an enhanced one for central government; a harsh, managerial attitude to the teaching force: this framework is not seriously contested. Many of Gove’s schemes – creating more academies and free schools, for example – elaborate policies pursued by Labour when in power.
The Labour leadership, cautious to a fault, gives Hunt little scope for radical departures, even if he were so inclined. He is reduced to arguing over nomenclature – his free schools would be called ‘parent-led academies’ – and offering content-free soundbites on matters that are no business of his.
An education secretary’s job is to ensure the legal framework allows teachers to keep discipline and that it protects children’s and parents’ rights. Likewise, the law should ensure that heads and governors have powers to dispense with incompetent teachers after due process. Schools do not (or should not) require ‘experts’ to stop children, as Hunt puts it, ‘chattering on the back row’. A bureaucratic licensing system is not (or should not be) needed to check that teachers can teach; they are not self-employed professionals like GPs, vets and accountants.
Yet there are real issues for Hunt to highlight without violently upsetting the consensual applecart. To his credit, he has made a central theme of Gove’s ruling that academies need not employ qualified teachers and his virtual dismantling of college-based teacher training. Tories do not believe that teaching requires discrete skills and knowledge; a graduate with an upper second, a personable manner and a smart suit can just breeze in and do it, they think.
Parents, however, dislike the idea of unqualified teachers. Equally, they fear schools falling increasingly under the control of privatised chains and a Tory government eventually allowing them to make profits. Nor are they enamoured of the relentless regime of tests and exams.
Gove is a smart journalist but a poor policy-maker. By refusing to compete for headlines and instead highlighting issues of substance, Hunt can seize the high ground for himself and his party.
Peter Wilby is a writer, commentator and former editor of the New Statesman
This opinion piece was first published in the January/February edition of Public Finance magazine
