It is a truth not-so-universally acknowledged that education reform is the single standout success of the last thirteen years of Conservative government. Through the dogged efforts of Michael Gove and Nick Gibb (so the story runs), the Tory educational approach has hauled up an English education system that was plummeting down world rankings under Labour.
The latest figures from the OECD’s Programme of International Student Assessment (Pisa) seem to confirm this. English schools and teachers have achieved their best ever ranking in maths: 11th in the world, up from 27th in 2009. Meanwhile, Labour-run Wales and SNP-run Scotland – both suffering under their own educational reform agendas – have fallen further behind. The ranking isn’t perfect but is useful.
Records of success like this have become so habitual as to almost seem passé. As Nadhim Zahawi set out for ConservativeHome last April, 86 per cent of schools are now rated as Good or Outstanding, versus 68 per cent in 2010. English children are rated as the best in the West for literacy; steady progress was made in reducing the gap between disadvantaged pupils and the rest.
Their achievements should be lauded. Not only because they provide one of the few useful examples since 2010 of how Conservative ministers have managed to navigate and work past the Blob, but because hundreds of thousands of children have seen a genuine change to their life prospects and their ability to read and write due to their efforts. Progressive dogma was challenged, overcome, and swept aside for better results.
As Robert Colville has written, that Wembley’s Michaela Community School, various Star Academies, and Sheffield’s Mercia School are amongst the top ten best-performing schools in the country is proof that neo-traditional, knowledge-rich, highly-disciplined methods of education work. Labour has been confronted with the inconvenient truth that the old ways are the best. They will ignore it. But it does show there has been some benefit in keeping the Tory flame burning.
Yet any panegyric to the Conservative record on education is tinged by two major blots on our copybooks. The first is the impact of the pandemic. Shutting schools was a disaster. England’s actual Pisa score for maths fell back to its level in 2012-2015 from a high in 2018. But since other countries suffered even greater falls, we rose in the rankings.
Improving discipline and making the curriculum more rigorous is of little worth if fewer pupils are there to take advantage of it. The data suggests that the number of pupils missing more than 10 per cent of sessions at school has doubled on pre-pandemic levels. Analysis by the Centre for Social Justice suggests 140,000 children are ‘severely absent’: a 134 per cent rise, or enough to fill about 140 schools.
This threatens to undermine all of Gove and Gibb’s efforts in aiming to reverse educational inequality. But, rhetorically at least, the Government seems far more preoccupied with aiming to get civil servants back into office than pupils into schools. The two don’t have to be at odds: as the so-called concrete crisis unfurled in September, half of officials at the Department for Education were working from home.
Still, the amusing sight of Gillian Keegan swearing about the lack of attention her good work was getting was indicative of the other great flaw in Tory educational policy since 2010: ministerial churn. Gove was shuffled off to the Whips Office back in 2014 to keep the teachers quiet ahead of the election. Despite seeming like the once-and-future Minister for Schools, Gibb had been sacked twice from the role before stepping down last month.
Since Gove, there have been nine Secretaries of State for Education in the last nine years – and four more since Zahawi wrote that piece. Since September 2021, we have had as many as Labour managed in thirteen years, with Michelle Donelan taking the dubious record as the shortest-serving Cabinet minister in history. Coupled with four changes in Prime Minister, this has meant a rapid turnover in approaches to education.
Whilst Gove, Nicky Morgan (his successor), and David Cameron were all on a similar page when it came to the importance of academies and standards, subsequent Education Secretaries and Prime Ministers have had different concerns and priorities. Theresa May focused on grammar schools, even if Justine Greening wasn’t so keen. Gavin Williamson switched the focus to skills but was overcome by Boris Johnson’s lockdown.
As a former apprentice herself, Keegan has made every effort to champion them over the more fashionable option of universities. But she has been overshadowed by a Prime Minister with a personal focus on increasing maths teaching at the expense of scrapping both A-Levels and the T-Levels championed by her predecessors.
In the absence of a clear message – the subject only merited a single page of the 2019 manifesto – the Conservative approach to education has become incoherent. Not only does it make this harder to champion one of our few successes in government, but it means the neglect of a policy area that everyone agrees is important.
We have all been to school; we all think we know best how to reform it. The saloon bar bore banging on about bringing back the grammars is of a piece with the overeducated leftie lecturer still preoccupied with tearing the remaining few down. Sunak’s passion for maths is his own interation, and is at least easier to conceptualise than Keir Starmer’s enthusiasm for ‘oracy’.
It would be a shame to see Labour take an axe to the progress the Conservatives have made on raising standards in the last thirteen years. But any failure to defend the Tory record is only downstream of the same self-indulgent navel-gazing that we have allowed to undermine every other aspect of our time in office. All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.