Labour’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill has returned to the House of Lords for final scrutiny before Royal Assent and will soon be inflicted on the country. Eroding both independence of schools and their accountability, this deeply regressive package turns its back on international best practice in favour of parochial interests and dogma.
When the last true reforming Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, began his overhaul of England’s education system in 2010, the direction of travel was to move more schools into Academy or Free School status: publicly funded schools with greater independence from local authority control. These schools typically had more freedom over budgeting, staffing and aspects of the curriculum. This was coupled with strong accountability through Ofsted, performance measures and funding that followed the pupil to enable a quasi-market — ensuring that good schools would grow, while failing ones would get taken over by better providers.
The result has been a massive improvement in the standard of education for English pupils. England now ranks amongst the strongest Western education systems in primary literacy and maths.
Pilloried at the time by Guardianistas as a weird, profoundly ideological experiment motivated entirely by Gove’s ambition and devoid of evidence for its merits,
the changes that Gove and his advisers made were in fact part of a global trend towards greater independence and autonomy for schools. Across the United States, Europe and the Gulf, a policy cocktail of more freedom for schools combined with radical accountability has also seen better results for pupils.
Indeed, the whole concept of modern-day academies was first pioneered in the United States in the early nineties. Known as charter schools, these state-funded but independently managed schools are granted operational freedom in exchange for accountability to the charter. Autonomy for accountability is the core bargain. They have rapidly expanded and now cover around 8% of the US state education system. Despite being a relatively small fraction of the US state school system, in charter-heavy cities, like Boston, New Orleans and Washington DC, graduation rates have risen significantly and charter schools strongly outperform their traditional state school rivals.
Qatar followed suit by introducing their version of the charter school system in the early noughties. So-called ‘independent schools’ were rolled out as part of Qatar’s ‘Education for a New Era’ reform programme. Putting variety and parental choice at the heart of the changes, Qatar saw its fourth grade maths scores increase by 26 points on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scoresheet between 2011 and 2015, one of the largest improvements among Gulf countries, together with year-on-year improvements in literacy.
Likewise, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates brought in charter schools during the 2010s under a public-private partnership model. The Emirate has enjoyed consistent, steady improvement in maths, science and reading attainment ever since, with charter operators bringing in new teaching practices and their ability to hire the best teachers globally making a profound difference.
While the academy-charter education system creates independent providers, other countries have opted for decentralising the management of schools and giving them greater latitude but keeping them within the state’s bureaucracy.
The Gulf state of Oman introduced its autonomy model through its ‘Basic Education Reform’ in 1998 and the ‘School-Based Management’ initiative in the early noughties. Both reforms introduced decentralised administration, giving greater responsibility to regional education directorates, school principals and teaching staff. Oman’s public schools gained more control over their operations while remaining centrally coordinated with national curricula and examinations. The result has been continual improvement in maths, science and literacy every year since they were rolled out, along with enhanced teacher training and infrastructure.
The Omani approach of devolving power within government-led provision raised educational quality, and yet, when New Zealand tried it starting in the late eighties, it began a long-term decline in education outcomes. So why the difference?
When New Zealand brought in its ‘Tomorrow’s Schools’ reforms in 1989, it created one of the most autonomous education systems in the OECD. Schools were still part of the state-school system but governed by community-led boards of trustees — not private operators. Unfortunately, this made it an administrative and political nightmare to replace operators or transfer the running of a school to new management. Unlike academies and charters, the crucial bargain of freedom in exchange for accountability was not struck, and education quality has suffered there ever since, with increasingly worsening results in both mathematics and reading performance.
Indeed, if you look at the countries that have seen the most dramatic turnaround thanks to school autonomy reforms — Estonia, Poland, Portugal and England — it is clear that accountability and consequences for failure are essential for driving up standards. All these now high-performing systems are united by an ability to replace failing school leadership, withdraw contracts or close schools that are letting down their pupils.
Labour would do well to heed the lessons here. Their Schools Bill turns its back on this global education revolution by not only reducing the institutional autonomy and innovation that freedom for schools brings but also weakens the ability to replace failing school leadership quickly. Their Bill will leave England in the worst of all worlds, with schools that are simultaneously more centrally controlled and rule-bound but also less accountable to parents and the pupils that attend them.
Labour often flaunts its internationalist ethos. But, when it comes to education, they have chosen the narrow interests of teaching unions and their ideological opposition to the rigours of competition over changes that have been proven to work wherever in the world they have been tried. England’s pupils will be the poorer for it.
Original image by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street.
