In the autumn before he was elected prime minister, Tony Blair, in a fit of possibly misplaced hubris, announced that his party would have a thousand days to prepare for the next thousand years. In the event it was only 974 days from the election to the millennium, but who could possibly be pedantic when the stakes were that high? Of course Blair was only being rhetorical with the truth, but the message his pronouncement contained, that of hope for the future after eighteen years of Tory misrule, lay at the heart of Labour's electoral appeal. Things, we were promised on that glorious night in May, could only get better. Yet, speaking from the other side of the millennium divide, one thousand days into a Labour administration, we have to ask whether or not they have. Although it is the health service that has arguably received the most attention when considering Labour's record, education is perhaps a better place to start. For education, education, education, as Tony Blair's inelegant use of the Ciceronian triad put it, was the top priority. That and joined-up government, a theme to which we shall return. To be fair, the Labour party did inherit a parlous state of affairs. True, exam results had been steadily rising under the Tories, but everything else had fallen; in particular, teachers' salaries and the overall expenditure on schools. This left Labour with a demoralised profession teaching large classes in crumbling school buildings. Perhaps Labour's biggest challenge, however, was to tackle the legacy of the Conservatives' drive to transform education into a marketplace. The Conservatives' essential premise was that, as with business, competition between schools would drive up standards. The economic indicators of success were to be exam results. For the first time, a stock exchange of school performance, the so-called league tables, were to be published to enable parents to trade their children against a school's future success. In the event it was shrewd investors and schools already rich in cultural capital, to use the sociologist Bourdieu's term, who profited by the system. Stephen Bali's(1) work, along with that of fellow researchers Sharon Gerwirtz and Richard Bowe, did much to expose the means by which the education market privileged those parents who knew how to work the system. More particularly, however, their research demonstrates the way in which it was certain schools who benefited from the market rather than the consuming parent. As schools grew in popularity, so they became oversubscribed, and more often than not this led to selection via the back door, either because the house prices in the catchment area became so prohibitively expensive that only the well-to-do could afford them, or because the schools themselves began to introduce screening devices through entrance tests and interviews, to ensure that only the academically able or socially adjusted gained entrance. Many of these schools became what was known as `grant maintained'. This enabled them to opt out of local authority control and so to control even more tightly their own entrance procedures. Unlike local authority schools, they could, if they chose, refuse to accept pupils with special needs or to take children that had been excluded from other schools. In addition they received preferential funding from a central government quango, rather than being reliant on local authority expenditure. Both these features accelerated the divide between the educational haves and have-nots until the distance between schools looked more like a chasm. Yet the rhetoric insisted that the schools at the top were `good' schools, while those at the bottom were `bad'. No acknowledgement was made of the fact that what these figures most revealed was the level of deprivation of the communities that the schools served. This failure to admit the glaringly obvious is an issue to which we shall return, for it also lies at the heart of Labour's shortcomings. …
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Jan 1, 2023
Louise Morris + 6
Open Access
