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The UK has, by accident, been running a prolonged experiment in education policy for the past three decades.
Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England have all pursued radically different approaches to schools policy since the advent of devolution. The results are in: and outcomes in England, where the Tory party has enthusiastically built upon New Labour’s approach to schooling, are much better than elsewhere in the UK. The country has climbed the Pisa international rankings, which compare educational outcomes between countries, and suffered a smaller real-terms deterioration after the Covid lockdown than its peers.
Given that the Conservatives have conducted a high number of policy experiments since 2010 with a low number of unalloyed successes, you would think the government might be inclined to shout about this one, or indeed talk about it at all.
The government did clear its schedule for the day the most recent Pisa rankings were published — but to talk about immigration, rather than education.
One reason for the government’s silence is that England’s increase in literacy and numeracy, and its striking success compared to other countries in educating the children of immigrants, are cross-party achievements. The relevant policies build on the work of successive education secretaries under Tony Blair, which in turn owed much to the foundations laid by former education secretary Kenneth Baker in 1988, when he introduced GCSEs and the national curriculum.
Neither the government nor the opposition is entirely comfortable discussing the Pisa success in England when the competing systems in devolved administrations have features which are politically attractive or represent personal hobby horses. Plenty of Conservatives hanker for a return to the old system of grammar schools and secondary moderns, a version of which is still used in Northern Ireland and remains in a few English counties. The modern Welsh education system, meanwhile, is the creation of the Labour party with a large dose of assistance from the Welsh Liberal Democrats, whose former leader Kirsty Williams served as the region’s education secretary in successive coalition governments.
Talking loudly about what has gone right in England over the past 30 years therefore involves explaining loudly what your own colleagues have done wrong.
But the Tories’ quietude comes at a cost, and not just to them. Their political position wouldn’t be transformed if they talked more about the public policy success of their time in office, but at the margin it would surely be less self-destructive than their preferred ambient soundtrack about how dreadful the country is. A better understanding of what the party did right in education would also help the Conservatives make the most of their remaining time in government — and offer a number of useful pointers to Labour, too.
When, as education secretary a decade ago, Michael Gove railed against his opponents, dubbing them “the blob”, he was giving a name to a real phenomenon: an establishment within education ranging from senior headteachers to the Institute of Education to the leaders of the major teaching unions. There is an open question about whether slapping a pejorative label on them was helpful, and it is one that divides even Gove’s closest allies. Some think that a more belligerent approach was a necessary part of further expanding the scope and scale of Labour-era reforms such as the introduction of academy schools, free from local authority control, while others believe it was a counterproductive approach that made Gove more unpopular than he needed to be.
What is certain is that the blob enjoys an unhappy hangover in the Conservative party. It has gone from a pejorative name for a real thing — the stakeholder interest and the consensus position among practitioners in a field — to an all-purpose, “the dog ate my homework” for underperforming Tory ministers to blame their failures on.
Take criminal justice. There is unquestionably a blob of serving police officers, policy experts and indeed home secretaries who uncritically support every mistake and mis-step in policing, from stop-and-search to the failures in recruitment and vetting. If you want to improve the quality of policing, as former prime minister Theresa May did, this blob needs to be taken on.
But the country’s ills cannot be reduced to a blob of bad vested interests against publicly-minded ministers. The lawyers insisting on maintaining human rights and due process against a Home Office keen to deport anyone who comes to the UK via small boats are also part of a blob. The parliamentarians arguing that the government should not put aside human rights laws are part of a blob too. Ministers have to work out what is misplaced stakeholder interest and what is useful institutional challenge.
How to do that and how best to replicate it are lessons that can be gleaned by anyone who studies what the Conservatives have got right in education policy. The biggest single lesson from the Tory party’s major success is the importance of stopping and thinking about what you want to do. Rediscovering how to do that would do the Conservative party a lot of good — whether in government or opposition.