Educational Policy after 1979

1. Educational Policy after 1979 The New Right: Mrs Thatcher 1979-1990 & John Major 1990-7 New Labour: Tony Blair 1997 on

2. The New Right Philosophy 1: 79-90 Thatcher & 90-97 Major • Social engineering to create an egalitarian society was not the job of schools. Education should empower individuals to liberate themselves, by acquiring marketable skills. • EAZ’s had tried to improve the quality of teaching by throwing money at the problem. This didn’t work, because schools and teachers were not accountable to parents. • Public schools were good schools not because they had more money, but because they had to be - to attract customers.

3. The New Right: Philosophy 2Chubb & Moe: 1997 • Chubb & Moe 1997,in Politics, Markets & Schools, argued that instead of closing good schools like the grammars, policy should put pressure on state schools to become as good as public ones, as competitive in the market. • For this to happen, schools needed the freedom to control their own budgets, so that they could recruit and retain good staff • Teachers had to be directly accountable to a Board of Governors that was capable of exerting real control over staffing, finance and the educational results of the institution.

4. The New Right Philosophy 3:Chubb & Moe 1997 cont. • Chubb & Moe saw it as essential that the Board be held accountableto its customers: the parents. Parent governors, governors’ report s to parents, open meetings & the publication of results would provide parents with the information they needed to judge how well a school was performing. • For ‘Parent power’ to become a reality though, the customer had to be able to take their business elsewhere, away from the local, community, bog-standard comp. Parents had to have some choice over their kid’s school.

5. The New Right Philosophy 4:Buchanan & Tullock 1967 • Buchanan & Tullock’s ‘Public Choice Theory’ argued that public services were bound to be inefficient, because they were not accountable to their customers. • The Education system regulated itself. This ‘producer capture’ meant that educationalists could run the service in their own interests, not those of parents, taxpayers, employers or even of the state. • Accountability [League Tables] & outside quality control [OFSTED] were required.

6. The New Right Philosophy 5:Brown & Lauder: Globalisation • Brown & Lauder: Neo-Fordism 1997. • The Globalisation of the world economy meant that no country or business could escape market forces: price and quality have to be competitive or you go under. • Affluent consumer wanted not only value but high quality & uniqueness. Mass production had to become more flexible. For this to happen workers must become more skilled, not less. Countries would only be able to compete, if their Education systems maximised the potential of their students.

7. The New Right Philosophy 6:Brown & Lauder cont. • Britain was not competitive in 1979. • High taxes, huge subsidies to inefficient public [nationalised] industries & the welfare dependency of an idle underclass with no incentive to work, raised the prices of everything Britain tried to sell abroad. • Compensatory education and the redistribution of wealth from MC to WC had worsened the situation, without improving educational attainment. In fact it was generally agreed to have fallen.

8. The New Right Philosophy 7:Brown & Lauder cont. • Education spending had focussed on narrowing the achievement gap between students. • BUT: it had done this by dragging the brightest down to the level of mediocre, whilst spending the bulk of the budget on the mediocre. • Solution: encourage schools to specialise, switch resources to good schools and positively encourage the brightest to leave the rest behind. Let the Market decide.

9. The Market, The 1988 Education Act & The New Vocationalism 1 • Grammar schools: LEA’s could retain their remaining selective schools. • TheAssisted Places Scheme paid for outstanding state school pupils to go to Public Schools - If their parents were MC enough to know how to apply. • Standard Assessment Tests would provide comparable data on school performance. • League Tables & OFSTED reports would provide parents with the information they needed to select the right school.

10. The Market, The 1988 Education Act & The New Vocationalism 2 • The National Curriculum was designed to ensure that all children possessed a common core of Skills, Attitudes, Concepts & Knowledge, regardless of gender or LEA. • Parental Choice would force schools to deliver good teaching or see their numbers decline. • Falling Rolls, the ‘Sink School’ phenomenon, couldtrigger OFSTED or HMI intervention, retraining, changes of personnel or even closure and redundancies.

11. The Market, The 1988 Education Act & The New Vocationalism 3 • Open Enrolment forced the desirable schools to fill all their school places to the maximum, if there were applicants. • An Appeal System operated where the rolls of desirable schools were over-subscribed. [This favoured parents with cultural capital.] • Formula Funding gave schools money in proportion to enrolments, switching investment to the best schools, instead of targeting the worst, as happened under ‘compensatory’ policies.

12. The Market, The 1988 Education Act & The New Vocationalism 4 • The Local Management of schools gave Heads control over their budgets, so they could spend it to attract customers, instead of having their priorities determined by local councillors & bureaucrats. • Grant Maintained Schools were encouraged to break completely with [Looney Left] LEA’s, by getting their funding direct from London. Opted out schools got higher grants and could ‘select’ their entry, making them more desirable. [Labour repealed this in 1999.]

13. The Market, The 1988 Education Act & The New Vocationalism 5 • OFSTED was given the power to assess the performance of LEA’s, as managers of schools. Independent managers could be sent in to take over & reform underachieving or inefficient LEA’s. • City Technology Colleges were created as flagships for the new drive towards ICT & vocationalism [Only 15]. • GCSE exams replaced CSE & O-Levels. All students would take the same exams [Higher /Foundation papers, and Short/Long Courses undermined this. Coursework = < 20%.

14. The Market, The 1988 Education Act & The New Vocationalism 6 • The National Council for Vocational Qualifications introduced work-related qualifications. • NVQ’s signify competency in practical job-related skills. • GNVQ’s provided vocational, modular courses that gave a general introduction to an area of employment, at the levels of GCSE & A-levels. • Modern Apprenticeships combined on-the-job training with days at college.

15. The Market, The 1988 Education Act & The New Vocationalism 7 • 1993 Higher Education Act made colleges of Further Education independent of LEA control and geared funding to their ability to attract & retain students. • The value of student grants was cut; the difference being made up by the first appearance of student loans. • The Government paid companies a subsidy to train youngsters for work. • Training became a way of gearing social assistance to an individual’s willingness to work to get work: [Manpower Services > Training Commission > Youth Opportunities > Youth Training Scheme > Training & Enterprise Councils 1990].

16. Ball, Bowe & Gerwirtz 1995 1 Market Forces & Parental Choice • Skilled school choosers, the privileged MC parent, had great advantages over WC choosers [well-meaning-semi-skilled or unconcerned-disconnected]. • MC parents could use postcode, cultural capital & knowledge of the appeal system to effectuate their choices. • MC parents could avoid ‘Local, Community & Bog-Standard Comps’ and gain privileged access to elite state or private dayschools: • MC > Leafy suburb, high profile, CTC’s, GM, grammar, cosmopolitan, selective or Catholic.

17. Ball, Bowe & Gerwitz 1995 2Market Forces & Parental Choice • SAT’s produced increased stress for children and reinforced negative labelling that followed a child throughout its education. • Schools began to move away from independent learning and creativity and back towards chalk & talk, teaching children to take tests, rather than teaching them how to think. Liberal education is more than training. • The status & confidence of teachers as a profession declined with each successive politically motivated initiative.

18. Ball, Bowe & Gerwirtz 1995 3 Market Forces & Parental Choice • Market forces encouraged schools to develop strategies for selecting brighter students and refusing slower, statemented or troublesome pupils. Over-subscribed schools effectively became selective. • League tables did not compare value-added data, only raw scores. This ignored the social differences in a school’s intake & environs. • By sabotaging the comprehensive ideal, the government had deliberately made all comparisons between schools meaningless.

19. Ball, Bowe & Gerwitz 1995 4Market Forces & Parental Choice • Decision-making in schools became a matter of finance & image. The needs of children came 2nd. EG: decisions on whether to enter a student for an exam they might fail. • Formula funding meant that advice to students now had to take account of their cash value to the school. EG staying on? • LMS transformed Heads intomanaging directors of medium sized companies; their time increasingly being taken up by financial & administrative matters, rather than interaction with children.

20. Ball, Bowe & Gerwitz 1995 5Market Forces & Parental Choice • The reforms aimed to limit bureaucracy, but actually transferred it into the schools, with office staff expanding dramatically. • LMS & GM Status were a politically motivated attack on local government: the Tories resented Labour domination of inner-city councils. This reduced local democracy. • The New Vocationalism rested on schools advising some children to accept a reduced level of choice. Those thus labelled for mediocrity would inevitably include more WC, black, female & troublesome etc.

21. The Dearing Report: The National Curriculum 1994 • Dearing wanted simplification & slimming down. • Writing a National Curriculum had created a feeding frenzy for venal educationalists & bureaucrats.BUT: • The NC enforced central control over teachers & LEA’s. It swamped them in useless paperwork. • The NC was traditional & restrictive. Many of its selections were tendentious & partisan. • The NC privileged selected knowledge over creativity & questioning. • The NC prevented schools from responding to the particular needs of their community. • History, Language, Music & Literature were culturally biased against ethnic communities.

22. Gillbourn & Youdell:The New IQ-ism 2001 1 • The competition between schools for pupils, resources and status, could only be adjudged if accurate data on results was available. • Any fair minded person would have to admit that a school’s results are bound to reflect the ability profile of its intake; schools with brighter pupils ought to have better results than schools with pupils of lower ability. • SO: educationalists prefer League Tables that compare schools with similar ability intakes & similar levels of social disadvantage [calculated on number of free school meals].

23. Gillbourn & Youdell:The New IQ-ism 2001 2 • BUT: how could you calculate what the ‘ability’ of a school’s intake was? • The tripartite system had relied on testing for General IQ, but this had been discredited. ‘Ability’ was meant to be less controversial a concept than IQ, because it was based on observable data: a ‘snapshot’ of what a child was able to do or to demonstrate knowledge of, at a particular stage in their education. • Ability could then be calculated on the basis of summative tests: SATs, NVRQ, VRQ & Examination results at KS4 [Conway] & KS5.

24. Gillbourn & Youdell:The New IQ-ism 2001 3 • Data on the achievements of children at one Key Stage could be used to predict what those particular children should achieve at the next Key Stage. • Schools where children exceeded expectations had high ‘value added scores’. • Schools where children had not made the expected progress, would score badly. • Gillbourn & Youdell were interested in the way that the concept of ‘ability’ & the data derived from it, came to be used in practice.

25. Gillbourn & Youdell:The New IQ-ism 2001 4 • Performance on any summative test is sensitive to a huge variety of social influences: [Deprivation, local crime, gender, ethnicity, home situation, school provision, the influence of peers, the quality and retention of teaching staff & classroom interactions. ] • Yet ‘ability’ was increasingly used by educators as if it was synonymous with innate potential, IE: General IQ. [Especially VRQ & NVRQ]. • Bureaucrats used the predictors to assess school performance, as if they were scientific. • Teachers used them to label students, predict the high flyers and discriminate against the also-ran’s [ IE: all the usual suspects - blacks, WC etc.].

26. New Labour & Blair 1997 Philosophy: 1 • Thatcher’s reforms had succeeded in making everyone paranoid about the state of British education and hyper-critical of schools. • Blair’s new Centre-Left Labour Party responded to this, describing their priorities as: ‘Education, Education & Education’. • Brown & Lauder characterise New Labour as‘Post-Fordist’. Labour agreed with Neo-Fordists of the New Right, that countries must have highly trained [ and retrained] labour forces to compete in the global market place.

27. New Labour & Blair 1997 Philosophy: 2 • New Labour’s ‘spin doctors’ claimed to have embraced the market and financial probity, breaking with the ‘tax & spend’ heritage of old Labour and the socialist [Neo-M.] Left. • BUT: Where Neo-Fordism put its faith in the free market, Post-Fordism continued to believe in state intervention and massive central government expenditure. • Labour argued that Britain could not successfully compete with Less Economically Developed Countries [The Third World] in a Global market for human resources.

28. New Labour & Blair 1997 Philosophy: 3 • Traditional Fordist mass-production enterprises were bound to favour the cheap labour of the LEDC’s. • Even in skilled work and service industries requiring further education, British wage levels would make us uncompetitive. • Britain had therefore to target the highly specialised and flexible ‘cutting-edge’ sectors of the economy….and to do that our work force had to be amongst the best trained and re-trained in the world.

29. New Labour & Blair 1997 Philosophy: 4 • New Labour argued that government needed to invest in education, so that business could be empowered to conquer the global market. • On the other hand, unless money was spent on the social inclusion of the emerging ‘underclass’, then valuable human resources would be wasted & social justice shamed. • SO: ‘compensatory’ spending would redistribute wealth to the Education Action Zones, failing schools, ethnic minorities, underachievers and children with educational or behavioural difficulties.

30. New Labour & Blair 1997 Philosophy: 5 • Spending would be increased, but the Chancellor, Brown, was determined not to allow inflation to rise. • The spin doctors and ‘Left Modernisers’ made it clear that the improvements would primarily come from restructuring and quality control, rather than ‘throwing money at the problem’.[ Without proper funding though, initiatives were only publicity stunts.] • New Labour adopted many New Right’s dictums about getting value for money, encouraging parents to be more responsible and using private & voluntary organisations.

31. Labour Policies Since 1997Some Key Features: 1 • Home-School contracts on behaviour. • Prosecuting parents over children’s truancy • Centrally imposed Literacy & Numeracy hours in Primary schools. • The National Literacy Strategy: imposed specific targets on schools and required teacher training. • The National College for School Leadership would train & re-train headmasters. • Homework clubs and wider ‘out-of-hours’ activities, to encourage pro-active learning.

32. Labour Policies Since 1997Some Key Features: 2 • Central government or even private companies could intervene to take over failing LEA’s. • Grant-maintained schools were renamed Foundation Schools & returned to LEA control. • Specialist School Status, attracting extra funding, would create diversity and force schools to compete against each other for funding. • A ‘More-Able’ initiative channelled funds towards the high flyers. [£350m - not a lot].

33. Labour Policies Since 1997Some Key Features: 3 • Investment in Education Action Zones was aimed at the ‘inclusion’ of the most disadvantaged minorities. • It was made easier for parents and LEA’s to end selection at Grammar schools and the most desirable comprehensives. [These can select 50%]. • Tuition fees for Further Ed. students were introduced in 1998 and higher ‘top-up-fees’ have been announced. This ran counter to the declared aim of getting 50% of school leavers onto degree courses.

34. Labour Policies Since 1997Some Key Features: 4 • Skills for Life encouraged the long term unemployed to retrain in basic literacy and numeracy skills, without which vocational training was pointless. • The ‘New Deal’ aimed to subsidize the employment of the socially excluded. • Connexions was designed to improve the vocational advice given to children. • Vocational A-Levels given higher status. • The Learning & Skills Council would coordinate post 16 & adult education.

35. Assessing New Labour Policies • Given the generally acknowledged Left bias amongst British sociologists, it is not surprising to find that comment has generally been favourable. • Left-ish comment, by Trowler in New Labour & Education policy 2003, does express concern over the extent to which Labour have adopted the ‘consumer power’ & ‘market’ catch-phrases of the New Right. The Left also see ‘top-up’ fees as a threat to the opportunity of WC children to go to the best colleges. • The Right, view Labour policies as confused and half-hearted. A stream of initiatives have been introduced to catch the headlines, but they are not followed through on or properly funded: all ‘spin’ and no substance.

36. Woolf: Does Education Matters?2002 • It was assumed by Labour Social Democrats and the Conservative New Right that education was the key to economic success and a competitive labour force. • Woolf points out that most of the so-called ‘vocational qualifications’ are unnecessary. • The education system is producing too many useless vocational qualifications & degrees. • Business and the country would be better off if government invested directly in job creation schemes and on the job training.

37. Whitty: Limits to Empowerment 2002 • Whitty criticised the philosophy of the Education Action Zones and Compensatory Education policies. • The argument goes that the plan was based on the idea that you could turn working class parents with working class cultural values into working class parents with middle-class values, by social investment & community involvement schemes. • This was both undesirable, since it dished WC culture, and also unlikely to work.