A recent report by Professor Glennerster of the LSE in the Guardian indicates that spending fell to a 40-year low during the first term. How do you reconcile this with the Prime Minister’s pledge that his three priorities were ‘education, education, education’?
I don’t know how that story came about, because it isn’t true. I think if you asked any teacher they would tell you that they’ve had more money with this government than they’ve ever had before. I’m not sure teachers would have said that during the first two years of the Labour government, but during the last parliament as a whole I think it’s recognised by those in education that more money was put in. The government took a decision in the first two years to keep to the Tory spending plans. I think that that was important, although clearly anybody in a spending department would always want more money to spend. That’s the nature of the job. But because of that decision, we’ve got economic stability and we mustn’t forget that. I taught for eighteen years and I think in the history of the public sector there have been swings between more money coming in and then that money being taken away because the economy was in crisis. Because we were tough on ourselves and set tough spending targets for public services in the first two years, we are now in a position where we’ve now got more money going into education and where this can be sustained. That’s what we’ve never ever had before: sustained year-on-year improvement. And of course we’re committed to increased education spending in real terms for every year of this parliament.
Given teachers’ objections to performance-related pay was it right to press ahead with this policy?
Yes, I do I feel very strongly that it was right. Performance-related pay is now in place which means that 190,000 teachers got a £2,000 pay increase last year on top of their annual increase. What we are aiming to do with PRP is to ensure that the pay structure values teaching in its own right. The pay structure prior to PRP really only gave you more money if you went into management and administration and that was wrong. But every teacher I know, every school I’ve ever been in, felt that what was of equal importance was the quality of teaching. It seems strange in a profession which has at its core how well you teach and how effectively students learn that we never recognised that in the pay structure. We live now in an era – and I think that’s right – where we do actually have performance management and monitor performance more closely than we’ve ever done before. We do that for two reasons. First, because it’s the performance of individuals that will actually deliver the goods and raise standards. Second, by monitoring performance we are in a better position to help individuals in terms of their professional development. Bringing the policy in wasn’t easy, but the profession has responded very well, and I’m most pleased that it means more money in the pay packets for our best teachers, which we want to keep in the classroom doing what they do best.
David Blunkett is reported recently as saying that he wished he’d done more to raise the morale of teachers. Do you regard this as an issue that needs to be addressed in the second term?
Of course teachers’ morale is important, and I know that it’s not as high as we would want it to be. I think that change is really tough. Teachers have undergone two decades of change but what we inherited when we came to government wasn’t best serving our children, so we’ve had to introduce more change. I’ve never met a teacher or a parent who felt that the system was good enough in 1997. We have to balance making the changes needed to deliver what we’ve promised to the electorate, while, at the same time, realising that every one of those changes demands more from a profession. That’s what we are trying to get right. Still, at present there’s too little support for teachers in the jobs that they do. I want to see more teachers with a greater range of people to help them: more classroom assistants, more bursars, and more administrative officers. So, yes, we do have to raise teacher morale. But I think that teachers should be very proud of what they’ve achieved. They’re the best generation of teachers we’ve ever had. But I sometimes think that – and maybe I can say this as an ex-teacher – they appear to lack confidence in their own ability. I think sometimes if an individual teacher is criticised, other teachers feel they’re being criticised as well. I would say to the profession now: I know its tough and I know that you’ve done a lot, but you have reason to actually shout from the rooftops about how good you are. I need to do that more, but I think they need to do that as well.
Newspapers and LEAs are reporting that the new term is getting under way with teacher shortages. Why do you think that is and how will you go about addressing it?
Principally it is because we’ve put more money into the system – because there’s 6,000 more posts than there were last year and so we’ve created more vacancies. Heads want to employ more teachers. We’ve increased the demand and now we’ve got to increase the supply. Although we have made a good start on that, it has not increased at a sufficient rate and there’s no two ways about that. We are recruiting in a very tight graduate recruitment market, the economy’s good and that’s great. But one of the consequences of that is that it’s very difficult to find people with the right skills. It’s been very difficult for heads this term and they’ve had to spend far more time on recruiting good quality staff than I would have wanted them to, but it’s not true that there are fewer teachers than there were last year or the year before. In fact since 1997 there are over 11,000 extra teachers in our schools.
Many Labour Party members are concerned about the greater use of the private sector in delivering public services, especially with regard to education. What do you see as the proper role of the private sector in this field?
Let me say what it’s not. It’s not a panacea – the private sector has not got all the answers, it doesn’t know how to solve all the problems. Nor do we think that public sector delivery of public services is wrong. We have a public sector ethos. We must never put that at risk because that’s what we believe and what people want. But I think there are things that the private sector has which it can bring to the public sector, and help heads and governors achieve the effective delivery of education. Schools have changed. Some of them are now multi-million pound institutions, they are more difficult to manage, they have more need for the proper use of information and data. If you look at private sector organisations, many of them have managed that change themselves over the last ten to twenty years. They have gone through that process of bringing people in with different skills in order to do a different range of tasks. Because of the failure of the last government to invest in the public sector, education is going through that structural change later than other organisations. If using the experience and the skills of the private sector helps us to manage that institutional change, then I think we should do it. The proper relationship is one of partnership.
Is it right that companies make a profit on children’s education?
They need to be paid to deliver the service. But I’d be hugely unhappy if there was an unfettered right to make a profit and if the private sector were ever in a position whereby they could say: we can make more profit if we deliver this less well. That’s why the nature of the contract between the governing body in the school and the private sector, or between the LEA and the private sector in terms of delivering LEA services, is so very important. Any fee we pay the private sector must mean that what we get in return is movement towards clear targets and there should be a penalty if they don’t reach those targets. My bottom line is: I’m prepared to pay as long as it helps us to deliver a higher standard of service.
The white paper pledges at least 1,500 specialist secondary schools by 2005. Don’t you think that children should have a more broad-based education before they start specialising?
I believe that a broad-based education and the National Curriculum are important. Sometimes there’s a misunderstanding that specialism replaces the National Curriculum, it doesn’t. Every specialist school must teach the National Curriculum, so with specialist schools it’s actually the National Curriculum plus. No child gets any less of the National Curriculum or is exposed to fewer experiences or learns less subjects. Instead, they get additional expertise in a particular area. But I wouldn’t even be happy if it was just that. Specialist school have to share their extra resources with other schools and with the whole of the community. You have all these extra facilities that are available: more language labs, more expertise to teach more foreign languages, a bigger sports hall, better tennis courts, a theatre, more music provision, more computers. All those things are then available for the community and other schools. We insist on that.
Does this commitment to specialist schools mean that Labour is simply carrying on the Conservatives’ policy of selection. Doesn’t that spell the end of comprehensive education?
I believe passionately in what comprehensive education sets out to deliver: equality of opportunity, social justice, making sure every child reaches their potential. Comprehensive education has achieved a great deal: there’s many people who have got life chances because they went to a comprehensive school. But you if you really look deep down in those figures, if you look at the background of children going to higher education, it’s not changed in twenty years. If you look at where the under-achievement and the failure is – who is it that’s not getting the 5 As to Cs – it’s the working class, those who live in our urban areas, those whose parents aren’t in work. We thought comprehensive education would solve all that and it has not. We have to be brave about that and we have to admit that. We have to say it has achieved so much, but if it’s to achieve those other things as well, we need to actually modernise the comprehensive principle. The worst way of defending comprehensive schools is to pretend that what they are doing at the moment will solve all our problems. Since 1997 not one new specialist school has chosen to use its ability to select ten percent of its intake by aptitude. That’s why I know that this won’t lead to a two-tier system: heads don’t want that, teachers don’t want that, parents don’t want that. Our aim is for every school to have its own ethos; something that makes it special which, as well as specialist status, could include being a beacon school or training school for example.
How do you think it is that the Welsh Labour administration’s white paper on education envisages achieving the same results without the use of the private sector and without the introduction of specialist schools?
It’s the facts of devolution. We both want the same thing and what motivates us is the same thing. But Jane Davidson [Welsh minister for Education and Lifelong Learning] and I inherited different school systems. We already have specialist schools, it’s probably true to say that we’ve got more urban blight, more major urban conurbations and all the problems that that can bring. We are shaping two education systems with slightly different histories, slightly different starting points and slightly different populations to serve. It would be strange, given the party’s commitment to devolution, if we came up with exactly the same blueprints. It’s not a case of better or worse, it’s a case of different ways. There’s never only one way to achieve one end.
Given that the new system of AS levels introduced in the first term is widely regarded as a failure, what changes can be made to improve it?
I don’t think it was a failure. What didn’t work was the logistics of the system and what worries me most is that, because we didn’t get the administration right, there’s a real risk that people think the broader curriculum wasn’t right. It is right. Everybody thought our young people should learn a broader curriculum at sixteen to nineteen. That was our joint starting point. What we need to do is to continue to offer AS levels, but we do have a responsibility to make the administration more manageable and to make the examination system more manageable and that’s what we’ll do this year. The results were very good and we have been pleased with that.
What is your vision of what a school should look like in ten years time?
It has got to be one where there are confident professionals – most of them will be teachers, but there will be other adults with a different range of skills as well – and there will be confident young people. I hope also that there will be places of learning that will have forged a whole range of partnerships: with other schools, with the wider community which they serve, with central and local government, and with business and commerce. I hope that we are the government that has begun to solve some of those deep-seated problems about children who come from families where learning has not been valued and where people’s whole experience of learning has not been a success. I hope also that in ten years time, every child who leaves school realises they are at a staging post in a journey of lifelong learning. Most of all, I hope we have re-created the learning culture in every community in our country.