Ten years ago this month, The Business Academy Bexley opened its doors. The first academy in England, it replaced Thamesmead Community College, an institution which reflected the inherent failures of an education system held back by tired dogma. In Thamesmead’s final year, just 10 per cent of its students achieved five or more A*-C grades at GCSE.
Thamesmead’s successor has had a tough ride. Thirty per cent of its 1,600 pupils do not speak English as a first language, and 30 per cent are eligible for free school meals, almost double the national average and an indicator of the social and economic pressures on pupils at the school.
In 2010, Ofsted noted that the academy was ‘emerging from troubled times’. Those troubled times – a shaky first few years – were overcome with a change in leadership, and it now sits proudly in the top 10 per cent of schools in England in terms of improvement at GCSE level. This year saw 70 per cent of its pupils leave with five or more A*-C grades.
The academy programme itself has had a difficult journey. Attacked by the forces of conservatism within the Labour party, it has proved to be every bit the agent for social change which its pioneers promised it would be.
The most influential of those pioneers, Andrew Adonis, this month publishes a book – ‘Education, Education, Education’ – on the struggle to push the reforms through. In it, he details a visit to the newly opened academy in Bexley. One student he encountered told him she ‘didn’t realise that schools like this were for children like us’. Has anything ever better captured the true nature of progressive politics?
By 2010, Labour had left an indelible mark on England’s education system – and set the bar high for future reform. The next generation of reformers can look to the academy programme not just for a blueprint on how to deliver progressive policy when all those around you are losing their heads. It should also be seen as the realisation of traditional Labour values in a modern environment: social mobility, equality, power in the hands of the many, not the few.
While I have long advocated Labour support for successful free schools, they are not the natural next stage of progressive education policy. Tied to Whitehall through funding agreements, Michael Gove’s pet project highlights the need for further decentralisation.
As Patrick Diamond put it in his chapter of The Purple Book, ‘devolution of power in Britain is an important prerequisite towards building a fairer, more equal society’.
But in his push for school freedom, Michael Gove has misunderstood the equal need for school security.
Free schools are accountable only to the secretary of state. Lack of planning and local coordination leaves some new schools, such as the One in a Million School, without funding just weeks before the new term.
Central control is strangling the fair and equal expansion of our school system. Whereas academies under Labour were set up with clear and focused local need in mind, free schools are failing the most desperate.
And as the looming crisis in teaching recruitment surfaces, Labour is best positioned to offer direct solutions handing power back to teachers and parents. Teach First was a successful enterprise to encourage graduates to look at teaching careers, but we should go further to reshape the profession.
Increasingly educationalists are looking east for answers. It isn’t hard to understand why. Education systems in Asia are among those praised in a recent IPPR report for placing a high value on teaching as a profession. High pay attracts the best graduates, performance is reviewed by peers rather than central control, and collaborative teaching is encouraged. Having given them schools to be proud of, Labour must now go right to the core of education and look at how pupils think and learn. Gove’s planned tinkering with the national curriculum suggests a lack of understanding about modern education. His sustained attacks on what he perceives to be less worthy ‘creative’ subjects are both populist and plagued by ancient dogma.
Cooperation with local business, flexibility over timetables, power handed to teachers, a higher value placed on teaching itself as a profession and a change in learning behaviour – these are all realistic goals for Labour’s reformers to signal our intent to ensure that the social equality pioneered by academies continues.
A decade of academies has not solved every one of the inherent failures which haunted schools like Thamesmead, but they have put us on the right path to world-class education.
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Alex White is a member of Progress, writes for the Young Progressives column, and tweets @AlexWhiteUK
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I am a labour councillor and member of the NUT and been in education for 45 years. Unfortunately Alex misses the point entirely as does the strategy of academies and the relationship to Local Authorities . The implication of the article is that it is better for schools and services not to be in the democratic control of residents and that planning for school places and education provision is left to the market . There are many good schools in existence that are not academies. Alex wants to ignore the evidence and cites one example – you cannot base a policy on that, As for arguing that Academies and free schools ( even without the caveats in the article ) are progressive and that those who oppose them are conservative turns the notion of progressive policy on its head. New labour argued in its first term that it was not about structure but quality – Michael Barber. It is still fixated about schools being outside the local Authority.
I suggest it is the pursuance of academies and the acceptance of the notion of free schools that is crippling Labour education policy including the failure to support the role and function of Local Authorities rather than understanding the really important issues of curriculum and exams and the wider issues of wealth inequality that affect education ( and Health ) inequality for which there is far more evidence.
Evidence shows that the performance of academies are at best mixed, so taking one institution as a generalisation doesn’t tell the full story. Many of the issues you identify in the second last paragraph are correct and have in some cases already been instituted – better culture, raising the status of teaching profession is all correct. However the stats show the greatest correlation is between economic background/social status and educational performance – systemic institutional changes are always going to be a part answer. Funding too is important. Labour needs to go back to the ‘Standards not Structures philosophy’ – constant structural reform and politicians interferring is in itself a major problem (NHS another victim)! There is also the danger of devolution becoming ‘atomisation’ and uncoordination, which is what is happening now with Gove as you imply, and Labour is partly responsible for. Like many things, Labour argues for a seemingly different course when in opposition but I suspect most of Gove’s reforms will stay in place just like Grammar Schools.
The most galling thing about the last ten years of education policy has been the obsession about the nature of educational institutions, most significantly academies. What the party lost when Estelle Morris resigned as Secretary of State for education was a focus on educational standards, quality and bredth of curriculum for all.
Westwylam and del Goddard are right: Labour needs to get back to standards not structures. Citing improvements in academies without also noting the equally significant improvements in ‘bog standard comprehensives’ is an exercise in sophistry.
The danger of the current system is that too many children fail due to a decision that they have had little role in making and economic disadvantages become hard-wired as more affluent parents often have better access to information and more influence, and so are always the ones best placed to send their children to the schools with higher levels of attainment. We need a system that guarentees the best for children no matter what school they go to.
It may be unfashionable in the Labour Party to talk about choice in education, but I think we need to start having more discussion about this too. I do not mean the limited one-off choice, usually made by the parents with little imput by the ‘consumers’ themselves, of which institution they attend but the far more important one of the bredth of curriculum offer available.
Whilst Labour did some good work this, such as part of its 14-19 reforms, it always played second fiddle to the institutional arguments and got lost. All too often the push to diversify opportunities, such as through partnership with other schools, colleges and educational providers, fell foul of school’s trump card of institutional self-interest.
The current system feels too much like telling someone that they have to choose which is the sole two-aisle supermarket they can use for the next five years, rather than allowing people to shop around for what best suits their needs.
We need a system that gives children access to as broad, and as high-quality, a curriculum they can access no matter what choice is made for them at 5 and 11.
In summary, the party seriously needs a child-focused approach to education, not an institution-focused one.
Alex White for Education Secretary! But surely we should be extending co-operative trust schools and requiring Free Schools adopt the co-operative model. I think Local Schools Commissioners would be a good idea and allowing schools to introduce perfomance-related pay.
The more I read on the Progress website the more dismayed I get. People seem to be trying to find past policies to prop up and celebrate rather than coming up with new thinking.
The solution to weak schools is work and money. The party needs to make a commitment to address the deficits of poverty as well as tackling poor leadership and inadequate teaching and parenting. This will mean funding some schools and whole communities better than others. You will get the work out of teachers, students, parents and governors if you nurture and value them. Stop looking at structures and take a more common sense approach to standards. Progress has to leave the past behind. You can’t move forward if your entire rationale is to defend the last Labour government’s mistakes. The academies programme was 50% great. The rest was a needless confrontation and has bitten everybody on the bum since Gove took over. Deal with it and stop trying to look back all the time.
I’d love to see some evidence for this. So far as I know, governance structures make little of no difference to school performance. What matters is the quality of leadership by the Head and the motivation of teachers and students. All else is piffle!