Trying to get out of the shambles they’re mired in, the Tories are attempting a typical double-shuffle. They’re going hard on crime, welfare and immigration. But they also claim they’re the true reformers, the only modernisers left in British politics.
It’s an old tactic, of course. Tory victories in 1951, 1970 and 1979 happened because they persuaded too many people Labour was stuck in the past, was in hock to vested interests, and only they, the Conservative party, stood for aspiration and the future.
It’s the position Michael Gove is trying out now. In a recent speech to Politeia , Gove rightly sees the influence of blue Labour behind Ed Miliband’s One Nation conference speech. But he wrongly thinks it proves Ed has embraced ‘the forces of conservatism’.
Instead of Benjamin Disraeli, Gove wants to make Tony Blair the apostle of the modern-day Tory party. It’s an argument designed to make Labour modernisers queasy. Gove thinks the Tories will get back to power by following New Labour’s embrace of limitless globalisation and top-down, market- and manager-led transformation of our public services.
Gove is an intelligent, decent man, the one real talent left at the top of the Tory party. His trouble, though, is that he doesn’t listen. As a result he’s missed something big. We’re not living in the 1990s. After the economic crisis, and wave after wave of scandal has engulfed the people in charge of out of touch public and private institutions, the politics of the 2010s needs to be different. Our perpetual political crisis has one cause – people, ordinary people, have been shut out of the institutions that rule their lives.
That’s true for the banks and energy companies, where mega-profits are made because consumers and ordinary workers have no power. But it’s also true for our public institutions too. Recent Fabian Society polling shows that even after the New Labour decade of reform, people’s experience of public services leaves them frustrated, powerless and ignored.
Most teachers and nurses, doctors and employment advisers and social workers are driven by a sense of duty and passion to care. But too often they’re scared of managers and meddling ministers, frightened about breaking the guidelines or not meeting targets they cannot control. A culture of fear has stopped them from being really creative.
Let’s be honest: a lot of ‘good’ teaching is about following the formula that gets children to pass exams, not nurturing the sense of real purpose, vocation and creativity that Britain’s children need. Because all that matters is exam results, advice about even the transition to university is catastrophically bad in our ‘best’ state schools. Children are prepared poorly for life and work after school. The obsession with 5 A*-C at GCSEs as the only way of measuring improvement; Gove’s imposition of a rigid way of teaching primary children to read; these are examples of well-intentioned directives that stifle the thought and vision which a really good education relies on. The problem, throughout, is that politicians don’t trust people with direct experience of how public institutions work to be the pressure for change.
Taking inspiration from Blue Labour, Ed One Nation politics marks a break with all that. The blue Labour position is simple. It’s based on belief in people’s capacity to get together and work for the common good. It recognises the importance of aspiration, but notices that aspiration starts with our relationships with people we care about: family and neighbourhood, our town or city, community and country as well as our selves.
People want things to improve. We want our children to do better than us. But none of us like change imposed from above, which we have no power over. We all have different aspirations and interests. There is always tension. But if we’re involved in the conversation, if workers negotiate with managers, if parents challenge teachers, we do far greater things together than we can on our own.
Too often, for Blairites as well as Gove, public sector reform just meant letting a new bunch of people with bright ideas tell everyone else what to do. In the name of challenging one set of vested interests we passed power to another. Since the 1980s, education policy has (rightly) taken authority from teaching unions and council bureaucracies. But it’s just given it to civil servants, quangos and headteachers instead.
Labour’s academy programme, accelerated by the Tories, was a good start in giving local schools more autonomy. The best academies are at the centre of their communities. We need to celebrate the difference they’ve achieved. But by imagining the super-head or the academy sponsor can drive change on their own, they concentrate power in too few hands. As a result, they forget that long-term improvement needs parents and teachers are involved.
The answer isn’t to give people power over every detail of the way an organization is run. Parents and patients don’t want to be managers. One Nation politics needs leaders to have authority. Whitehall should let go and let the people who run public institutions get on with their job. But the key idea is the balance of interests, and the sense that we only thrive when we recognise the reciprocal obligations we have to one another.
Authority comes not from the right to command, but the capacity to broker a conversation that brings different interests together for the common good. In my Fabian pamphlet Letting Go, I’ve outlined some practical ways Labour can make sure people can hold our public institutions to account. We could be really radical, and give workers, service users and citizens the power to elect the managers of local public institutions annually so their leaders have a confident democratic mandate.
One Nation Labour offers a clear challenge to the Conservative claim to be the true modernisers. With an idea of public sector reform caught up in the debates of the 1990s, it’s the Tories who are stuck in the past. The sentiment they’ve ignored is frustration with the concentration of power. The word they’ve forgotten is democracy. Labour needs to lead the reform of our public services by making the power of people the force for change.
—————————————————————————————
Jon Wilson is a historian at King’s College London and author of the Fabian Society pamphlet Letting Go. How Labour Can Stop Learn to Stop Worrying and Trust the People. The pamphlet is launched today at a Labour party policy review event entitled ‘How should One Nation Labour govern in 2015?’ featured Lord Wood, Hilary Benn MP, Alison McGovern MP, Nick Pearce and Jon Wilson.
I have to say, I I disagree with Jon’s assessment of Michael Gove as any form of talent within the Conservative Party. Having read his dismal “Celsius 7/7” offering about the 7th of July bombing – mainly reheated opinions from elsewhere with zero original thought, when he was appointed as Education Secretary, I didn’t have high hopes, and I wasn’t disappointed. His absymal offerings are a “back to the future” melange of free market ideology, covert selection, and letting any old whacko with a garden shed and an enhanced CRB check run a school (PGCE not required – unless of course, you want to teach in a STATE school, then it’s a 1st from Oxbridge only).
Jon however makes some interesting points about formulaic teaching to targets – in which, to be honest, we in the party have to take some (not all) of the blame. On balance, though, schools and education in general was light years from what it was in 1997 both in attainment and in condition terms. I’m not sure I agree with his point about not preparing children for life, university and beyond. I’m old enough to have heard that a number of times in my life.
He’s spot on about “politicians don’t trust people with direct experience of how public institutions work to be the pressure for change” – mainly because Blair and Progress types regard anyone who is a professional as having a vested interest, and therefore a bias. Of course the vastly overpaid management consultants and thinktank groupies who counterposed different policy options (often with no empirical evidence, or experience in the field at all) had NO vested interests, as the boards of many an Academy, LSVT Housing Association, or privatised public body will attest.
I do disagree with his assessment of “education policy has (rightly) taken authority from…council bureaucracies” and I do wonder what evidence Jon has to support this supposition. Schools that go academy or opt out tend to be the better schools, and hence get better results, so please, please, please don’t quote dubious figures about how fantastic academies are – the jury will be out for some time on that one. If a statement like “The best academies are at the centre of their communities” is to be believed, how is that achieved when most academy governing bodies have little or no elected representation and consist of a self-selecting elite of local worthies and friends of the founders. LEA schools were at least required to have a governing body that broadly represented the community. Academies and Free Schools do not.
As regards the dead hand of the LEA, if you speak to teachers and other school staff – and I’m not talking their union representatives here, academies have been no good to them at all – longer hours, coming off national pay terms and conditions, and the loss of LEA facilities unless the school (rarely) buys back the services.
The irony is that some Academies – certainly in the secondary sector – will end up going to the wall, with catastrophic consequences for local education. LEAs will become the providers of last resort, in a role almost guaranteed to provide failure
I’ll read the rest of the pamphlet with interest!
Ric, weren’t we briefly together on the Governing Body of McEntee School?
The problem with the way academies are now is not that they’re independent of LEAs, it’s that, as you say, they’re not democractically accountable. Some _are_ very good, and their independence is partly the reason, but there’s nothing to make sure they involve parents, teachers and other staff in the way they’re run – which means any improvement seems based on the personality of their leaders and isn’t rooted in a broader set of relationships to local society. But there are lots of atrocious LEAs, which either provide no support, or intervene in a haphazard way when they worry results are going the wrong way. Especially with the move to Children’s Services, senior leaders don’t have enough of a stake to have the faintest idea what makes a particular school work (I can list many examples, Waltham Forest back in the day being one).
I think we need (a) to think about how to democratise individual schools, requiring them all – whether academies or not – to listen to the voice of parents and teachers, (b) create much more open structures of local or regional support and accountability, which the LEA might convene but isn’t about cabinet members or senior officers making fickle decisions behind closed doors; (c) get rid of the idea that a school’s performance can be judged by a single statistic, and allow them and the local/regional structures they are part of work out how to measure what they do.
Lot’s more thinking to do though.
We were – it wasn’t THAT brief – a couple of years IIRC.
The problem for me *is* that they are independent of LEAs – which provide a structure that enables improvement, encouragement and collaboration. Whilst I admit that Waltham Forest – who I’ve just finished a 10 months stint working for – may not have previously provided a paragon – I have worked with good LEAs – Croydon, Camden, and when at the LRC, many other London councils, whose LEAs definitely add value. Hertfordshire LEA, where I live (despite being a Tory Council) also add value and have often been held up as a benchmark of excellence.
The LEA governance model has worked on schools for many years – whereas I cannot think of a single academy that is deeply rooted in the local community – and believe me, I’ve worked with enough. In terms of governance – what do we do – elected parent and teacher governors, and people nominated to represent the community?….that almost sounds like, well, LEA schools!
You do need a wider group of people to run schools as a community resource – what appalls me is that apparently local businessmen – and it is usually men – appear to be welcome on academy governing bodies, as well as religious figures – but the local community is not. And who represents the community better than the local authority?
The local and regional structures are just recreating what went before. We were four square against Grant Maintained (GM) Schools as a party when the Conservatives introduced them- and should remain implacably opposed to Free Schools and Academies too.