Is it worse for government to make bad law or no law? At the risk of sounding like an A-level revision topic, this question is front of mind as the children’s wellbeing and schools bill returns to the House of Lords this week.
The government wants to raise standards, but many parts of this bill threaten the freedoms that help schools succeed. The school system is complex and too often the pages of Schools Week are filled with school leaders pulling their hair out at the unintended consequences of well-intentioned policy.
The bill disempowers school leaders, shifting power to Whitehall, the education secretary and local authorities. But the government has not identified what problems doing so is trying to solve or provided evidence that its proposed measures will help schools.
Take one example: qualified teacher status (QTS). We all want our classrooms staffed with high-quality teachers, but at a time of national teacher shortages we should be widening the pool of talent, not narrowing it.
There is no evidence that unqualified teachers are lowering standards. However, the proposals do raise concerns about the recruitment of specialist teachers in the arts and STEM subjects and could cause major challenges for special schools.
If the government’s own impact assessment suggests the QTS measure could prevent 700 to 1,250 potential entrants to teaching a year, what will the unintended consequence be?
This is just one example. Across the bill, many measures raise similar questions of practicality and unintended consequences, which the House of Lords must scrutinise carefully.
There will be opportunity for peers to amend it, and the hope of many who champion school freedoms is that they will resist the one-size-fits-all approach it proposes.
As Luke Sparkes said in the evidence session to the bill committee back in January: “It is also worth knowing that our most successful schools at Dixons – the ones that are getting the best results for disadvantaged students nationally – would have to fundamentally change as schools if they had to align to a set of rigid standards. That would be bound to impact negatively on outcomes for children, and not just academic outcomes. It would be a significant backward step.”
School freedom is important because where leaders are empowered to run their schools they get better outcomes for their pupils than if they are implementing the latest bureaucratic diktat, whether from Whitehall or town hall. Centralisation promises ‘standardisation’, but that should not be confused with ‘standards’.
Schools may not always utilise every freedom at their disposal, but the important thing is they can, to make a difference for their pupils and communities. We shouldn’t put a ceiling on innovation when it comes to helping schools meet high standards.
Today there are 740 free schools in England spanning mainstream, specialist and alternative provision. They have the freedom to tailor their curriculum, staffing, school day and ethos to suit the needs of their students, and they outperform other types of non-selective state schools across each key stage for which national data is collected.
Free schools show why trusting school leaders to get on with the job should be at the heart of education reform. The state’s role should be to enable and support, not control and constrain them.
Parents, teachers and pupils deserve a system that builds on success – not one that holds it back. So as peers come together to consider its provisions, we hope they will see that freedom, innovation and accountability have been key to improving education over recent years and take action to protect these values.
And we hope the government listens, because a bad bill and a backwards step are in no one’s interest.
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