Westminster whingers are wrong: Less schools policy is good news

There is a growing grumble around Westminster and the education policy community that the schools sector isn’t getting the attention it deserves from politicians.

There are, broadly, two kinds of whinge, depending on your political persuasion:

1. Labour – resurgent in the polls – has little policy imagination in education, no great ambition and, importantly offers little on the scale of David Blunkett ahead of the 1997 election or Michael Gove before 2010.
2. The Conservatives have been too distracted by Brexit, Covid, the Boris Johnson Moral Bankruptcy and the Liz Truss Car Crash to bother themselves with schools to anything like the same degree as during Gove’s great era of reform.

There is a third, come to think of it, that underpins the first two: It is that people/voters/parents/the great unwashed seem to have stopped caring about the state of our schools. It is often pointed out that Ipsos Mori recently found that just 8 per cent of voters think education should be prioritised for intervention – its lowest poll rating since October 1984. We therefore get the absence of policy-making that we deserve, goes the thinking.

James Kirkup, a celebrated Westminster policy wonk (but not an education specialist), took up all three arguments in The Times this week with a comment piece that spurred another bout of handwringing. He layered something else on too: the suggestion that because everyone – public and politicians  – had stopped paying attention to educational performance, poor kids were being let down by a failing system.

I’m not sure any of this stands up.

Let’s take the grumbles in reverse order.

3. Surely, we should be fairly pleased that most people are not deeply concerned about the State Of Our Schools™? Isn’t it a sign that after years of political meddling the public is happy with what goes on in the nation’s classrooms? Shouldn’t we rejoice that they have (however passively) noticed something important: that our schools are almost certainly better than ever?

2. There is some truth in the idea that the Tories have been absent from the field of battle. It is shameful that they backed out of their own catch-up plans for life after Covid and in so doing accepted the learning loss that affected the poorest young people the most.

Nonetheless, 18 months on from this awful decision, one can hardly claim that the Sunak government is not interested in schools. It has just appointed possibly the heaviest-weight junior ministerial team in living memory (step forward Nick Gibb and Robert Halfon). What they will do is far from clear, but surely they’ll do *something*.

1. It’s on this point that I most violently diverge from the Westminster whingeing. I am convinced that Labour, led on education by Bridget Phillipson, is set to radically rethink much of what we understand about the institution of school.

Phillipson and her team have already set out their plans for universal breakfast clubs (one of few costed and funded policy announcements at Labour’s annual conference) and you would have to be a long way from the jungle drums of Westminster to have missed the fact that there is likely more to come in this space.

Labour has a clear policy trajectory. It might not excite wonks such as Kirkup, but it wants to rebuild the infrastructure that goes around schools rather than interfering again in the classroom or the structure of the system: childcare, Sure Start-style parental support, after-school clubs, extra-curricular activities are all set to become subject to big changes and big innovation from a Phillipson-led DfE.

These interventions will be expensive – and thanks to the Conservatives the cupboard is bare – but it is in these areas that the most educational advances are to be made. Not least because schools are doing a very fine job with teaching and learning.

What is more, my opinion work suggests this is where public appetite for education reform is strongest too – so it’s also good politics.

Contrary to the prevailing narrative in SW1, I am certain today is a very exciting time to be thinking about schools policy. Time to stop the grumbling.