Jamie Martin - Policy Analyst to Michael Gove, Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families
It’s a pleasure to be here at the Scottish Conservative Party education conference. Michael Gove, as a Conservative who was born in Edinburgh and went to school in Aberdeen, is delighted by the development of a distinctly Conservative Scottish education policy over the next few years.
There is no more suitable place than the home of the Scottish enlightenment for a conference on raising standards in education. And there is no more suitable topic to start with than school choice, which is being used all over the world by politicians on the centre left and centre right as a mechanism to raise standards and make opportunity more equal.
THE INTERNATIONAL MOVE TO SCHOOL CHOICE
The recent PISA survey on international performance found that in just about every developed country in the world, schools which were independent of government saw their students perform better than those educated in state run schools.
In America, President Obama and Secretary of State Arne Duncan have promised to double the funding for the independent Charter Schools, and encouraged CharterSchool providers to go into the most disadvantaged areas and offer parents genuine choice and higher standards.
Nowhere, however, has the effectiveness of expanding school choice in order to raise standards been proved more conclusively than in Sweden. As we just heard in Thomas’s excellent speech, Sweden has led the world in opening up its education system to new independent providers and widening parental choice. As Thomas pointed out, the result has been improvement, not only in the new free schools but in the existing municipal schools as well.
ENGLAND AND SCHOOL CHOICE
But Sweden isn’t the only Northern European country where school choice has been shown to make a difference to standards in schools and the life chances of children. South of the border in England, there are already signs that the Academy programme introduced by Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis is bearing fruit.
This year GCSE results showed that previously failing schools which had been turned into academies saw their results improving faster than the national average.
But more importantly, those schools which started as academies had pupils sitting GCSEs for the first time, and many achieved outstanding results. None more remarkable than the MossbourneAcademy in Hackney, where in an area beset by educational failure for generations, 84% of pupils obtained 5 GCSEs including English and Maths, nearly double the national average.
Mossbourne’s results reflect not only the brilliant leadership of Sir Michael Wilshaw and the hard work of its students and teachers. They reflect the way that schools with the freedom to set their own ethos, hire the best teachers, innovate and improve can raise standards and enhance life chances.
This is why it is even more tragic that Gordon Brown and Ed Balls have looked to place a brake on the Academy programme at every turn.
Where Academies once had freedom under the national curriculum, now they have very little. Where they once were independent of local authority control, now they are subject to it. Where Academies previously had freedom over who they hired, Ed Balls now places constraints on who can teach in these schools.
The tragedy of this government’s desire to centralise, constrict and bully instead of trusting professionals and empowering parents is that, as Tony Blair recognised, there has never been a time when England has been more in need of a radical school choice agenda.
The scale of the problem in England
England’s is an education system plagued by low standards and a widening gap between rich and poor.
40% of students leave Primary School unable to read and write, and 55% leave Comprehensives without the government benchmark of five good GCSEs.
Of the 75,000 children on free school meals each year (about 1 in 8 of all pupils), four out of ten fail to get even a single ‘C’ grade GCSE.
Of these 75,000, only 189 go on to get three As at A Level – compared with the 175 three A’s pupils produced by just one school, Eton.
Independent schools, which educate just 7% of pupils, produce more pupils who get three A's at A Level than every comprehensive school put together.
At the root of this problem is the fact that every year, over two hundred thousand parents, including a third of those in London, fail to get their first choice of school.
You don’t need to be a policy genius to realise this is a system in need of radical reform.
CONSERVATIVE PARTY PLANS
That’s why Michael Gove and David Cameron have mapped out an ambitious Conservative policy programme on education. A Conservative Government will reverse the measures taken by the Government to dilute the freedoms of Academies that are crucial to their success. We will also go further and extend the scope of the programme to the extent that academy freedoms become the norm for state schools.
A crucial step in this direction will be extending the Academies Programme to primary schools, allowing a new generation of independent, free, non-selective primaries – with the power to innovate and with control over their budgets, curriculum and discipline.
An unacceptable number of schools in England are failing. They have consistently poor results, cannot demonstrate that they are adding value, and all too often have been run by the same local authority with the same party in control for many years. We will take immediate action. We will allow organisations in which every school is successful – like ARK, or the Mercers Company or the Harris federation of academies – the chance to take over failing schools and give the pupils in them the education they deserve.
This all builds on our most radical and high profile policy commitment, the move to create a supply side revolution in schools by allowing new good schools to spring up where they are needed most – in the poorest areas.
In a clear nod to the outstanding success of the Swedish model, we would allow education specialists – charities, philanthropists, existing federations and groups of parents – to set up new schools as an alternative to failing schools. Any parent would be able to apply to such schools, irrespective of catchment area.
We would tear down the barriers to entry that currently exist for new providers – especially through a radical reform of planning and building regulations – to ensure the creation of thousands of new high quality school places across the country.
These schools would be given the full, original academy freedoms. Freedom over the curriculum, freedom over pay and conditions for staff, freedom from local authority control. They would be truly independent schools fit to compete with the best in the state or private sector.
SCHOOL CHOICE AS A PRACTICAL MEASURE TO HELP THE MOST DISADVANTAGED
These reforms are not being pursued from blind ideological conviction, but as a practical measure to improve schools for all pupils, especially the most disadvantaged. This is shown by the widespread cross-party support for greater school choice in England, from former Labour Cabinet Minister Alan Milburn to the leading Lib Dem think tank Centre Forum. But it is best demonstrated by our commitment to reforming school funding to ensure new schools and further innovation are most effectively concentrated in the areas of greatest disadvantage.
This would be done through the form of a pupil premium, which would ensure the poorest children carried the highest per pupil payments. This would mean those schools set up in the poorest areas had the resources to meet the unique challenges they face, and incentivise providers to establish fantastic new schools in the areas of greatest need.
CONCLUSION
The desire to help the most disadvantaged and make opportunity more equal is at the heart of the history of school choice. In America, Black parents in the inner-cities have been its loudest cheer leaders. In Sweden, the benefits of free schools to poor and ethnic minority pupils have been considerable. In England, the results achieved by Academies shows its potential to radically improve life chances in the country’s poorest areas.
It is the tragedy of Ed Balls and Gordon Brown that their ideology blinds them to the truth that parental choice and school freedom is the best way to make spread opportunity more widely. The dead hand of state control is the great check on the aspiration of the poorest. Tony Blair realised this, and it inspired his vision for the academies programme. It now falls to Michael Gove and David Cameron to be at the forefront of a coalition which stretches across the political divide to support school freedom and parental choice.
Our vision is of an independent state school accessible to every community, open to all but committed to excellence, free to pursue tougher discipline policies, free to pay good teachers more, free to innovate, experiment, and drive up standards.
Our intention is that the ability to choose this type of school for your child becomes a universal right for the many not a privileged luxury for the few.
It’s because we believe background should not be destiny, that being born into disadvantage should not mean being deprived of a future, that we want to make opportunity more equal.
And alongside reforming politicians across the world, we firmly believe school choice holds the key to realising this vision.