Change?

Posted on 18/06/2024

With the General Election campaign well under way, Patrick Yarker, writing in a personal capacity, considers a number of aspects of Labour’s education policy as presented in the party’s Manifesto.

In keeping with the outlook of its main antagonist, the Labour Party’s General Election Manifesto presents education as a matter of individual and collective economic prosperity. Education as such finds itself subsumed within a section outlining how the Party will ‘Break down barriers to opportunity’.

This section endorses meritocracy. It opens by emphasising the hard work which should result in success, goes on to underscore the importance of economic security, and culminates in naming and defining education as a ‘system that prepares our children for life, work and the future’. By reversing John Dewey’s foundational dictum that education is ‘a process of living, and not a preparation for future living’, the Manifesto whittles education down to a tool. Such instrumentalism denies education its nature as the practice of freedom.

The Manifesto perfectly expresses a damagingly-technicist cast of mind when it claims that ‘too many children arrive at primary school not ready to learn’. The claim has something supercilious about it even as it misconceives the nature of learning and hence the work of teaching. Apparent concern about children’s supposed unreadiness masks a drive to ensure compliance within the system as currently constituted. The child must be ‘readied’ for the system, rather than the system made ready (no doubt at greater expense) to enable the child. Here the Manifesto confirms allegiance to a school system in which attention to the mandated course content and the exam-syllabus takes precedence over a necessary regard for what pupils or students bring to the work of education and what might enable them meaningfully to meet with the required materials.

The Manifesto doubles down on current approaches. It says, for example:

The last Labour government’s promotion of phonics put rocket boosters under the reading and writing ability of a generation of children. We will do the same for numeracy, improving the quality of maths teaching across nurseries and primary schools.

But should maths be taught in nurseries? Should anything be ‘taught’ there when currently-authorised versions of teaching cleave to the instructional and didactic? The problematic outcomes of statutory phonics teaching in Key Stage 1 might give Labour’s policy-makers pause and not encouragement. A more thoughtfully-responsible policy for the teaching of reading is urgently needed, such as might draw from the research undertaken by Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking, among others.

Elsewhere, the Manifesto acknowledges teachers for hard work in ‘bringing alive knowledge-rich syllabuses’. These Govian relics look set to remain. They will be the basis for reforms which:

…deliver a curriculum which is rich and broad, inclusive, and innovative. To capture this breadth, our review will consider the right balance of assessment methods whilst protecting the important role of examinations.

The mooted ‘expert-led review of curriculum and assessment’ might offer escape from the hidebound. It is implied that the review will tilt towards the development of ‘essential digital, speaking and creative skills’. Everything will depend, as always, on who conducts the review, and how. Will a range of practitioners be able meaningfully to influence it, or any of those once merrily traduced by ministers as ‘the Blob’?

If so, a space might open to advance conceptions of curriculum and assessment more in line with Dewey’s precept and with what is known about the importance for learning of co-agency, trust, surprise and the relational. There may be an opportunity to shift the formal discourse away from ‘deliverology’ and towards more enabling and constructive conceptions of pedagogy and assessment. Labour might prepare for such a review by re-addressing the work of the last serious—albeit non-governmental—venture of this kind, the Cambridge Primary Review of 2010. As the most comprehensive investigation into the sector for two generations, it still holds lessons for today.

Labour’s headline educational pledge is to remove the VAT exemption and business rate relief for private schools. Among other things, money recovered through this policy will pay for 6500 ‘new expert teachers’, mental health support for every school, Ofsted reform, 3000 extra nursery places, and Early Years language development in primary schools. This promise distinguishes Labour’s educational policy from that offered by the Conservatives, the Liberal-Democrats, the Greens or Reform UK, whose top priorities for England’s education system include banning particular forms of thought, preventing people from going to university, and boosting private schools. But on the face of it Labour’s Manifesto offers no break from neoliberal conceptions of education.

Such a break is advocated in Forum’s recent e-book: ‘Renewing public education: towards a more inclusive, democratic and joyful system’. The e-book argues, for example, in favour of universal early childhood provision as a way beyond the current fragmented and marketized approach. Labour has next to nothing concrete to say here beyond the proposal to fund the pledged extra nursery places by ‘upgrading space in primary schools’. The idea appears unmoored from any wider Early Years policy that would significantly improve the status of Early Years workers, to say nothing of their qualifications and pay. Are these extra places the start of a move away from the prevailing ‘childcare’ model and towards the integrated system of Early Years education so sorely needed?

Labour would replace single-word Ofsted judgements with ‘a report card…telling parents clearly how schools are performing’. It is suggested that attendance, safeguarding matters and off-rolling will form an element in this judgement, and there may also be implications for the curriculum. By contrast, the Conservative Manifesto promises ‘backing’ for Ofsted, while the Green Party would abolish the organisation. It remains to be seen how Labour proposes to strike the balance between collaborative elements of inspection, intended to foster a school’s development, and the evaluative and judgemental aspects.

Unlike the Liberal-Democrats, who would give Local Authorities certain extra powers and resources, Labour’s Manifesto addresses neither school structures nor governance. It says nothing about stopping forced academisations. One sentence promises ‘new Regional Improvement Teams, to enhance school-to-school support, and spread best practice.’ Perhaps during the remainder of the campaign we will learn more about who will comprise these teams and how they will mesh with, or go beyond, what MATs and drastically-enfeebled LAs are already doing by way of inter-school support. As for ‘best practice’, it is all too often a dead end for practitioners. Better to plan viable ways for them to come together to think through the challenges they face in their settings, rather than be directed by those who neither share their context nor their responsibilities. Will this be part of Labour’s promised new Teacher Training (sic) Entitlement?

School buildings in every region remain out of commission because of RAAC or the long backlog of repairs. The teacher retention and recruitment crisis only intensifies. A systemic and not a localised emergency, this can’t be solved without a general improvement in pay and conditions, and enhanced freedom of scope for practitioners to determine what they teach and how they teach it.

Straitened funding and ossified thinking shackle the formal education system in England. Whichever party takes power in July, breaking those chains will be among the most pressing tasks for organised labour and a mobilised public, as well as for elected representatives.