Education, like everything else, is now about branding. If a school is thought to be failing, the answer is not to improve its books and equipment, to bring in more and better teachers or to repair its buildings, but to give it a new image. It can get a superhead, on £70,000 a year rather than £50,000. It can join one of David Blunkett's innumerable initiatives: specialist schools, beacon schools, education action zones, Fresh Start schools. It can get a new name: Islington Arts and Media College (four trendy words in one go) rather than George Orwell (long dead; wrote old-style sentences with verbs) Comprehensive (dread word); East Brighton College of Media Arts rather than Stanley Deason.
Only two weeks ago, Fresh Start, which involves closing a school and then reopening it under new management and a new name (and probably new teachers, since the old staff have to reapply for their own jobs), looked like the flavour of the month. Mr Blunkett, speaking about 68 "failing" secondary schools, said that if they did not improve, Fresh Start would sort them out. Alas, within days, the "superheads" of three of the ten schools previously given this treatment (the policy was launched in 1997) had resigned. The three superheads - two running the schools with fancy names in Islington and Brighton, the third in Newcastle - had decided, after wrestling against overwhelming odds for periods of between six and 18 months here on Earth, that they would be better off on Planet Zog. Undaunted, the Education Secretary has now announced yet another new brand: the city academy, which will replace failing schools with something "built and managed by partnerships involving the state, voluntary, church and business sponsors". If Mr Blunkett sounds vague, it is because this latest wheeze was invented not by him but by bright young things in Downing Street. All you need to grasp, really, is that the city academies will be outside the control of local councils, which are redundant relics dependent on quaint rituals such as voting and public accountability, and that the dynamic, forward-looking private sector, with smart suits and mobile phones, will be moving in.
Let us, since we live under a government that cares only about what works, lay aside scruples about democracy. Rebranding can work if it helps a school attract more middle-class parents. There is really no more to it than that. A school can overcome location; what counts is intake, intake, intake. Mr Blunkett caricatures this view and says that "no child is preordained by their class or by their gender or by their ethnic group or by their home life to fail". Nobody has ever suggested anything so stupid. But if you bundle all the children from all the poorest families, with all the greatest social problems, from the areas with the highest crime rates, into one school, you will end up with a place in which it is pretty near impossible to teach effectively. Nearly all failing schools fit this description. Rebrand them, turn them into what Americans call "magnet" schools and you may succeed in reversing the parental flight from inner-cities. Then everyone, and most particularly the disadvantaged pupils, will benefit, both from a healthier social mix and from the greater number and quality of teachers who will be attracted.
But watch out for the tricks. You can see them already at the newly branded King's College, Guildford, a precursor of the city academies, now run by a private company at the invitation of the Tory-controlled local council. Nearly a third of the old school's intake had been excluded from other Guildford schools. King's College will not accept such pupils. It may even refuse to take some of the old school's pupils if their attendance and behaviour records are bad. So when it succeeds, as it probably will, the success will be put down to private-sector gold dust being scattered over it, when the real reason will be that, unlike a council-controlled school, it could change its intake. The trouble is that some other Guildford school will become a dumping ground for excluded pupils, will be given inadequate resources and, like King's College's predecessor, will then be pronounced a failure.
Expect something similar wherever city academies are set up. Privately run schools do not tolerate failure - there is too much at stake. But they do not, as their propagandists would like us to believe, perform some alchemy that turns failure into success. They simply export it elsewhere. And wherever it ends up, Mr Blunkett may finally run out of new brand concepts and be left with only six solutions: money, money, money and teachers, teachers, teachers.
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