State Schools: new Labour and the Conservative legacy
Edited by Clyde Chitty and John Dunford Woburn Press, 168pp, £39.50
ISBN 071300214X
The authors' target is the political class that has ruled over education since 1979. They attack both major parties with vigour and apparent impartiality, but they reveal their political bias through their likes and dislikes. For instance, they are opposed to competition in the classroom, to league tables, to the assisted places scheme, to Tory attempts to offer educational choice by creating a diversity of schools, and they blame the Tories for attacks on local education authorities. They regard the abolition of the few remaining grammar schools as a priority. And they insist that the only way to the promised land is through the establishment of a single, nationwide and monolithic institution: the comprehensive school. They blame the low morale of teachers, and their reduced public esteem, on the Tories, the media and Ofsted, instead of focusing on irresponsible actions by teaching unions. Their progressivist, left-wing theorising could hardly be clearer.
They are right, however, to approve of the national curriculum, while deploring the way it was implemented. We needed a national curriculum, if only because far too many pupils were ignoring science, languages and art at the end of the third year of secondary education. But the Tory government's ideas were too prescriptive and mired in detail. What was, and still is, needed was a far greater emphasis on the three Rs in the early years, particularly on the absolutely crucial business of reading - David Blunkett's insistence on the use of phonics may well turn out to be the present government's greatest educational achievement.
I well remember, as the head of English departments in secondary modern and comprehensive schools in the Sixties and Seventies, how we were faced, year after year, with a large group of pupils from primary schools who were poor readers - a deficit very difficult to make up, and which created frustrated adolescents who often expressed their anger through delinquent behaviour. (A hugely disproportionate number of young convicts are poor readers.)
Another flaw here is that the authors pay too little attention to pressure groups. The state education service is a vast, complex, supply-based empire with an assured clientele. In the UK, there are more than 30,000 schools, about nine million pupils, and close on half a million teachers. This makes effective oversight very difficult. The system is highly porous. It can be penetrated and influenced by groups whose agendas have nothing to do with parental wishes. Pressure groups have mastered the logistics of curriculum innovation, and have been able to effect radical change. The abolition of physical chastisement, the acceptance of personal and social education (PSE), the imposition of so-called multicultural education, the reduction of moral education to what is politically correct, and the indoctrination of children as young as four with the disturbing and damaging principles and practices of permissive, explicit sex education - all these can be traced to powerful vested interests who know the ropes. No study of the state education service that ignores the activities of pressure groups can be considered adequate.
There is, however, proper concern about Ofsted and its equal opportunities report of 1998, a document that might well have emanated from the happily defunct Inner London Education Authority. This gives the impression that schools are hotbeds of racial and sexual discrimination, intent on denying opportunities to ethnic-minority children and to girls. In fact, the highest-achieving group is Indian in origin, and girls have been outperforming boys for years. The truth is that the most worrying group are probably white, inner-city, working-class boys.
For anyone with an interest in the politics and administration of state education, this is a useful book - provided that the claim to ideological impartiality is taken lightly.
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