Lessons learnt

For a bill that aims to remove barriers to opportunity, which strengthens safeguarding for children, improves multi-agency working and delivers breakfast clubs for all primary children, Labour’s children’s wellbeing and schools bills has met with a disappointing reaction.

Instead of focusing on the totality of the bill and how children will be supported, commentators, backed by media cheerleaders, fulminate over Bridget Phillipson’s desire to create a renewed national curriculum that – fittingly, for a national curriculum – all schools will follow. ‘Britain’s strictest headteacher’, Katherine Birbalsingh, calls her a Marxist because she wants all children to be taught by somebody qualified, and because she expects academy schools teach in line with universal standards. The ex-Ofsted chief, Amanda Spielman, claims that Phillipson is curtailing the ‘autonomy’ of schools compared to the halcyon days of Michael Gove’s ‘success’(sic). Apparently, Phillipson has been ‘captured by the unions’ because she speaks to them and has agreed to action the independent pay body’s proposals.

Amid this maelstrom of anger and misinformation, some colleagues on the left are worried, too. Professor Becky Francis’s recently published interim report on the review of the curriculum is not seen as radical enough. There is also understandable unhappiness with the Ofsted framework proposals: the proposed process remains a compliance agenda characterised by top-down control, instead of an accountability process focused on school improvement partnerships, trust, and quality assurance. Department for Education (DfE)policy more generally is seen by some on the left as not radical enough, lacking in vision, too busy appeasing Ulti-academy trust heads and tinkering with a system that urgently needs changing.

So unfortunately, the reaction to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill has largely ignored the substance of the legislation – particularly with regard to vulnerable and disadvantaged children. The use of a ‘single unique identifier’ (SUI) to improve multi-agency information sharing where there are concerns about a child’s welfare is a timely one, welcomed by many agencies including Adoption UK. Local authorities will now have the power to direct all schools (including academies) to admit looked-after children who are looking fora school place: this requirement promotes fairness and the support of vulnerable children.

Requiring the register of children not in school (CNIS) to include home educated children and those in flexi schooling or alternative provision improves safeguarding and student entitlements. The new rules on home education, particularly for children who are educated at a special school or are subject to child protection investigations, defend children from low quality provision. The scheme for improving the quality of kinship care, as well as new protections for looked-after children and care leavers up to the age of 25, are progressive and timely. The perceived difficulties of the bill largely concern how greater power for LA’s will fit and work within the interface of schools who have had considerable autonomy in creating their own rule book in these areas.

So how do we view the work of DfE and Phillipson’s team so far? Levelling VAT on private school fees was brave. The breakfast clubs for all primary schools; the curbing of academy opt-outs for the curriculum, teachers ‘pay and admissions; and the limiting of branded items of school uniform are much needed actions. The expansion of free school meals to include all children in households receiving universal credit has the potential to lift children out of poverty. The significant money for the schools rebuilding programme announced in the spending review is essential and well-timed. All these measures, we could argue, are a good start in making our fractured system more cohesive, which could lay the groundwork for even more progressive reforms – on SEND provision, for instance.

From National Education Union general secretary Daniel Kebede to Sir Michael Wilshaw, formerly of Ofsted, colleagues are respectful of Phillipson’s genuine commitment to inclusion and the eradication of disadvantage born of her own background and experience. This focus is strongly reflected in the bill. Choosing Becky Francis to head the curriculum and assessment review – who in her role as the CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation has been focused on breaking the link between family income and educational achievement – was a sensible best fit with what the government is trying to achieve.

Instructing Ofsted to create proposals for a new framework, then offering it to general consultation, was a risk-averse one. Yet if ministers had dared to float a ‘dilution’ of the sacred inspection regime themselves, it would have laid the ground for feverish right wing attack lines around ‘rigour’ and ‘standards’ and more misleading media froth. However, eventually, we will have to move further away from the status quo.

Graham Donaldson, the architect of the Welsh and Scottish curriculums, spoke to the Fabian education policy group recently. He said that delivering a step change in the English system, with its many providers and types of schools, was a particularly challenging task. In addition, the ‘improvement trap’ – where stakeholders see ‘success’ mainly in terms of metrics and marginal gains – may impede more progressive approaches to the curriculum.

The elephant in the room curtailing a more radical policy agenda is surely the media. The right-wing media has sought to cultivate derision and seem hellbent on disparaging anything the new government proposes. Phillipson has produced ‘a war on schools’ and she is ‘destroying Britain’s education system’ (The Spectator); the bill is ‘an abuse of state power’ (Telegraph); Becky Francis is ‘lauded’ in ‘loftiest left-wing circles’ and ‘specialises in ‘equality and gender issues’ so she’s pejoratively ‘woke’ (Andrew Pierce). Katherine Birbalsingh has received more media coverage during this period than Phillipson and the other 99.9 per cent of head teachers put together. This serves to create the impression that her entirely negative response to the bill is the ‘go to’ wisdom, creating more hostility as other outlets and social media follow suit.

Early mistakes by the new government have been made, of course, but the children’s wellbeing and schools bill is not one of them. In the current climate, it is probably better for education policy to be nuanced and gradualistic. It is only a first step, to be sure – but a step in the right direction

Image Credit: UK Government via flickr