Análisis crítico de la propuesta educacional conservadora-liberal demócrata en Inglaterra recientemente publicada en el diario The Guardian.
Gove’s claim to be ‘freeing’ schools is a cloak for more control from the centre
This dreary abuse of local democracy was tried by Thatcher and Blair. All people want is fair access to a good, nearby school
The Guardian, Thursday 27 May 2010
So this is the big idea. David Cameron’s coalition icon, his first bid for headline gratification, is “free schools”. The government’s bright spark, Michael Gove, was assiduous in opposition and has hit the ground running. But what exactly has he hit it with?
The unvarying conviction of new ministers is that they can change the world by re-engineering structure. It is not true, but for a quarter of a century the belief has blighted those running Britain’s hospitals, schools, police, railways, everything. Distracting officialdom from the job in hand with some Whitehall fidget is the one constant of public policy.
British schools are not good enough. This is widely acknowledged. As a generalisation, good schools have got better, but not bad ones. After decades of research, still no one knows if a smaller class, a new building, a simpler curriculum, a better-paid teacher or a bigger budget makes any difference.
Hence there has been little measurable value in the doubling of resources going to schools over the last decade, during which time local councils have been all but relieved of financial responsibility for them. Centralisation of school policy has delivered nothing.
Gove disagrees. He appears to envisage a return to the old saw that schools “freed” of local councils are somehow blessed thereby. The thesis is code for a hankering after the days before the 1944 Education Act, when autonomous grammar schools were distinct from “local” board schools. After the collapse of 11-plus selection and the advent of comprehensives in the mid-1960s, a longing for the past emerged mostly from middle-class parents in big cities, and has continued ever since. “Choice” has become talisman for a frantic rush to escape disorderly city schools with bad teaching and crammed with immigrants.
Under Margaret Thatcher there were initial attempts to meet middle-class aspirations in the assisted places scheme, at one point moving 30,000 pupils into private schools. This widened dramatically with the arrival of Kenneth Baker at education in 1986. He introduced the concept of city technology colleges and grant-maintained schools. Thatcher declared that she would “give parents the right to take their children’s school out of the hands of the local authority”. Money would follow the parent in a version of the old rightwing voucher. Thatcher predicted all localism in education would be “unbundled”.
This never happened, because schools and parents were just not interested. Not to be loved infuriated Whitehall, and the cause was resumed by John Patten in 1992, announcing that “by 1996 most of the 3,900 maintained secondary schools as well as a significant proportion of the 19,000 maintained primary schools” in England and Wales would be grant-maintained. He became more and more obsessed. Bribes and promises of higher pay were offered to schools and headteachers to opt out.
The Treasury soon called a halt to what could have been a demand-led extravagance. It insisted on a central funding agency and “common funding formula” with conformity to local capacity targets. Patten’s 1993 act had 308 sections, with 1,000 amendments added during its passage, all to regulate what were supposedly liberated schools. Never was so much legislation hurled at so trivial a problem. Cart-loads of regulations arrived at every school. I know of no headteacher who claimed to receive less paperwork as a result of the act.
Tony Blair caught the same virus. He repeated Thatcher’s demand to “make every school an independent state school”, a contradiction in terms. In 2003 his adviser, Andrew Adonis, promised him 200 academy trusts backed by private entrepreneurs, later increased to 400. Knighthoods were offered to potential backers.
These schools cost a fortune. The average was £30m per academy, with private promoters rarely giving more than £2m. The equivalent funding to the local school was £10m. A steady trickle of reports indicated that there was no evident “academy effect”. An Edinburgh academic calculated that the academies were costing £5m for each “improved pupil”, staggeringly bad value for money.
By 2006 only 5% of council schools had opted out. Since the early 1990s they had benefited from the Tories’ “local management of schools” policy, giving them more freedom over money and staffing. Indeed, the chief burden was from the inspectorate and bureaucracy imposed by central government. In 2001, David Miliband as education minister was estimated by Hansard to have sent 3,840 documents to each school, embracing 350 policy targets. It was demented centralism.
Transient private corporations or parents’ groups cannot realistically stand proxy for a community, let alone for a town or city. Gove’s only hope of advancing the academies’ cause would be for them to stand proxy for the private sector. But for that he must push the nuclear button and give them control over their admissions.
The key to the politics of education in Britain lies not in governance but in admissions. All else is euphemism. “White flight” may be called parental choice. Catchment areas may be derided as postcode lotteries. But the one really creditable effort of British education since the war has been the battle for some equality of opportunity within the state education sector, even if in big cities it has not always worked.
If Cameron and Gove really mean to reverse this, to revert to 11-plus selection and educational segregation, they had better say so, and face the political music. This is the topic that tore the Tories apart in the 1960s, when middle-class parents found their children rejected for grammar schools by formal examinations. It is hard to imagine the coalition could survive this.
But if that is not the intention it is hard to see the point in this return to a failed Thatcherite policy. Gove anyway can have no money for a new school building splurge alongside recently rebuilt existing schools. Even if he had, the Treasury would do exactly as before, and impose control over every penny.
Whatever is wrong with English schools (always excepting London), it is not governance. People seem to prefer them run through some sort of local democracy and, as the 2000 Ripon grammar school vote showed, they want a fair admission system. Most schools and teachers welcome support in staffing and admissions from a local authority office. That is why so few opted out. “Freedom” is not an issue uppermost in most minds, while parents just want their local school to be good.
If Gove wants to free schools of bureaucracy he should look to the beam in his own department’s eye. He can call off his health, safety and employment mafias. He can disband, as he seems minded to, his curricular centralism. He can abolish more than one measly quango. He can use his spare money on the Liberal Democrats’ well-conceived pupil premium.
Dreary abuse of local democracy is being mounted yet again to cloak a bid to “nationalise” schools. The key to better education must lie elsewhere, deep within these institutions, in their ethos, morale and staffing. Good schools are underpinned not damaged by civic commitment and civic pride. Gove’s centralism ill befits a government whose leader once proclaimed his localism. But that was before he commanded power at the centre.