Press
Nasty Ed Balls tears up Tony Blair's homework
Publication: |
The Telegraph |
Link: |
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Author: |
Matthew D'Ancona |
Date : |
6th April 2008 |
It was just like old times, really. Last week, as Tony Blair made a passionate speech on the value of faith in public life, Ed Balls, Gordon Brown's closest Cabinet colleague, was biffing faith schools around the playground over their admissions policies. Yes, even now, the old Blair-Brown split can still rise like some hairy beast from the Labour swamp and splutter into life.
In the days leading up to the Prime Minister's international conference on "Progressive Governance" in Hertfordshire this weekend, the surviving Blairites were in despair at Mr Balls's recent conduct, and what they see as politically suicidal backsliding on public service reform. "Balls to NASUWT, Gove to CentreForum," one such MP said to me. "Which is the New Labour speech?"
To decipher: this Blairite was referring to two addresses delivered at the end of last month. Speaking at the annual conference of the second biggest teaching union, NASUWT, the Schools Secretary gave a speech that strayed from friendliness into emollience. Meanwhile, Mr Gove, the shadow schools secretary, was at the liberal think tank CentreForum setting out an education strategy based not on the appeasement of vested interests, but the radical liberalisation of the schools system inspired by the hugely successful Swedish experiment.
One often hears these days - usually from those who equate Tory radicalism with swingeing tax cuts - that the Conservative and Labour parties are almost indistinguishable and that the voters will have no real choice at the next election. To grasp what tosh this is, one only has to consider the widening gap between the parties' education policies (not to mention welfare, policing, prisons, Europe, the voluntary sector etc etc)
On Wednesday, Mr Balls launched a full-frontal assault on schools that, he claims, breach the Admissions Code, naming and shaming 96 of them in three areas specially selected for his research exercise. Amongst various infringements, the survey found that six schools in Barnet, five of them Jewish and one Church of England, had asked prospective parents about voluntary contributions. This, Mr Balls claimed, was tantamount to charging for education.
Actually, it is no such thing. In the Jewish community, there has long been an understanding that those who can afford it help out with the additional cost of security that is sadly necessary at such schools. Church schools of all denominations often make appeals for donations, as one would expect of foundations that need additional funds to pay for religious activities. To suggest that parents are deterred or intimidated by this custom reflects either condescension or, more probably, the inability of Whitehall eyes to see local reality.
What is Mr Balls up to? He is, after all, a formidable politician, with a brain the size of a planet. What is certain is that he was looking for a fight. The selection of Manchester and Northamptonshire for his survey was unremarkable, but his department's claim that Barnet was chosen simply because it was "a London authority" and "because no objections had been referred to the schools adjudicator [the admissions regulator]" from the borough is spectacularly disingenuous.
Barnet has consistently been one of the highest-achieving areas in national league tables, not least because of its grammar and faith schools. If one was on a mission to discredit diversity of provision and educational competitiveness, Barnet is where one would head in the hope of finding fault.
Most parents, I imagine, will be mystified by the spectacle of the Schools Secretary bashing the best schools at a time when Britain is slipping down the international league tables in literacy, maths and science, one in six pupils fails to achieve a single grade C at GCSE, and more than 10,000 schools brace themselves for a teachers' strike later this month. You would not think that the wording of application forms to a few excellent schools in north London would be top of the Schools Secretary's in-tray.
Yet in the tribe of which Mr Balls would one day like to be chieftain such bizarre priorities are not only commonplace but orthodox. After 14 years of New Labour, the party's ancestral attachment to the old-fashioned comprehensive system is undiminished and ferocious. For Labour, it is an article of faith, not a testable proposition, that comprehensives are good. Anthony Crosland, as education secretary, discouraged his officials from researching the success or failure of such schools, saying "it can't tell you whether you should go comprehensive or not - that's a basic value judgment".
True, the Brown Government is still happy to get out the Blairite spray-paint and give schools the appearance of 21st-century diversity: academies, specialist schools, trust schools and so on. In the Financial Times last month, the PM used Blairesque language more brazenly than ever before, warning that "there can be no backtracking on reform, no go-slow, no reversals and no easy compromises".
In practice, however, his Government was quick to bind the academies much more closely into the national curriculum and (even more significantly) to draw these supposedly free-standing schools back into the town hall fold. This is just where they don't belong: indeed, the whole point of the academy programme was to let schools flourish in semi-independence, as free as possible from local authority officialdom and ideology.
The row over admissions, likewise, may be confected, but it also reveals the true colours of this administration. The Admissions Code for schools is a grimly un-nuanced document that strictly outlaws almost everything in the allotting of places: parent interviews, photographs, information about a child's hobbies, even discussion of school trips that might deter the needy. You name it, really.
In February 2007, crucially, the code became mandatory - rather than a wish-list to which schools must only "have regard". This change in status was a concession to the Left that Blair had made in a bid to win backbench support for trust schools in his Education and Inspections Bill (2006).
Mr Balls has signalled that for him and Mr Brown, this was not a political tactic but a moral imperative. Even Crosland, the great destroyer of grammar schools, preferred persuasion to coercion: the infamous Circular 10/65 of July 1965 did not "require" but only "requested" councils to make schools comprehensive.
But Mr Balls, implementing the 2007 code literally and with political vigour, goes further than Crosland ever dared. Last week, he wrote to Philip Hunter, the schools adjudicator, demanding strict compliance with the existing regulations, and announced a further tightening up of the system in amendments to the Education and Skills Bill.
This was a very significant episode in the history of the Brown Government. It showed that the PM and his allies still believe, fundamentally, in central rationing of public goods, and in fiercely policed queuing, rather than in liberalisation and supply-side reform. As in the Laura Spence affair over Oxford admissions, their instinct is to find fault with high-achieving institutions and put their custodians in the stocks - as if the token humiliation of the strong somehow empowers the weak. As if the clipping of a strong bird's wings ever helped an injured bird to fly. If this is "Progressive Governance", you can keep it.
Matthew d'Ancona is editor of The Spectator