Change at the chalkface

I've written this feature on the Gove legacy for the October edition of Public Finance.

David Cameron's replacement of Michael Gove with Nicky Morgan as education secretary caused consternation among reformers whilst exciting enthusiasm in many staffrooms. Reformers fear his changes will be watered down by his successor; many teachers hope the relentless pressure of change will ease.

But Gove’s legacy may lie less in academies and free schools than in the changes to the curriculum, teaching and accountability. And a focus on classroom teaching by Morgan, with her more conciliatory tone to teachers, could reap real dividends.

Academies are funded directly by the government rather than local authorities, and have had greater freedoms over the curriculum, teachers’ pay and admissions, subject to regulation and funding agreements. By May 2010, the growing programme was targeted on underachieving secondary schools, with 203 such ‘sponsored academies’ already open and 60 more due that autumn.

Gove allowed successful schools to become academies and brought primaries into the programme. Many signed up for extra cash – typically £250,000 per secondary school – as they gained control of their local authority budgets. At a time of austerity, it was a no-brainer. In return, these ‘converter academies’ would work with weaker schools. Most say they do, though the extent to which they do so varies, and academy take-up has been much slower in primary schools.

Meanwhile, Gove also introduced ‘free schools’, essentially new academies set up in response to parental demand or innovative ideas from teachers, educational and faith-based charities. The government barred local authorities from establishing any traditional community schools.

Since 2010, the number of academies has grown rapidly. There are now over 4,000 academies, including nearly two-thirds of secondary and about one in eight primary schools, as well as dozens of technical academies – 30 university technical colleges and 37 studio schools with practical curriculums and close industry links for 14- to 19-year-olds.

Sponsored academies – of which there are now 1,100 – were intended to improve standards, particularly for the poorest students, which is why Gove required many failing primaries to change status, sometimes in the teeth of strong local opposition. Downhills primary school in Tottenham, north London – now the Harris Primary Academy Philip Lane – was a particular flashpoint and the scene of strong protests. The proportion of its pupils getting the expected level 4 in reading, writing and maths rose from 69% to 77% this summer – twice the national average improvement.

And, sponsored academies generally have improved faster than other schools, albeit from a lower base. Many belong to chains – groups led by an educational charity, a university or a successful school. Sutton Trust analysis in July found that disadvantaged pupils in nine of 31 chains studied had better results than the average for all schools, while improvements in 18 chains were faster than average. Some well-known chains, like Harris and Ark, each with 27 academies, do particularly well. But the study confirmed Department for Education concerns that other chains that had grown very rapidly since 2010 were underperforming.

The DfE capped 14 academy chains in March, including the 77-school Academies Enterprise Trust. They must focus on improving their existing schools before being allowed further expansion. Ministers also forced another academy chain, E-Act, to transfer 10 of its 34 schools to other sponsors. Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw has inspected weaker academies in co-ordinated swoops across chains, including AET, where half the 12 academies inspected were deemed inadequate. He has yet to be given the power by ministers to inspect chains as separate entities.

This mixed picture also extends to the 250 free schools now open, though few have been open long enough for a full judgment. Seventy-nine free schools opened this term and 76 more have been approved, but the programme still feels incoherent. It may be the default mechanism for new schools with rising demand for new places, but relatively few free schools result from parental action.

Instead, there is an eclectic mix of genuine teacher innovation and rebranding of existing options, including faith schools, former independent schools or new academies established by chains.
One celebrated success has been the London Academy of Excellence, a free school for sixth formers in Stratford, east London, supported by Eton and the independent Brighton College, which sent four of its 160 students to Oxbridge and 68 to Russell Group universities this year. However, the local college says it does well too: of the 75 students it admitted with the 5A* or A grades at GCSE required by LAE, 60 went to Russell Group universities and two to Oxbridge.

Other free schools have faced real difficulties. The Montessori Discovery free school in Crawley, Sussex, had to close in January after a damning Ofsted report. Anal ysis by independent factchecking organisation Full Fact of Ofsted data suggests a similar proportion of free schools were rated outstanding as other schools, but a higher proportion rated inadequate or failing, based on 40 free school inspections.

For all the arguments about academies and free schools, their impact may be more prosaic than their supporters or critics allow. Good chains have an effective model absent in weaker chains. But their success still reflects quality of leadership and teaching, and their consistent application, which may not simply be an academy effect when many schools are forming collective trusts and federations.

This is why other reforms may matter more. There is growing interest in using research evidence to inform school improvement. Since 2011, the Education Endowment Foundation, a sister charity of the Sutton Trust established with £135m of government money to help improve results for disadvantaged pupils, has used 75 randomised trials to test approaches to school improvement. Nearly half of school leaders now consult its research evidence.

Tougher accountability is making its mark too. Ofsted has put many coasting schools into special measures and placed more emphasis on good teaching, downgrading some previously top-rated schools. Gove toughened Labour’s floor targets, requiring weaker schools to achieve ever-rising minimum standards. Failure often prompts a requirement to become an academy.

However, the biggest upheaval has been to the curriculum and exams. This term, primary pupils face tougher spelling, grammar, punctuation and mental arithmetic lessons, in addition to phonics checks introduced in 2012, while secondary schools are introducing computer science, harder maths and more historical chronology. GCSE coursework, modularity and resits have been dropped, leading to a dip in English performance this year. Many vocational qualifications have been devalued or removed from the league tables.

From 2016, secondary schools will be judged on their best eight GCSE subjects, using average points, rather than the five best graded C or above as now. This builds on the English Baccalaureate, a league table measure of English, maths, science, languages and humanities results. The combined impact is intended to make exams harder and ensure that schools don’t game the league tables to conceal underlying weaknesses. However, they also make it much harder to make a fair judgment on the success of Gove’s reforms, and could force down results at once struggling schools and academies that were starting to improve.

Yet behind the flurry of change, there remains an underlying truth. The two things that make the most difference to a school’s success, particularly for poorer pupils, are the quality of its teaching and the calibre of its leaders.

Gove has introduced teaching schools, with a remit to improve teaching quality among groups of local schools, and expanded school-based teacher training. But for all the emphasis on new teachers – 35,000 are recruited each year, and their quality has been improving alongside that of school leaders – there is far too little done to improve the skills of the 450,000 serving teachers in England’s classrooms. In fact, there is much more variation in the quality of teaching within schools than there is between schools.

Improved professional development and teacher appraisal may not set reformers’ pulses racing, but they could make most difference at the chalkface. Sutton Trust research has shown that raising the quality of the weakest tenth of teachers to the average would lift England from a middling position in the OECD international league tables to the top five, and the trust is now working with the Gates Foundation to capture international best practice. That could deliver the revolution in standards that politicians want to see – in academies and community schools alike.

Delivery depends on detail for new ministers

I've posted at the Sutton Trust on the reshuffle.

Reshuffles can be a brutal business. This week’s surprise move of Michael Gove, and his replacement by Nicky Morgan as education secretary, seemed particularly so. But no less surprising to those in education was the departure of David Willetts as universities minister to make way for Greg Clark.

Both had been highly able ministers, as well combative advocates in defence of their policies. And both leave significant legacies. For Gove, the media has focused on the growth of academies and free schools and the changes to the curriculum. With Willetts, raising tuition fees without any medium-term impact on the numbers of young people going to university was a clear political success. 

Yet, their legacies in tackling disadvantage and improving access may lie elsewhere, and it is important that their successors recognise these achievements as much as those with a higher profile.

It is true that there are now 4000 academies, scores of free schools and that the curriculum is being made more knowledge-focused, with exams toughened to match. The direction of travel towards greater school independence has been accelerated, but whether it leads also to rapid improvement will owe as much to other less celebrated changes. The best academies and free schools clearly make a difference, but there have also been significant failures.

As significantly, Gove – and his Liberal Democrat deputy David Laws – have championed the use of evidence to improve teaching, gradually increasing expectations that their pupil premium is used on what works, and this week’s Ofsted report suggests that is having some impact. The funding of the Education Endowment Foundation, our sister charity, was an important part of that process, and it is one that not only enjoys cross-party support but growing buy-in from school leaders and teachers.

Equally important in my view has been the continued use of floor targets to raise the minimum acceptable standard for schools – though the impact of planned changes to the core league table measure may not have been fully considered – and the development of Teaching School Alliances to support school-to-school improvement, a key feature of the London Challenge.

Although his critics presented his policies as intensifying competition, the reality of the growth of academies has been an explosion in multi-academy trusts and similar co-operative arrangements at a local level, of which the Teaching Schools are an important aspect.

For Nicky Morgan, the challenge will be to build on these aspects of the Gove legacy and to foster greater collaboration between schools, particularly isolated primaries and schools in regions as yet largely untouched by the reform bug in ways that may support the growth of academies, but also enable all schools to provide the academic curriculum now expected of them.

If there was one significant weakness in the Gove – and to an extent, the Laws – approach, it was in their willingness to use levers sufficiently. The pupil premium is being used more effectively, but why not do more to reward schools that make a real difference to their disadvantaged pupils, and cut the premium from those that persistently fail to do so? Why not expect more collaboration from converter academies, which gained financially from their conversion, so they are required in their funding agreements to play a part in wider school improvement, as the best converters already do?

Greg Clark faces challenges in higher education too. Although student numbers have held up, and the proportion of students from poorer backgrounds has continued to grow, there are significant concerns about the impact of student debt in the future. Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others suggesting that the current likely repayments will barely cover the increased fees suggest that the overall funding model needs review; equally, while it may seem attractive to load repayments onto people’s salaries in their 40s rather than their 20s, the social implications of this extra burden may not have been thought through. The new minister will need to take another look at the arithmetic.

It will also be important to monitor the impact of the raising of the student numbers cap on recruitment to elite universities. While this may increase student places overall, some Russell Group vice-chancellors fear that it will make it harder to improve access, as A*AA or higher may become the norm in popular courses, with less room for contextual offers.

For both ministers – and the same is true for Nick Boles, who replaces Matthew Hancock as skills minister in improving apprenticeships – it is to be hoped that tackling social mobility and the impact of disadvantage should be as much a priority as it was for Gove and Willetts. Doing so means getting the detail right, as much as it does sketching the big picture

Cultural capital in the core curriculum

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I argue that there are important social mobility implications surrounding what children study in the core curriculum, in the wake of the Of Mice and Men Twitter storm.

Of Mice and Men may not be quite flavour of the month, but To Kill A Mockingbird certainly has the imprimatur of the Education Secretary. Michael Gove hit back on Monday after a Bank Holiday weekend Twitter storm denounced the supposed banning of Arthur Miller in favour of a British and Irish literary canon.

The facts of the case are murky: the Secretary of State has upped the compulsion on the study of British and Irish authors, so exam boards are apparently interpreting this as meaning that the greats of American literature that have been a staple of English classrooms are no longer an essential part of their GCSE syllabus.

This isn’t the first time such debates have occurred. But they still have important implications for the cause of social mobility and educational equality. Having a breadth of cultural knowledge and awareness is an important part of success in later life and engaging with the networks where power resides.

When I worked with David Blunkett during an earlier National Curriculum review there were voices arguing in favour of dropping compulsory Shakespeare and ending a requirement that all students should read at least one significant pre-1900 work of fiction. We resisted their siren call.

The rationale for doing so is clear. Despite the supposed homogeneity of our tech-obsessed lives, there remains a significant access gap when it comes to works of great literature, drama and poetry. For many young people, their primary access to their literary heritage – and a global canon of great writing - will be at school, and often before the age of 14. So it is right that there should be a clear entitlement to such access, just as there are fundamentals of history, geography, science and art where school is the gatekeeper to such knowledge.

This is not to say we need wholesale to adopt the philosophy of E.D. Hirsch or still more his Amero-centric fact lists, but it is to say that it does matter that we have a core curriculum and an expectation  that every young person will have a basic entitlement to cultural knowledge as well English, Maths and Science.

There is, of course, a counter argument. Some say that the accumulation of knowledge and facts is rather less important than the acquisition of skills – learning to research, knowing how to study, the ability to communicate well, working in teams. The Sutton Trust/EEF toolkit rates meta-cognition, sometimes called ‘learning to learn’ – in plain terms, study skills – among the highest scoring interventions for raising attainment.

But I have always thought this to be an artificial divide. Without some basic knowledge, Google is an unholy mix of the irrelevant, the interesting and the positively ill-informed. Knowing what is likely to be correct is an important part of assessing the relevant over the ridiculous. A false dichotomy between knowledge and skills has emerged.

Yet it must equally be the case that learning such important skills through the curriculum is important. It is no good getting to university and finding oneself with hours of time intended for independent learning when you don’t know how to use that time as effectively as possible. This is not to excuse the dearth of contact time increasingly complained about but to note that the absence of such skills makes it far harder to make the most of university life.

As the former Chief Inspector of Schools, Christine Gilbert, made clear in her seminal review of personalised learning nearly a decade ago, personalised learning, which is particularly important for disadvantaged pupils, “should involve a broad and rich curriculum that takes account of prior learning and experiences and helps pupils to develop the full range of knowledge, skills, understanding and attitudes.”

That seems the right balance in a debate too often needlessly polarised. That’s why this weekend’s controversy highlights an issue about the curriculum – and the syllabuses of our competing exam boards – that is more important than the literary merits of John Steinbeck or Harper Lee. The National Curriculum should not simply be the preserve of whoever happens to be in power at the time of its revision. But nor should it be left to ‘independent experts’ whose instincts may be to strip the masters for modernity.

We need to have a proper mix of politicians of all parties, headteachers and subject specialists whose role is to decide on the subject matter of the curriculum and to reach consensus in doing so. It should not really be for David Blunkett or Michael Gove to decide the preferred authors in the curriculum, based on their personal prejudices or preferences.

Yet, whoever takes on responsibility for the curriculum should remember the fundamental responsibility they have to ensure that the next generation has access to a breadth of knowledge and skills that gives them the cultural capital that is as important to social mobility as good exam results

No legislation is no bad thing

This is my latest Sutton Trust blog post

When I was a special adviser at the Department for Education in the late 1990s, it was seen as a measure of a Department’s success the extent to which it achieved legislation in the Queen’s Speech. This essentially macho test often led to more legislation than was strictly necessary to achieve policy goals.

Many people forget that although the Labour government needed legislation to restrict most infant class sizes to 30, it needed no legislation to introduce the literacy and numeracy hours in primary schools. The latter were the result of a mix of persuasion and accountability, and were arguably more effective as a result.

And legislation was too often used as a way to trumpet changes that could have been introduced less dramatically. Trust schools – the centrepiece of Tony Blair’s 2005 education reforms – were a good example. As with Michael Gove’s first academies legislation, the essential architecture was already in place, and what changes were needed could have been introduced with less fanfare through regulations.

So, it is no bad thing that there was no education legislation in this year’s Queen’s Speech. Of course, that didn’t stop the Government using the occasion from getting Her Majesty to remind Parliament of changes already in train, such as the curriculum overhaul or performance pay for teachers.

But nobody would argue that Michael Gove is any less powerful because he hasn’t got a fifty or a hundred clause bill to take through Parliament over the next twelve months. And I doubt any of his junior ministers – who would be tasked with the legwork – is overly concerned either.

However, what it does mean is that it is all the more important that changes the Government is introducing get the scrutiny they deserve, and that they are subjected to the sort of rigorous evaluation – usually through randomised control trials – that the Sutton Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation are using.

That is important not just for ministers who want to ensure that their reforms are making a difference to results, particularly for the poorest pupils, but also if they are to gain buy-in from teachers and headteachers.

With more than half of all secondary schools now having academy status, as well as a growing number of free schools and university technical colleges, schools are getting used to having more freedoms than before. And while complex legislation can be important on some issues – such as ensuring a fair admissions code – it is a blunt instrument over issues such as the curriculum or performance related pay.

Over-complexity militates against successful reform. When Estelle Morris first introduced performance pay in 2000, the intervention of the teaching unions ensured the whole process was wrapped in endless bureaucracy.

Leave aside for a moment the perfectly valid issue of the impact of PRP on attainment – though Gerard Kelly’s recent TES piece show why in this case there are other issues to consider – the real problem is that legal issues come to outweigh the flexibility that allows heads to reward good teachers in a straightforward way. A less complex system may prove to be more effective in overcoming the culture against PRP in some schools. And we might then have some serious research on the issue too.

But those increasingly independent state schools will equally need to be persuaded on the curriculum – including on the detail now planned in subjects like history – and on other issues where ministers feel strongly. As they do so, it is important that they use evidence rather than past practice or even DFE guidance to make their decisions.

That’s why the increasing popularity of the Sutton Trust/EEF Toolkit is so important. Next week, we plan to publish new evidence of just how popular it is becoming. But in the meantime, we should reflect that giving Michael Gove and schools a break from the 2014 Education Act is not only no bad thing, it may allow the breathing space needed for genuine reform to take place.

Can we get a secondary consensus?

In my latest Sutton Trust blog, I look at the implications of last week’s announcements on secondary school exams and the curriculum by Michael Gove. This is written in a personal capacity.

Last Thursday’s unexpected U-turn by Education Secretary Michael Gove over his plans to replace GCSEs was presented by some as a sign that the most sure-footed cabinet minister in the coalition had come unstuck.

Yet a closer look at what actually happened suggests that though his plans may not have had the full rebranding he envisaged, they remain rather more intact than commentators have suggested.

While reformed GCSEs will no longer be known as EBCs, other changes announced last week could still have a profound effect on schools, what they teach and how they are assessed.

Alongside the confessional appearance in the Commons, Gove also unveiled his plans for the national curriculum, a radical change in the key league table measure for GCSEs and confirmed his plans for those exams to remain linear and become more demanding.

The draft national curriculum makes little change to range of subjects that students take – computing replaces ICT, but PSHE, citizenship and PE remain statutory requirements, even if their programmes of study are sharper and less prescriptive.

The level of prescription in subjects like history – which is now wholly chronological – and English which has a level of detail on grammar unseen since the literacy hour – stands in sharp contrast to the notion that schools would be increasingly free to decide for themselves what they would do. Teachers are freer to decide how to teach, but are much more circumscribed in what they must teach, at least until the age of 14 (and, at least for core subjects, to 16).

In that context, it was particularly surprising that Gove dropped plans to move towards a single exam board for each GCSE syllabus. He may have done so on the advice of Ofqual and worries about European competition law, but it was a reform that had wide support outside the exam boards and should be revisited.

The context for the new Gove curriculum was set out in a speech to the Social Market Foundation last Tuesday, where his belief that a core body of knowledge should lie at the heart of schools was set out more sharply than ever before, with the Conservative Secretary of State choosing the Italian Marxist father of Euro-Communism, Antonio Gramsci as his chief witness, alongside more familiar contemporary advocates such as the American academic E.D. Hirsch.

At the same time, Gove is proposing a number of changes to the league tables, which could have even more wide-ranging impacts on what schools teach.

Instead of measuring schools primarily on five good GCSEs – at C grade or above – including English and Maths, they will be measured on English and Maths grade Cs and on an average point score based on a student’s best eight subjects.

What might all this mean for social mobility and for disadvantaged students? On the one hand, there is a lot to be said for bringing greater clarity to the body of knowledge that children should learn. The curriculum had, arguably, lost the clarity it had in 2000 and earlier versions, and many will welcome this. It is also right to encourage greater breadth – and that would be welcome at A-level as well as GCSE, as Peter Lampl has argued recently.

The challenge – and test – for the new curriculum will be the extent to which it is adopted by academies, the 50 per cent of secondary schools that are free to choose most of their own curriculum, and the extent to which today’s parents expect them to adopt it.

There is a perfectly good argument – as Gove made in his SMF speech – that children need a body of knowledge if they are to benefit fully from acquiring the research and study skills that most teachers – and the evidence from the Sutton Trust/EEF toolkit – suggest can play a big role in boosting attainment. A false dichotomy has been created between knowledge and skills, and both need to be seen as an important part of children’s educational development.

Of course, for students who go to university, it is right that they should be encouraged to take a strong suite of academic subjects, and it is to be hoped that the new GCSEs have the rigour to bring an end to the soul-destroying annual ritual of criticising the achievements of young people at the moment when they learn how well they have done in their exams.

Yet a big gap in the Government’s thinking lies in what happens after the age of 14 to those for whom a more vocational or technical education would be more motivating. EBCs may be gone but the EBacc remains, and will lie at the heart of the 8-GCSE measure in the new league tables. For students taking 8 GCSEs, it is perfectly reasonable to expect them to take five EBacc subjects, and they now have a chance to have achievements in other subjects like art, technology and religious education recognised. This has pleased those lobbying for such recognition.

Kenneth Baker’s University Technical Colleges start students on technical and vocational pathways from age 14. Further education colleges will be able to recruit from that age. Yet because of the undoubted abuses of vocational equivalences in the past, all technical and vocational qualifications, regardless of depth and intensity, have equal weight in the league tables.

The Government still has to find a satisfactory way of recognising the achievements of those who take a more technical curriculum, and it should use the reformed league tables to do so. To argue this point is to be neither Luddite nor defeatist, but it is to recognise that for some students – a minority maybe but at all ability levels – an academic curriculum post-14 will not enable them to fulfil their potential.

There is a real chance to develop a lasting consensus on education, one that outlives changes in Government, and one that caters for the needs of every child at different phases of their education. Last week’s suite of announcements could herald a different approach. For that to happen, the consultations on the curriculum and league tables need to be as open to reasonable change as that on GCSE reform turned out to have been.

Making the pupil premium go further

Most schools face standstill budgets, or real terms cuts. But some of the school budget is growing, and will grow further. The pupil premium, worth £600 this year, rises to £900 next year and could reach £1200 per pupil by 2015. The challenge for schools is how to use that money where it will have most impact – and there is a case for incentivising effective practice.

The pupil premium was part of both the Liberal Democrat and Conservative manifestos. It had two important roles: firstly, to narrow the attainment gap between pupils on free school meals and their classmates, and secondly, to encourage successful schools to take more disadvantaged pupils.

Previous governments have provided extra resources for such pupils through extra funding to local authorities with high levels of poverty. Nevertheless, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out that pre-premium extra funding in the system attached to deprived pupils amounts to £2000 in primary schools and £3000 in secondary schools. And that has had variable impact.

But this is the first grant paid to schools for each disadvantaged pupil, regardless of where the school is located. The Government decided against ring-fencing the premium, relying instead on schools publishing details of spending on their websites and extra league table measures.

But there is mounting evidence that the premium is not being used as intended (nor is there any evidence that is changing admissions behaviour). Ofsted reported last month that often schools did not disaggregate the pupil premium from their main budget, and said that the funding was often used to maintain or enhance existing provision.

The National Foundation for Education Research, in a survey of 1700 teachers in 1200 English schools for the Sutton Trust earlier this year, showed that little of the pupil premium allocation for 2012-13 – a sum worth £1.25 billion in total – was likely to be spent on activities proven to be the best bets for boosting attainment. Many would spend it on staff rather than improving teaching.

But there is evidence of the most cost effective approaches to improving standards. Researchers at Durham University assessed 21 different interventions for both impact on attainment and relative cost and helped the Sutton Trust to create a toolkit which a growing number of schools are using priorities for the premium. The toolkit will be updated and expanded by our sister organisation, the Education Endowment Foundation, in 2013.

The Sutton Trust/EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit shows that there are three strategies that schools can undertake with a high impact at relatively low cost. Using evidence from here and abroad, they calculate that each of these strategies can provide the equivalent of between six and nine months extra learning, at a cost of around £170 per pupil.

The single most effective strategy is improved pupil feedback, which should be an important part of a school’s drive to boost the quality of teaching and learning. Other low cost proven methods include teaching pupils to learn effectively and peer tutoring, where young people help each other to learn.

Of course, a growing number of schools are already turning to the Toolkit for ideas, and a new version will be online early next year. However, there is surely a case for the Government to help give proven ideas a further boost.

As the size of the pupil premium pot grows, why not use some of it to match fund schools’ spending on proven strategies? It is not as if the Government is opposed to ring-fencing any of the premium; Nick Clegg has used it to fund summer catch-up schools.

So, why not have a pot which schools where schools could double a proportion of their premium provided they spent it on a menu of proven activities? With a little extra incentive, ministers might find that the pupil premium went a lot further.

This post also appears at the Sutton Trust blog.

Do Gove's changes add up?

I've written this column for the September edition of Public Finance magazine:

There’s little that Michael Gove and his advisers like more than crunching numbers. The education secretary is very proud of the mountains of data, previously shared only with schools, that are now publicly available.

So, the figures for academies and free schools appear encouraging. By July, 1,590 English schools – mostly successful secondaries – had chosen greater independence as academies. Another 540 will convert this term, making more than half of England’s 3,200 secondary schools academies, although just 6% of primaries.

Another 367 schools are sponsored academies, with external support, often from a school chain such as Ark or Harris, used to improve standards. Some 280 are close to approval, including 187 poorly performing primaries.

In terms of free schools – new academies sponsored by parents, teachers, charities or faith groups – 68 are opening this term, adding to the two dozen already open; 102 more are planned, some focusing on special educational needs or ‘alternative’ provision for disaffected youngsters.

But these numbers alone won’t produce better results. And this new school year will test the effectiveness of the coalition’s laissez-faire approach.

It is easier to persuade a school to convert to academy status than to transform a failing school. And while some converter academies chose independence to change their curriculum or timetable, three-quarters did so to improve their financial position and avoid budget cuts.

Nationally funded academies receive extra money for services previously provided by local authorities, often greatly exceeding their value. For secondary schools, this could add several hundred thousand pounds to their annual budget. Significantly, Gove now plans to reduce these differentials, making converting less attractive.

But he must also persuade converters to support weaker schools. Gove resisted making this a condition of their funding, so relatively few have done so. This is particularly a problem for primary schools. Some attempts to force change have attracted local opposition. A bigger obstacle is the absence of sponsors.

The big chains have focused on secondary schools. While they will sponsor a few primaries, they won’t support hundreds. Gove needs successful schools to step in, but his refusal to link such change to the extra cash has made his task harder.

His other primary problem is whether there will be enough places. The focus on free schools – some in areas with little demand for new schools – has led to a potential shortage of places for primary-age children, particularly in cities. The Department for Education gave £500m to help resolve this in April, but now estimates that 736,000 more places will be needed by 2020. Meeting this demand would cost at least £3bn extra a year.

Some schools are considering double shifts to cope. If significant numbers of children don’t have a place, the emphasis on free schools could become a political headache.

Shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg has already shifted Labour’s position from opposition to free schools to focusing new schools on meeting parental demand.

The government says its main goal is narrowing the educational gap between rich and poor pupils – poorer children perform significantly worse at GCSE and in tests at age 11 than others.

Yet without the right levers, it might fail to do so. Already, there is evidence that the pupil premium, which gives schools extra cash for pupils entitled to free school meals, is not being used where it might have most impact. A Sutton Trust study showed that 28% of teachers did not know how the cash was being used, and others were using it in ways that had little proven impact.

The government has no way to ensure that the pupil premium – which is set to absorb £2.5bn of the education budget by 2015 – is well spent or to link it to outcomes. Indeed, critics believe the premium could stand as a metaphor for the coalition’s education reforms: strong on inputs but weak on outcomes. This school year, Gove must show that his reforms can deliver results – and not just with the low-hanging fruit.

The politics of playing fields

I have a small confession to make. I was the one who suggested that an independent panel should be set up to recommend which applications for playing fields should be approved and which should be rejected. The reason I did so was because such decisions are never black and white, and it made sense to involve the strongest critics in the decision-making process. So while I think he has made a serious political error, I have some sympathy for Michael Gove this morning, as he is assailed for approving five applications that the panel had rejected. But I also think the case highlights the need for far greater transparency in the whole process - and greater honesty about the issue on the part of the media.

In 1997, after thousands of playing fields had been sold off in the previous decades, Labour set a presumption against the sale of school playing fields for the first time. Schools should generally not sell off playing fields, except in circumstances where doing so would not reduce access to sport and the proceeds would be used to provide better sports facilities at the school. Around 200 applications were approved between 1997 and 2010 and in these cases such criteria were met. After 2001, the decision-making process was effectively delegated to an independent panel where critics of the sale of playing fields were included so they had to look at the reality of the issue on a case-by-case basis. The presumption against their sale was also strengthened a little.

I suggested the independent panel having spent many hours poring over the applications on behalf of ministers and discussing with officials the precise reasons for any case that they planned to recommend for acceptance. Although some such playing fields were overgrown disused patches of land, there were also cases of viable playing fields that were being sold to make major improvements in the quality of sports and other education in a school. Inevitably, however, there were strong opponents to each sale and each approval attracted widespread criticism. Hence the independent panel.

So, while I have some sympathy with Gove this morning, I think he made a major political error not accepting the recommendations of the panel. And he was also unwise to reduce restrictions on the amount of space that schools have to provide for sports. Remarkably, since the panel was established, there has been virtually no controversy about the sale of playing fields. Fields in Trust - as the National Playing Fields Association is now called - sits alongside representatives of headteachers and local authorities to act as an independent and fair-minded jury on each case. By overruling the panel, however justified he may have felt he was in the individual cases, he has re-politicised a process that had effectively been de-politicised. More importantly, the publicity around today's story may have made it that much harder for the panel to take genuinely independent decisions.

There is one aspect to the panel's workings that should change, however. They should have to publish their decisions on a regular basis. The Telegraph claims this morning that these are not made public. When I suggested the panel, I certainly assumed that their decisions and membership would be made public. There is no justification for this not being the case, as happens with the Schools Adjudicator on admissions, for example. That said, there must still be occasions - not many, it is true - when it is in the greater interest of pupils to sell a playing field to provide superior sporting facilities than it is for that land to remain largely unused. To their credit, Fields in Trust, through their participation in this process, recognised that reality. Others should too.

John Rentoul quoted from this post in his Independent on Sunday column.

Will this secondary shake-up boost standards for all?

Today's Daily Mail splash on the future of GCSEs, the national curriculum, league tables and exam boards has the air of a brainstorm session at Sanctuary Buildings that has been released before being fully thought through. Nothing wrong with that, if Michael Gove spends some time thinking through all the implications of what he is proposing. But he needs to be careful that his proposals don't end up undermining a wider drive to raise standards for all.

There are some perfectly good ideas in what appears to be being considered. It makes perfect sense to have a single exam board for each exam. The effect, of course, will be to have a single syllabus in these subjects. Which makes the supposed removal of the national curriculum from secondary schools rather less radical than is being suggested: indeed it would ensure that academies and free schools work to a single syllabus. Lord Baker is right to argue that it is as important that technical subjects are examined at a high standard as well as Gove's favoured subjects like history and geography.

The second question concerns the proposal of splitting the GCSE into a CSE and O-level exam. There is a seductive sense to this idea if you believe that the only impact of GCSEs has been a 'dumbing down'. But this is a tabloid caricature. It is perfectly fair to feel that there needs to be more rigour involved in getting an A grade, but that doesn't mean writing off thousands of youngsters who could today strive for a C. There is a terrible canard in the notion that the use of the 5 A-C benchmark itself denies ambition: in fact, a C is worth far more to a child than a D when talking to employers, and the existence of the benchmark has led many schools to push such pupils towards a grade they can achieve in a way that the average point score would not necessarily do.

But there is a good argument for saying that achieving an A grade should be really demanding. With a single syllabus there is no reason why this cannot be achieved in a single exam, particularly since Gove wants to move back to linear testing at the end of two years. That is not to say there is no place for more practical exams in English, Maths and Science. Such tests should be available, however, at GCSE standard of level 2 as well as the less demanding level 1, and less 'academically -minded' students should not merely be expected to achieve level 1. It would be a serious and terribly retrograde step to move in this direction, and Gove will find that it could have as serious an impact as Labour's scrapping of an expectation that all schools study languages through to 16.

This raises the issue of league tables and floor targets. And it is here that Gove could be making his biggest mistake. The big improvements in London and by academies over the last decade have been spurred in part by ever-more ambitious floor targets based on the 5 GCSE standard. It is a realistic but relatively demanding ambition for schools to expect a majority of their pupils to reach this level, and Gove has sharply increased the demand of the floor targets. Of course, one could set a target based on the average point score, but this could have the perverse effect of lowering expectations in terms of breadth. And since there is no longer a strong incentive to use high GCSE vocational alternatives, the main concern here has been addressed. By all means publish a 5A target alongside this, though in truth the EBacc is becoming the more rigorous target here.

Gove has time to get this right. More rigorous GCSEs, particularly for top achievers, do not have to place a cap on ambition for many other students. More practical business-focused English and Maths tests should not themselves be set unambitiously. And Gove should not throw away one of the most effective drivers of improve standards for many schools in the process.

Freedom, what freedom?

I recognise quite a lot of what was in the English and Maths curriculum materials issued by the Department for Education last week. They bore an uncanny resemblance to the documents that accompanied David Blunkett's national literacy and numeracy strategies in the late 90s. The expectations on spelling, grammar and punctuation were all there, as was a focus on mental arithmetic and times tables. So, the nonsense in the Tory press about this being the first time since the 1950s that schools had such expectations suggested that they were being even lazier than usual in accepting the line being spun by Michael Gove's spinners.

So far as I can see, all that is really new is that children, bizarrely in a decimal age, will have to learn their 12 times tables in case Britain abandons decimal currency in sympathy with a Greek return to the Drachma.

Equally, today's focus on synthetic phonics is not new either. Phonics were a part of the literacy strategy too, but the specific focus on synthetic phonics gained traction with Sir Jim Rose's report in 2005. This, too, was for a Labour government, for the benefit of confused Tory columnists. However, we didn't, it is true have the phonics screening check which seems to having some bizarre requirements.

So, I welcome quite a lot of this renewed rigour in the primary curriculum. I also think that most primary schools have been doing quite a lot of this, at least since the late 90s.

But I can't for the life of me see how it fits in with the philosophy of a government that insists it will set schools free. Is it any wonder that several members of the curriculum review have quit in the confusion?

Gove's educational challenges

I have written this column in the April edition of Public Finance.

At the Conservative spring conference in March, David Cameron pointedly praised Education Secretary Michael Gove for his free school and academy reforms.

The prime minister offered no such comfort to his beleaguered health secretary, Andrew Lansley, whose reforms have received much criticism from doctors, nurses and even government backbenchers.

Gove has scored notable successes, lifting academy numbers from the 280 planned by Labour to 1,635, by enabling successful maintained schools to convert. Twenty-four free schools, with academy freedoms, have opened with 72 more planned. And despite problems over sports and capital funding, the education secretary has encountered only sporadic opposition from the teaching unions.

Gove has trod more cautiously than Lansley. Academy status was voluntary, unlike GP fundholding (an area where Lansley has retreated). Gove has rejected newly selective and profit-making schools. And he has presented his changes as Blairite continuity rather than the clean break the health secretary claimed.

Yet the speed of school change could yet be Gove’s undoing unless he resolves urgent questions on capacity, commissioning and the curriculum.

Gove’s academy expansion has been largely through giving successful secondary schools more freedoms. Their conversion is easier than replacing failing schools with sponsored academies, as the Department for Education brokers each arrangement. Sponsors, such as the education chains or faith groups, are held responsible for improving performance. There are just 337 sponsored academies compared with 1,298 converters.

Here Gove faces his first capacity problem. When he launched primary academies, he declared that schools where fewer than 60% of 11-year-olds reached Level Four in English and maths would have to convert and be supported by other academies.

But there are not enough existing academies to support all the 1,000-plus primary schools that fail to make the grade. Gove wants successful heads to step in, yet only 37 of 1,298 converter academies have done so. And the recent row over Downhills School in Haringey, north London, where Gove has sacked the governors to ensure it becomes an academy, shows how difficult it can be to achieve such change. He needs lots more sponsors.

That’s not the only capacity issue. Demand for primary places is projected to increase by 434,000 by 2018, particularly in cities such as London, Manchester and Bristol. Yet new free schools aren’t always located where demand is greatest. The programme will need to refocus if it is not to seem like an unaffordable extra as thousands of other children are left without schools.

This is where commissioning matters, especially as local authorities have lost their education capacity. Despite academies’ freedoms, they answer to Gove through funding agreements. With almost half of secondary schools likely to become academies, Whitehall seems ill-equipped to address failure and plan new places without local intelligence.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the new chief inspector, thinks local commissioners could provide an early warning of failure. Others want them to co-ordinate new schools and broker new academy sponsors where existing arrangements aren’t working. Some want them to be elected, like police commissioners, or answerable to elected mayors; ministers would prefer to appoint them. Either way, the issue raises questions about the government’s commitment to localism.

The third issue could expose the biggest contradiction in the academies programme. Many academy principals treasure their freedom to offer more practical lessons to students who would otherwise have disengaged.

Ministers have already reduced the league table value of many vocational qualifications.But heads and teachers worry more about the future of practical learning. Professor Alison Wolf’s review of vocational education said that 14–16 year-olds should spend no more than a day a week on practical subjects. Gove elevated geography, history and languages above technical subjects in the league tables. And the national curriculum review has suggested that those subjects could be made compulsory to age 16, as the status of computing and technology is reduced.

These changes would reduce head teachers’ freedoms to provide a practical curriculum; but academies fear that inspections and league tables will force them into line too.

Otherwise, such change seems pointless if half of secondary schools are effectively exempt. A new curriculum would not take effect until 2014, but ministers must choose freedom or compulsion this year. Gove’s political tact has led some commentators to see him as Cameron’s successor. His challenge now is to resolve the dilemmas that the speed of his changes has created. His success or otherwise will determine whether those leadership predictions are premature or not.

Are grammar schools really on the rise again?

There was much excitement last week as Kent County Council gave the go ahead for a new 'satellite' grammar school in Sevenoaks. Supporters of grammar schools could hardly contain themselves. Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph hailed the dawn of a new era

Crosland’s ambition was never fully realised. Like the Celtic tribes that resisted Roman occupation, or the handful of monasteries that survived the dissolution, 164 grammars remain as an affront to the new order of enforced egalitarianism. And, glory be, for the first time in 50 years there may soon be a new one.

Meanwhile, opponents of grammar schools believe that the Sevenoaks move was enough to suggest that Ed Miliband and Stephen Twigg should launch all-out war on the system through their academy funding agreements. Fiona Millar in the Guardian today fulminated at Michael Gove's 'sneakiness'. 

Now the coalition's devious use of the school admissions code – introduced by Labour to bring more fairness to the system – will allow popular schools to expand without constraint or consultation. Plans for annexes to existing grammar schools have quickly surfaced and there is little to stop these "satellites" popping up all over the country. Belief in an elite education system runs like a deep blue vein through the Conservative party...... This sneaky last-minute change to the admissions code, made after consultation had closed, shows how superficial Cameron's Tory modernisation really is.

In truth, no last minute change to the admissions code was needed to allow an existing grammar school to expand. In fact, under Labour, the number of students in grammar schools increased by nearly 30,000 from 128,000 to 158,000 between 1997-2010, because it was never the Government's intention to prevent existing grammar schools from expanding. Rather the policy (underpinned by 2008 regulations) was to stop new grammars being established while insisting on parental ballots where there was a desire to end existing selection in a school or an area.

In reality, evidence in this whole debate is too often dependent on prejudice. Grammar schools score highly in league tables because they have a strong intake. A fair comparison would be with the top 25% of students in comprehensive schools, not their whole intake. And in those circumstances, the results prove pretty similar.

Where today's grammar schools score particularly poorly is on social mobility. Professor David Jesson has shown that it is a myth that grammars are true agents of social mobility: only 2% of their students are eligible for free school meals, well below the 15% national average when he did his calculations. His conclusion is that:

Out of an annual national cohort of 22,000 pupils entering Grammar schools, well under 500 of these are from ‘disadvantaged’ backgrounds. If these schools did offer ‘a ladder of opportunity’ to pupils in their areas we might have expected well over 2500 in this category.

This is undoubtedly a problem in wholly selective areas like Kent where poorly performing secondary moderns find it harder to compete, and where there have been a higher than average number of failing schools as a result. At the same time, since it is a wholly selective system in the county, parents whose children pass the 11+ will prefer a local to a distant grammar school, and it is hard logically to argue that those who bus children to selective schools in the county must continue to do so.

Yet the political reality for both Labour and the Conservatives is that they are neither going to abolish existing selection nor actively encourage new grammar schools. Despite the arguments of opponents of grammars there is no more evidence that Kent parents want to scrap selection than there is that people in other parts of the country want to re-introduce a system of grammars and secondary moderns. Indeed, the only time recently that parents were balloted on selection, in Ripon, they voted to keep it.


This is why it would be a wholly bad idea politically for Labour to promise a war on selection. The party has to win back seats in places like Kent to form a government, not alienate potential Labour voters. Gove is in a rather trickier position. He is far more interested in promoting new academies than he is in seeing new grammar schools, but he has a strong pro-grammar lobby in his party. Indeed, the Leader of Kent Council Paul Carter, who has backed the Sevenoaks developments, has been an opponent of Gove on academies, and there is no love lost between the two men.

However, Gove does need to be much clearer on the circumstances where he will and will not approve central funding and academy funding agreements for 'satellite' grammar schools. If he isn't, he will cause much bigger problems for his academy and free school programmes. Here, as elsewhere, the 'detoxified' Tory brand is in danger of re-toxifying.

The Sevenoaks developments could derail the education policies of both major parties if they listen to too many siren voices in this debate.

Gove's homework muddle

Has Michael Gove started to go soft? The thought went through my mind as I heard the gleeful way in which the coalition's spinners promoted their 'scrapping' of Labour's 1998 homework guidelines over the weekend. In truth, I had not known that any school rigidly adhered to these guidelines. They were a good example of the nudge theory that the former No 10 guru Steve Hilton liked so much. They sent a message rather than setting a straitjacket. But then Hilton's off.

Nor was it their primary purpose to require schools to set a certain amount of homework. they were intended to give some helpful information to parents about what to expect as much as to encourage all schools to set regular homework - something that is part of the new Ofsted framework, incidentally.

Directgov still hadn't caught up with Gove's fit of the vapours this morning, and was still suggesting to parents that they wreck their children's childhood by reading with them for ten minutes a day. Ten more minutes for CBBC or computer games, then. However, the emphasis is on quality as much as time taken.This is how the Government's website presents the guidelines to parents:

The emphasis is on how homework helps your child to learn, rather than on whether it takes a certain amount of time.
For example, some children will work quicker than others and get more done in less time. The rough guidelines for primary school children are:

• Years 1 and 2: one hour per week
• Years 3 and 4: 1.5 hours per week
• Years 5 and 6: 30 minutes per day

The guidelines for secondary school children are:

• Years 7 and 8: 45 to 90 minutes per day
• Year 9: one to two hours per day
• Years 10 and 11: 1.5 to 2.5 hours per day

Your child shouldn’t be expected to spend much longer on homework than the guide times. It doesn’t matter if activities don't take as long as the guide times as long as they are useful. Schools should organise homework carefully so that children aren't asked to do too much on any one day.

The website went on to point out that 

All homework activities should be related to work that children are doing at school. However, homework should not always be written work. For younger children it will largely be:

• reading with parents or carers
• informal games to practice mathematical skills

For older children homework activities may include:

• reading
• preparing a presentation to the class
• finding out information
• making something
• trying out a simple scientific experiment
• cooking

It doesn’t matter if activities don't take as long as the guide times as long as they are useful.

In other words, these guidelines were more about giving parents a sense of what was reasonable, not imposing some straitjacket on schools. Gove hasn't been shy about telling schools to adopt uniforms, wading into local debates in Devon for example, yet giving parents a sense of what's reasonable with homework is too much because it upsets Tory luvvies like Kirstie Allsop. 

I doubt the TV presenter's children will be short of books or other educational stimulation. The guidelines weren't really for her benefit, as Chris McGovern noted in the Telegraph: "The danger is that schools will use this as an excuse to dilute the amount of homework. Middle-class children will do their homework anyway. Guidance for children who are coming from more deprived backgrounds is probably more important.”


The homework guidelines were introduced precisely for the same reasons that Gove is so keen to impose his straitjacket on the curriculum: to bring state schools closer to the expectations of private schools, and to recognise that children who read with their parents at home during primary school or who do regular homework when they are older are more likely to get on than those who don't.

So what Gove actually means when he says he is scrapping the guidelines is anybody's guess. Does the Government think homework is a passe concept? Apparently not. The DFE says that “Homework is part and parcel of a good education, along with high quality teaching and strong discipline." I'm not sure that was the message that came through yesterday. 

One can only assume his spinner was short of a story for the Sunday hacks (I know how it is: I've been there). Yet by alighting on this, he has simply delighted those who think homework is bad for you and caused potential confusion among parents. Not sure I'd call that a result.

Vocational vacuum: we need more than sneers and Aunt Sallies

I have no idea how many young people inflated their GCSE league table scores by doing horse care or fish husbandry qualifications. But I do know that the combined impact of removing the 'thousands' of courses no longer recognised for their GCSE equivalence by Michael Gove yesterday will be pretty minimal. There are two reasons why. First, most of the improvements since 1997 - an increase in numbers gaining 5 good GCSEs or equivalents, including English and Maths, from 35 to 58 per cent, were the result of a big improvement in the numbers gaining Maths and English GCSEs, and not the result of gaming or of vocational qualifications. A quick look at the DFE's own data confirms this to be the case. And second, those that used vocational qualifications, often to encourage improvements in English and Maths by gaining confidence in a more practical course first, tended to use BTECs and OCRs, which will remain valid in a significant and welcome retreat by the Government, although less valuable in the league tables.

But these facts were a little beyond the slightly hysterical reports on the BBC News and the breathless sneering of John Humphrys yesterday morning. In the process, they left unanswered the question that has been ducked constantly by this Government over what vocational qualifications should be available to 14-16 year-olds and how they should be delivered. Alison Wolf doesn't really think that practical courses have much place before 16, and she would limit their role to 20% of the curriculum, whilst arguing simultaneously that more students should be taught full-time in further education colleges from the age of 14. Lord Baker was on the radio this morning waxing lyrically about his university technical colleges, declaring that 40% of their course content would be practical. UTCs take students from ages 14 to 19. His disdain for Wolf's position on this issue is no secret in Whitehall; the feeling is said to be mutual.

At the same time, beyond the grudging acceptance of BTECs and OCRs implicit in yesterday's supposed cull, the Government has little sense of what should be available to young people turned off by academic subjects at an earlier stage. The English Baccalaureate subjects have plenty to commend them for perhaps a majority of students, but achieving English and Maths with more practical courses may be a better goal for others. Labour's Diplomas generally became too complex and never took off, though some like ICT and engineering had industry credibility. Perhaps we now need, in addition to the BTECs, a new range of junior apprenticeships, with real progression built in, and clearly linked to proper career paths. But start them at 14 - with English and Maths - and not at 16. That's where Wolf's FE college proposals could play a big role.

But for now, the Government has really nothing useful or constructive to say about vocational education. Alison Wolf claimed that young people were being betrayed by qualifications of little value in later life. Perhaps they were. But they are certainly going to be betrayed a lot more if the Government can't get its act together to recognise the need for good practical alternatives for those who may sway the ranks of the truants and excluded if their needs are not met within the education system in good time.

Can you have too much data?

Nobody is a greater believer in the power of data than I am. During the Labour government, the real power of the tests and tables introduced by the Tories was unleashed, with success in raising minimum standards in schools and maximum NHS waiting times. The coalition have recognised the value, at least, of the former. But we also made the mistake of trying to have too many targets. Specifically, the Treasury started to impose its endless whims on departments, leading to some real problems, as with crude exclusion targets; some that seemed doomed to fail, like the bid to cut truancy; and many that were an irritant for departments and an unwelcome addition to their box-ticking for frontline professionals, but had little impact on service users.

With today's league tables, there is every chance the coalition are embarking on the erroneous course. I'm all in favour of the data.gov.uk initiative, but having tried to open some of the extraordinary zip files buried within it, I do wonder quite how accessible it all is. On a smaller scale, today's tables present the same problem: we now know how well schools progress; how well they do at the top end, at the bottom end, and for average pupils; we now how well they do in Gove's favourite subjects, as well as in the subjects already reported separately of English, Maths and Science; we know the progress a school has made; and its level of improvement. All of this is valid and potentially useful. But we are told that this barrage of statistics will see schools avoiding 'gaming' which is apparently all that an improvement from 35 to 58 per cent in the proportion of students gaining five good GCSEs (or equivalents) including English and Maths since 1997 amounted to. Yet the DFE's own statistics show that even excluding BTECs that are worth four GCSEs, the total is 53 per cent this year for GCSEs or 52 per cent for academic GCSEs. Hardly all the result of gaming. Indeed sponsored academies and the London Challenge - two Labour programmes regularly praised by Gove - played a pretty large role.

But the Government is becoming a bit confused here. In fact, as Michael Gove's adoption of them recognises, schools responded to floor targets, particularly thosr for the five good GCSEs, precisely because they were deemed the most important in lifting them from poor to average. I hear from heads that the schools most likely to adopt the EBacc are those that are satisfactory and see this as a route to good. Again, these two measures are acting as floor targets. The danger of trying to judge schools on a much wider range of criteria through league tables - as opposed to Ofsted judgements which should do so - is that the parent has more information than they can absorb, and they are unable to process it. Five good GCSEs may have been a flawed measure, just as the KS4 English and Maths tests may not be perfect, but it is a simple and meaningful way of judging a school. When CVA was introduced, some schools saw it as an alternative to good GCSEs, yet few employers will look kindly on a clutch of Ds and Es - it may have shown progress but it was often not enough for those students, who needed real qualifications. I only hope that the perverse effect of the government's information overload is not a slowing of the pace of improvement.

Can Gove change the culture on capability?

I had a weary sense of deja vu listening to Michael Gove on the radio this morning, talking about his plans to toughen up capability procedures. For the Today listeners, Gove highlighted his plans to 'allow' schools to remove poor teachers within a term rather than a year. Since they have been able to do so since 1998, when a fast-track process was introduced, which was later widening in its scope, this was not quite news. The real problem is partly that the procedures, thanks to the teaching unions, were more complex than they should have been - and Gove is easing this - and partly the same culture in schools that has made performance pay seem more like incremental progression in too many cases.

Gove's changes include:

• giving schools more freedom over managing their teachers through simpler, less prescriptive appraisal regulations;
• removing the three-hour limit on observing a teacher in the classroom (the so-called "three-hour observation rule”) so that schools have the flexibility to decide what is appropriate;
• a requirement to assess teachers every year against the new, simpler and sharper Teachers’ Standards – the key skills that teachers need;
• allowing poorly performing teachers to be removed in about a term – the process can currently take a year or more;
• an optional new model policy for schools that deals with both performance and capability issues; and
• scrapping more than 50 pages of unnecessary guidance

All this is perfectly sensible. However, unless there is a major cultural shift in schools, particularly primaries, they will be relatively meaningless. Heads often fear that unless they promote virtually all those eligible for progression they will cause discord in the staffroom. Equally, there is a sense among teachers that unless they get pay progression for excellence reasonably automatically, it is a sign of failure rather than a spur to do better. A growing minority of schools - particularly academies - have the confidence to challenge this consensus. But it remains too strong in too many schools, and it is the reason why the apparently radical reforms to performance pay - hugely contentious at the time - have been far too ineffectual. There is also a strong case for an annual reward scheme for schools showing the biggest improvements.

The truth is that it is this culture, as much as the complexity of the guidance, that explains why it can typically take a year to remove an incompetent teacher. Teachers are often given far more informal chances to improve than they would get in most other working environments before any formal process starts: of course they need the chance to improve, but it can become quickly apparent whether they are willing to do so. So, these Gove changes are perfectly reasonable, and build sensibly on changes introduced in the late 90s, but they will only effect the radical difference that their prominence in today's news bulletins promised if the freedom to manage teacher performance more flexibly translates into a new mindset in schools themselves.

I am quoted on this issue at the Financial Times and this post also appears at Public Finance.

Gove is right to tackle academy critics, but he needs to take his case to the parents

When I saw the letter from David Lammy and others, including the general secretary of the NUT, criticising DFE plans to convert Downhills Primary school, Lammy's old school, into an academy, I knew it would just be a matter of time before the whole incident formed the basis of a speech by the Education Secretary Michael Gove. It seemed like a gold-plated gift to Gove, delivered just in time for Christmas, and the Education Secretary has wasted no time opening it and showing it to all his friends.

In a speech today at Haberdashers' Askes Academy in South London, Gove highlights the protest using a splendid headline from the Hornsey Journal, ‘Campaigners: Hands off our failing school.’ Downhills has become a cause celebre from the critics of academies, who think it wrong that underperforming schools  should be forced to become academies.

In his letter to the Guardian, Lammy et al wrote:

...the secretary of state for education has become the playground bully, using draconian legal powers to force schools into academy status, removing democratically elected governing bodies, circumventing the important role of local education authorities and creating more opportunities for those in the private sector to take over England's schools.It is clear that the Haringey schools mentioned in your article and, we understand, many more around the country are being used to promote the government's academy agenda. Department for Education officials are instilling fear in schools and putting them under intense pressure to convert voluntarily rather than face the stigma of being forced to become academies run by external sponsors as so-called failing schools. This use by Michael Gove of legal powers, departmental staff and resources to pursue a political agenda has nothing to do with school improvement and must cease forthwith. Decisions about schools are best made by people from the communities they serve. This undemocratic programme is no more than political dogma and has nothing to do with localism or communities.
 
Gove uses today's speech to hit back, citing the work of Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis, who battled to convert failing secondaries, as well as the success of CTCs to justify his extension of the Academies programme. He tells us that there are now over 1500 academies, though only 335 are led by sponsors. And the truth is that, while it may be a legitimate criticism to question the DFE resources spent on persuading outstanding schools to take a £25k cheque to pursue the legal formalities needed to convert to academy status, rather than simply letting them get on with it, the drive to replace failing primary schools with sponsored academies is genuinely an extension of the Blair programme, and one that is needed.

There is a hard core of primary schools that have remained stubbornly below par for years, and they need to be given a new start, sponsored by a successful school, an established sponsor or as part of a trust arrangement. In his speech, Gove says there are more than 1,000 primaries - 1 in 18 - where fewer than 40 per cent of pupils reach Level 4 in reading, writing and mathematics. The status quo is not enough for them. Nor, frankly, is it good enough to expect 'other solutions' to be tried before moving to academy status if the problems are that entrenched.  

Whether Downhills is still among the worst is less clear. Results from 2011 show that Downhills is no longerbelow the Government's floor target for Level 4 English and Maths any more: it had some pretty miserable results in 2008 and 2009, participated in the 2010 boycott, but got just above the target at 61% last year - the floor is 60%. Progress in the latest Ofsted monitoring inspection, after a dismal report last January, suggests progress is now satisfactory, though it suggests a lot still to be done. It is a school that clearly needs a strong drive forward - but its pupils would benefit from some political agreement about its future rather than being the pawns in this ideological battle.

Yet Gove's arguments would be a lot stronger if he were able to distinguish in his own mind between the genuinely hard graft required to convert failing schools to academy status - and the scars on his back in this case are mere scratches compared to those endured by Adonis and DFES officials in the early 2000s - and the legal niceties needed to enable others to do so. I think it is great that good schools have been enabled to convert: I just feel that they could have been expected to do more as academies, given the financial incentive provided - many schools gained £300-£500k in the process. 

Gove admits in his speech that only 18 out of 1194 converters are sponsoring other academies (and two of those started doing so under Ed Balls), though around 400 participate in trusts and chains. By conflating the figures for sponsor-led and converter academies, he is undermining his own strong case for action in the failing primaries. And by failing to pursue his own expectation that outstanding converters would significantly help weaker schools, he has played a weak hand in exploiting any potential leverage from the conversions.

In such battles, the education secretary needs to turn on one of his better traits: his charm. Gove should not be making his case to the converted at the brilliant Haberdashers' Academy. He should meet with Lammy and be ready to argue his case to parents of children at schools like Downhills. Since the DFE is rather short of the sponsors it needs for all its target primaries, a process of engagement, where governors and parents get the chance to meet sponsors, many of whom will be other school heads, could go a long way to separate the ideologues from those they have swayed.

All that said, this is now a good time for Labour's Shadow Education Secretary, Stephen Twigg to take a strong stand on academies. On failing primaries, there should be no quibbles from the two Eds. Twigg should be ready to argue the case for primary academies to play a central role in reducing school failure, and to act as a persuader with recalcitrant Labour councils where there is an issue. This is not to say that he should back every imposition unquestioningly but that where it is clear that academy status is best he should work to prevent it becoming a party political football.

Michael Gove's speech today makes many of the right arguments. He now needs to find ways to make that case directly to the parents and teachers in the primary and secondary schools whose pupils still desperately need a new start, and to engage them in finding the right academy-based solutions. He deserves backing in making the case. But if he is to win this battle, he must also recognise that this has to be his top priority for schools reform in the coming years.

The Chancellor giveth what the Chancellor hath taketh away

Surely the most brazen aspect of today's rather disjointed display by the Chancellor was his announcement on school capital funding (trailed like much else in the weekend press). To recap, shortly after coming to office, Michael Gove earned his spurs with the Treasury by abruptly cancelling over 700 school building projects, loudly proclaiming his ability to achieve 'better value for money', and denouncing Labour's Building Schools for the Future programme as a 'costly failure'. He later lost a court case over a failure to consult properly.

Since then, some capital allocations were made to ensure the sponsored academies programme (the difficult bit that involves rather more than a £15-25k legal bill) was able to continue and to provide some funds to the free schools programme. There has also been some cash to help local authorities to deal with an unexpected surge in demand for school places, in part caused by a decline in private school take-up among the middle classes. Today, George Osborne gave back another £1.2 bn to be split evenly between free schools and school places.

But, the government hasn't just cancelled most new building in schools, at significant cost not just to the fabric of schools, but also to the construction sector. It has also decimated schools' ability to keep their buildings in good repair, by virtually eliminating their annual school capital grant that David Blunkett introduced, known as formula capital. There is, of course, a strong economic argument for pegging teachers' pay and reining in current spending in schools, as much as everywhere else: and with the IFS forecasting that 55% of primaries and 70% of secondaries will be losers, despite the pupil premium, that is happening.

However, there is far less justification, as Osborne now seems to allow, for the huge curb on schools capital investment. Moreover, the focus on free schools capital is particularly odd, since a much-touted attraction of free schools was, apparently, their ability to provide a presumably superior education at the same cost as the school down the road. Now, it seems that they will cost an average - and many of these will be primaries - of £6m each.

I've no problem with free schools having such capital funding, where they are meeting demonstrable need, or are genuinely helping tackle poverty. And I welcome the new specialist maths colleges (even if this is from a Government that axed support for specialist school networks). But, let's be clear: a lot of this money is at the expense of rebuilding other schools in deprived areas. And the list of free schools to date suggests that the genuine parent-promoted or teacher-led schools are being supplemented to boost the numbers by a combination of minor independent and faith schools joining the state system, Middle School/two-tier refuseniks and local authority schools under another guise. The idea that those latter groups deserve preferential capital treatment over other schools and academies is less than convincing.

It is eight months since the DFE published the not hugely inspiring James review of schools capital. When I tried to open it from the DFE website, I was informed that the 'file is damaged and could not be repaired'. Fittingly, since there is still no coherent programme for infrastructural investment (and that includes technology) yet. Instead of another Gordon Brown-style rabbit-out-of-hat exercise, the Chancellor should have given schools a clear idea of the coalition's investment plans for the duration of the parliament. Had he done so, he might have raised at least half a cheer from those upon whom he has just imposed 15-20% real terms pay cuts (including extra pension contributions) - and from the construction sector as well.