Building on Blair's reforms?

For all the rhetoric in the Commons today, one thing stands out clearly from today's White Paper by Michael Gove: his education agenda represents far more continuity from the reforms introduced by Tony Blair and David Blunkett than it does a dramatic change from the direction of the last thirteen years.

There is much to be welcomed in the paper: the extension of floor targets, a hugely successful drive that saw underperformers fall from 1600 to under 200 between 1997 and 2010; expansion of in-school teacher training, building on Labour's Teach First, graduate teaching programme (renamed Teach Next) and training schools (rebranded teaching schools); marginal changes to the right to discipline introduced in 2006 (with a watering down of the plan to scrap exclusion panels and a welcome pilot of giving schools clearer responsibilities for excluded pupils); promotion of synthetic phonics (Blair, 2006) with a welcome new reading test; a doubling of Labour's National Leaders of Education; a reiteration of the strategic role for local authorities envisaged by Tony Blair in his 2005 White Paper; an acceptance of an increased education leaving age. There should be little reason for Labour to oppose any of this.

The paper also reiterates the coalition's plans for academies and free schools, a pupil premium with a less than clear commitment on a national funding formula and an opposition to the extension of selection. Despite the partisan rhetoric that has accompanied its launch, there is a sensible change of tone in the paper itself, acknowledging many of the genuine improvements of the last 15 years while focusing on benchmarking with the best in the world. Where there must be cause for doubt are around some of the planned changes to the curriculum. It makes sense to reduce the league table value of some vocational qualifications; it is less clear that an expectation that every student should achieve history and languages GCSEs is the best way to address the needs of those who have a more practical set of abilities.

Moreover, today's paper comes against a less distinguished backdrop of change over recent months. The wholesale desire to scrap quangos and initiatives, including Building Schools for the Future, has created some big potential problems: Gove's slagging off of the School Sports Partnerships is shameful and inaccurate: there are far more pupils playing in competitive team games as a result of their work, as well as participating in PE. It is wrong to pretend they will survive if the money for them is devolved across all schools. This is a decision that should be rescinded until the partnerships have the chance to win new funding, not least as the National Funding Formula has been put on hold. Equally destructive are plans to scrap any specialist school funding, even though a re-orienting of such funds could secure subject excellence in science or languages, a goal of the White Paper that is promised without the levers to deliver it.

At the same time, schools will be anxious about funding until there is much more clarity over how funding is to be distributed, who gets the pupil premium and what will happen to the hundreds of thousands of pounds each currently receives for standards, specialism and capital. The money to help turn around weaker schools seems too modest to fulfil the ambitions. Simplicity may be a noble goal; its execution is rather messier. Blair's reforms crucially depended on sufficient targeted resources. There is some here: but is it enough?

Nevertheless, many of today's proposals should be welcomed. Collectively, they represent a matureness of approach that builds on much of the best of what has been developed over the last two decades rather than seeking to dismantle it.

This post also appears at Public Finance.

Sports axe highlights key flaws in Gove thinking

Today's reports about the deep dismay in sporting circles and the Cabinet over the decision to axe funding for school sports partnerships highlights a fatal flaw at the heart of Michael Gove's approach to schools. The partnerships have been remarkably successful, not only increasing participation with the numbers of pupils getting two hours PE a week rising from one in four to four in five, and an increase in competitions. It is absurd to suggest, as Gove did on Marr, that by removing ringfencing such activities could continue, since the co-ordinators are funded specifically to work across schools not in a single institution. In any case, the money is being removed from individual school budgets and handed to local authorities which can distribute it as they choose, a decision that makes little sense if Gove is no longer planning a National Funding Formula, as he now maintains.

But this decision also exposes two flaws that are becoming starker as Gove prepares to publish his White Paper this Wednesday. The first is the wholesale removal of leverage. Gove was able to dodge Marr's questioning about the curriculum adeptly this morning. But there remains a real contradiction between his wish to see a back to basics approach and his granting of considerably more freedoms to schools. Many academies, for example, want to use more thematic teaching and some of the vocational qualifications that the Government doesn't like. It is right to want a more rigorous approach to English grammar and spelling - and that was at the heart of Labour's literacy strategy - but the only way to ensure it happens is through strong pressure and accountability. At the same time, those academies can point to real success through curricular innovations and their voice will become louder if a more prescriptive approach is adopted.

And that also highlights a second flaw in Gove's thinking. For partisan reasons, he chooses to pretend that he is starting from scratch with some of his ideas. Yet he is not. For example, the so-called 'no touch' rule does not exist: David Blunkett published guidance on the use of restraint in 1998 that has been enshrined in the right to discipline within the 2006 Education Act. The problem is not a lack of legislation, it is a fear among teachers of litigation. And it is hard to see how Gove can prevent that happening, any more than his anonymity for teachers unjustly accused of abusing children can prevent village gossips retailing the charges widely.

The fact is that he has failed to resolve inherent contradictions in his approach: between curricular prescriptions and freedoms; between local authorities controlling pursestrings and the transparency of national funding; between permissive legislation and restrictive litigation. While there may be much that is good in this week's White Paper, not least the expansion of in-school teacher training, building on Labour's Teach First and graduate teacher programme and the development of collaboration between academies, the failure to think through the wider impact of funding decisions and to resolve such contradictions could seriously undermine his ambitions.

Elitist perhaps, but not brazen

I've written for the Public Finance blog on David Cameron's proposed teacher training reforms.

David Cameron has said today that he wants to make teacher training ‘brazenly elitist’. His main proposals are to ban graduates with third class degrees from teacher training and to rebrand the Graduate Teacher Programme – which mainly targets career changers who want to enter teaching – as Teach Now.

Yet, while Cameron may be hoping to provoke some sort of a political row with the education world with these changes, the truth is that they are merely a logical extension of Labour’s teacher training reforms. The Tories’ last schools minister, Eric Forth, memorably bemoaned his party’s failure to reform teacher training, just months before the 1997 election. Labour was determined not to leave the system unreformed as a result.

So, since 1997, the proportion of teachers who train in schools (mainly as mature career changers) has grown from a handful to around a third of all trainees who can earn while they learn. The proportion of trainees with better degrees has risen too (though largely in line with the proportion of graduates awarded those qualifications). Teacher shortages have largely been eliminated with better salaries and golden hellos, though some gaps remain for specialist maths and science teachers. And the Teach First programme – of which the Tories are keen fans – has been placing elite university graduates for two years in inner city secondary schools, with over half of them making a career of teaching as a result.

Cameron’s plans take things further, particularly because of the focus they place on good degrees for all, and the greater focus on degrees from top universities. And there will undoubtedly be more reforms of what is taught in teacher training colleges – though they were shaken up too with the literacy and numeracy hours. All make sense, and also build on proposals by the Sutton Trust and Policy Exchange. But the Tories may be underestimating economic forces: it will be far easier to enforce the tougher recruitment targets in a recession when it is a recruiters’ market than when the graduate employment world becomes competitive again. Elitist this policy may be, but not especially brazen.

Those teachers without 2 A levels

Alan Smithers and his team at the University of Buckingham do a fairly good analysis of our trainee and newly trained teachers each year. Their league tables are a must for potential students. This year, they note, for example that 80 per cent of teachers trained in schools are teaching a year later, but the figure is rather lower among those trained at universities, though a snapshot six months after graduation may not tell the whole story. This is another argument for extending employment-based training, which has already grown substantially under Labour to a fifth of all training.

But they are being a bit disingenuous in the claim that has hit the headlines: two thirds of science teachers don't have 2 A levels. Of course, this refers only to those on four year undergraduate courses, a route mainly chosen by primary teachers. Buckingham's own data shows that only 6 per cent of secondary teachers are now trained on such courses. In fact, there were only 953 people accepted onto all four year secondary teaching courses in 2008, of which only a fraction will have been to science, compared with 5147 onto postgraduate PGCE science courses alone. And as the Buckingham team acknowledge, 78% of them had good degrees.

There is a good case for scrapping undergraduate secondary specialist teaching, and shifting more places to school-based training. But it isn't helped by playing to the August 'everything in education stinks' gallery.

How much training do teachers need?

The teaching unions have reacted with predictable fury to the announcement that some graduate career changers might be able to gain a teaching qualification within six months instead of the year currently expected on the Graduate Teaching Programme. But they were never all that keen on the GTP in the first place, with its classroom-based alternative to traditional teacher training, whereas headteachers welcomed the real experience it offered. One in five teachers now gains a GTP qualification.

The issue is surely what is learnt rather than how long is spent doing it. There is no good reason why this shouldn't take six months for an able and willing learner.

There is no single route to teacher training any more, and that is a good thing. However, a programme like this will only real work well if it is combined with the sort of experience that happens in Finland, where teachers' professional development is about more than in-service training days. Teachers routinely work for Masters degrees and Doctorates by researching issues that matter in their schools and developing solutions to real problems. This is something that the promised Masters in Teaching and Learning has the potential to offer here.

It is a long way from the traditional theoretical musings which characterised too many of our university education departments in the past.