How Labour should respond to Gove

I've written a feature for the June issue of Progress magazine on how Ed Miliband should respond to the coalition's key school policies.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, sees himself as Blairite school reformer. By expanding academies, maintaining minimum exam standards for schools and strongly embracing school standards, he is certainly echoing many of the themes that characterised New Labour's approach to ‘education, education, education'.

But he has also downplayed Tony Blair's linking of investment to reform. And while this may be harder with fiscal restraint, the coalition can be challenged on its stated objectives. It is here - rather than in attacking its main policy planks - that Labour should focus its opposition.

Gove's education reforms have three main elements: structural reform with more academies, including new ‘free schools'; a drive on academic school standards; and a pupil premium - extra cash for pupils in receipt of free school meals - to fight poverty. Only the last was a key Liberal Democrat policy, but all were central to the Tories' manifesto. Gove is essentially implementing a programme developed for him in opposition by the Policy Exchange and Reform thinktanks.

Blair aimed for 400 academies by early this decade. But these were primarily replacing failing secondary schools or providing new opportunities in disadvantaged areas. Gove has allowed primary and special schools to become academies, and any school can apply for academy status, with those rated ‘outstanding' or ‘good with outstanding features' by Ofsted able to do so almost automatically without a sponsor. This, rather than an expansion of sponsor-led academies in deprived areas, supported by universities and educational charities like Ark and Harris, is what has led to an expansion from Labour's planned total of 272 academies in September 2010 to 629 in April 2011.

At the same time, Gove is promoting ‘free schools'- parent-promoted, faith-led or sponsor-led new academies - but has been hampered by the groundwork and funding. At most, a dozen seem set to open this year. So far the initiative has produced few radical new ideas: most planned schools could have opened under Labour and some are simply resisting local authority reorganisations.

Labour needs a careful, subtle response to those policies, perhaps employing a three-pronged approach. First, it should query the balance of government resources being used between sponsor-led academies in deprived areas and helping good schools convert. The really hard work lies in getting weaker schools to become academies with good sponsors. Only with the recent appointment of former academy leader Liz Sidwell as schools commissioner has Gove turned his mind to this tougher task.

Second, Gove has said that when outstanding schools become academies they should be required to work with a weaker school. Labour should press for strong partnerships, like those being promoted by the headteachers' and principals' organisation, the National Leaders of Education, but they should be a clear part of academy funding agreements.

And third, Labour should use the free school model, refocusing it on transforming curriculum choices for all and providing better schools in deprived areas. At present, as with academies, it has become too much of a numbers game.

Gove's approach to standards and the curriculum has been strongly academic. His promotion of a league table measure that he calls the ‘English Baccalaureate'- awarded to pupils gaining good GCSEs in English, maths, science, languages and history or geography - has shown that only 15 per cent of pupils nationally reach this standard. However, the proportion gaining good grades in English and maths has risen from a third in 1997 to 55 per cent thanks to Labour reforms. But rather than criticise efforts to toughen standards which parents support, Labour should champion a tough ‘technical Baccalaureate' as an alternative that rewards practical and vocational success alongside English, maths and science. Gove is surely right to acknowledge the need to improve standards faster to meet international competition; Labour should help develop consensus on what this means in practice, challenging the narrowness of the education secretary's measures but not his ambition for higher standards.

Finally to funding, where the coalition is weakest. Its much-trumpeted pupil premium is worth only £430 per pupil on free school meals this year, barely replacing other cuts in schools with large numbers of poorer pupils. Despite promises of no cuts for schools, shadow education secretary Andy Burnham has shown average per pupil cuts of 3.9 per cent over the next three or four years alone, with another National Association of Head Teachers survey showing as many losers as winners. Labour cannot easily promise to restore such revenue cuts, but it can reasonably question the government's approach to the pupil premium and schools capital.

Labour has failed to quantify the extra help it provided to pupils in poorer areas, and its impact -the reduction in schools with fewer than 30 per cent of pupils gaining five good GCSEs in English and maths from 1600 in 1997 to fewer than 100 today. The party should embrace the concept of the pupil premium but set higher expectations for its use. Schools should receive a higher premium where they successfully improve overall results and narrow gaps in achievement. Those that fail to do this should see their premium reduced.

With capital, nobody could oppose efficiency efforts, but Labour should criticise the demise of formula capital, as proposed by the recent James review. By providing a typical secondary school with £150,000 a year to spend on maintenance and smaller development projects, school independence and responsibility are enhanced. This year's cuts to on average £25,000 a year greatly reduce those freedoms. Labour should champion independence here while holding the coalition to account on its wider plans for school spending.

Burnham has successfully tackled key Gove failings, including the scrapping of the education maintenance allowance, where there has been a partial U-turn. But his tougher task will be building on New Labour's education reforms to show clever, strategic and forensic opposition to an education secretary whose stated ambitions may be Blairite, even if his execution is otherwise.

Separating the truants from the cheap holiday seekers

The schools minister Nick Gibb greeted the latest truancy figures by blaming Labour for failing to get to grips with the problem. And it is true that despite giving schools and local authorities much tougher powers to tackle what is called 'unauthorised absence' the absentee numbers seem relentlessly to be on the rise.

But this is too simplistic a picture. One measure that had a remarkable effect was targeted action on schools with the highest levels of truancy, where such concentrated effort reduced the numbers of days lost to absence in the schools concerned, though it didn't dent the overall figures. This week's statistics (pdf) show that these measures, introduced by Tony Blair in 2006, saw the number of persistent truants (those missing 14 or more days a year) have fallen from 336,935 in 2006 to 260,740 in 2010 with the harder core (those missing 32 or more days a year) falling from 48,080 to 26,750. That is the single most impactful measure on truancy in decades.

But that success story has been obscured by an important change that was made during Labour's time in office to the focus of the data. Instead of simply focusing on unauthorised absence schools were urged to clamp down on term-time holidays, and to reduce overall absence figures, including authorised absence. The result was to drive many cheap term-time holidaymakers into the truants' corner. Indeed a look at the actual statistics (pdf) here confirms this, as the increase is unauthorised absence broadly mirrors the fall in authorised absence. A fifth of all unauthorised absence is due to family holidays. And there has been a fall in secondary school absence with a rise in primaries. I personally was against this change, because I believed the focus should be on persistent truants. But it has driven the data since.

However, the coalition does not appear to be continuing the work on tackling persistent truancy that had this big impact, as it is sceptical of such targeted work. Instead it imagines that the measures in its Education Bill combined with Ofsted inspections will do the trick. Among heads, only the permission for same day detentions is given a thumbs up - the rest is seen as window dressing (as, to be fair, were many similar Labour measures). But there is nothing here that will make the slightest difference either to the number of hard core truants or to the holiday plans of families in search of off peak bargains.

Next time, the coalition will have to start taking the blame if absentee data don't fall significantly. And when the time comes, we need to take a close look at the persistent absentee data. Those are the ones that are likely to become tomorrow's NEETS.

Garret FitzGerald 1926-2011

Garret FitzGerald, who died today, was Ireland's first post-nationalist Taoiseach, and in that role he laid the groundwork that has culminated in this week's extraordinary visit of the Queen to the Republic. He was not, truth be told, a hugely successful Taoiseach in policy terms, but his contribution to Irish life far outweighed any of his achievements as head of government. He set a tone of integrity that stood in marked contrast to the corruption of Charles Haughey, his main Fianna Fail opponent. His leadership of Fine Gael and the coalition government marked a sea-change in Irish life, as an intellectual who, while getting elected through the clientilist system, managed to transcend such narrowness to embody what President McAleese called the characteristics of the Renaissance man. An economist, his politics were those of the European social democrat - albeit sometimes at odds with a Fine Gael party led by the ultra-conservative Liam Cosgrave during the 1970s - rather than the scion of a party born of obscure Civil War arguments.

It is a tribute to this intellectual giant that he continued to contribute wise economic and politics analysis to the Irish Times every week until shortly before his recent illness. But the respect he earned was genuine and widespread. In truth, his Anglo-Irish Agreement lacked the subtley to transcend the sectarian divide, but he had understood the need to move forward politically, which would lead in time to the Good Friday Agreement. His social agenda, too, proved premature, and it took time - and the election of Mary Robinson in 1990 and the 1992 coalition with a strong Labour presence - for the advances he supported in areas like divorce to be realised. But as his highly readable autobiography demonstrated, it was not for want of trying. Ireland today is a very different place socially and culturally than it was when Garret FitzGerald entered politics. And that it is owes no small debt to his sense of what it could be.

Lessons for Life

There was a great turnout in the Commons last night for the launch of Lessons for Life, a collection of 50 interviews with education, business and government leaders that I conducted for HTI, the education leadership charity, to celebrate their 25th anniversary. Estelle Morris hosted the event.

Among those giving their views on education - and remembering their own schooldays - are Sir Alex Ferguson, Michael Gove, David Blunkett, Sir Martin Sorrell, Sir Michael Barber, Lord Baker, Digby Jones, David Puttnam and Yo Sushi! founder Simon Woodroffe. Education leaders interviewed include Sir Michael Wilshaw, Dame Sue John, chief inspector Christine Gilbert, Dame Ruth Silver and Sir William Atkinson, who spoke at last night's launch.

Sir William, who has transformed the Phoenix High School in West London, tells me in the book of his own remarkable story after he arrived in 1957 in the UK with his mother and older brother:

"The teacher, because my mother spoke with a very broad Jamaican accent, took into his head that my brother was aged 7 and had not been to school, whereas I was aged 9 and had been to school for two years. Therefore, it was unfortunate that I couldn’t read and write and he was a mini-Renaissance man,” recalls the headteacher whose leadership was the inspiration for the Lenny Henry character in the BBC series, Hope and Glory.

“So, I spent two years in a remedial class, which initially had a profound effect on me, with other children who were not having a good time at school, learning that I was not terribly bright and not terribly good at school. As result, I managed to fail my 11-plus at 9 when they thought I was 11. It was only then that they discovered my age. By that time, I’d internalised a number of very negative things about myself as a learner. So two years later when I took the 11 plus, I failed again. Most people only fail it once!”

But that early setback didn’t deter William. And he owes a lot to sixth form head at Battersea County school, Ray Sanders, who helped him gain the O levels he needed – after an unsuccessful first attempt. “Ray decided that I had potential that I didn’t think I had,” he says. “He got me to realise that I was capable of doing far better than I thought I could. He was also the person who made me want to become a teacher; not only Ray, but also the young teachers working in that comprehensive school. For me, they appeared to be good role models; these were people who really wanted to make a difference before it was fashionable.”

"Lessons for Life" is being sold in aid of the Inspire programme which promotes mentoring for disadvantaged young people. Copies are available from HTI at £25 each.

Back to the university drawing board

I know the Government is getting desperately confused in its higher education policy, but the answer is not to introduce a two-tier fees system for home students. Instead, the Government needs to examine the problems it has created for itself in its higher education policy. The most important mistake was in getting the pricing wrong, assuming that universities would not charge £9000 while it was cutting their teaching budgets. This was a false economy, as the Government has to pick up the tab for the extra loans, which although attracting some interest are now only repayable when earners exceed £21k in income. It looks like there was no proper modelling done which included the likely impact of abolishing all state funding.

Perhaps now is the time to look again at the inter-relationship between several aspects of the new system: the size of the maximum fee and the availability of loans, the loan repayment terms, the extent to which government and universities underwrite those loans and the level of HEFCE grant for non-science subjects. A better balance could certainly be more manageable - and fairer- than allowing rich kids to indulge in a spot of arbitrary queue jumping. Vince Cable - if he can refocus on his department for a moment - and David Willetts need to go back to the drawing board.

The morning after

Were it not for Scotland, Ed Miliband could claim to have had a good night. As it is, the extraordinary SNP surge will overshadow some genuinely impressive achievements: potentially gaining a majority in Cardiff (providing a lesson in the benefits of coalition for the larger party), routing the Lib Dems in cities like Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Hull and Stoke, winning back Gravesham and good results in places like Telford and Luton. Yet Labour also lost ground in key seats like Gloucester and Dartford. Of course, results have still to come in many areas. But the fact that one cannot say it was an overwhelmingly good night for Labour is a measure of the uphill struggle that Miliband still faces.

For he is the leader of the party in the whole of Britain, not just England; and he can't accept credit for Cardiff without also accepting the embarrassment of Edinburgh. He needs now to work to ensure that there is a root and branch reorganisation of the Scottish Labour Party, with the persuasion of a heavy hitter to position him or herself to do an Alex Salmond on the whole Scottish Labour party. After all, Salmond had the confidence to stick his name on every Scottish ballot paper.

In England, this is a better result than it might seem, because Labour has once again become the largest party in votes cast. This is important with the Tory gerrymeander still set to be introduced despite the failure of AV. It is a mark of the ineffectiveness of Nick Clegg that he didn't insist that the two measures were dependent on each other, thus forcing Cameron and crew to restrain themselves over their No enthusiasm. The Liberal Democrats are facing potential revolts over key coalition policies which will strain the partnership, and should certainly scupper Andrew Lansley's barmy NHS plans (if not restoring those waiting time targets that had been a huge success for patients) and may force speedier Lords reform and turn the pupil premium in schools into a meaningful incentive to attract poorer students. And while the Tories will be pleased not to have seen their vote drop significantly, they may find that this is the last time they can feel so smug: as Lib Dem councillors disappear, voter anger will find a new home.

For Labour, it is vital that the party does more than sort out Scotland. The extra councillors should help consolidate the party organisation. But Miliband needs to show some policy mettle too, and not wait until his various reviews have pronounced. Voters don't know what he stands for, and he needs to pick some strong symbolic policies on which to take a stand: that might mean outpacing the Tories where their policies are potentially popular, like on academies and free schools, and providing radical alternatives where they are getting it wrong, including on crime and prisons. He should not let the Lib Dems take the initiative on constitutional reform, but he needs a clear and credible economic and social policy that appeals to working class and Middle England voters alike. Of course, he should not unveil all - or even most - of his policies now, but he does need to show where he stands. Otherwise it will be difficult to turn last night's genuine gains into an election winning strategy for 2015 - or before.

An updated version of this posting appears on the Public Finance blog.

The wonders of Jordan

Jerash

Karnak





Petra

We spent Easter in Jordan, visiting the major sites and relaxing by the Red and Dead Seas. Our original planned trip to Syria as well was cancelled - later than I had expected given the appalling events there - just days before our departure, but that didn't take from the wonders of Jordan. We ended up with the Cox and Kings 'Splendours of Jordan' trip, which was a fast-paced but excellent overview.

From our Amman hotel, close to the Ministry of the Interior, the noise of a crowd chanting seemed to grow ever louder. Jordan had, after all, not been immune from the Arab Spring: King Abdullah sacked his government in response to some protests, and on the Friday before we arrived, dozens of police were injured after Islamist extremists demonstrated in Zarqa - or so the Jordan Times reported. But these were no demonstrators: the hotel had laid on two giant screens by the swimming pool for a late evening soccer match. Those who cancelled their visits to Jordan because of Syria or Egypt are missing out. Amman is an extraordinary mix of old and new, and felt entirely safe though all the big hotels had airline-style security. We had a great dinner at the famous Fakhr el-din restaurant and spent time visiting the wonderfully preserved amphitheatre and the Citadel with its remarkable city views. We took in the Franciscans' Mount Nebo where Moses saw the Promised Land and the great crusader castle at Karnak. Petra with its stunning Treasury, tombs and Siq is as awe-inspiring as one would expect; and Jerash - old Antioch - is a remarkable Graeco-Roman city.  Wadi Rum has all the echoes of Lawrence of Arabia that one would expect; while Aqaba is a splendid city to relax (with cheaper taxes than elsewhere in Jordan too) especially staying in the centre.

Petra

Petra sunset

Aqaba

But the Jordanians are worried about growing cancellations as a result of the Arab Spring. True, over Easter there was little sign of tourists staying away, especially in Petra and Aqaba. But there is a real concern that people will stay away in the autumn or next year, as people consider their options. Syria and Yemen may be out of bounds for now, but Jordan is not. I hope people don't allow the troubles of neighbours to let them miss out on the wonders of this remarkable country.

Cable is right: Cameron's kneejerk immigration policy is bad for business

Vince Cable is in many ways the biggest disappointment of the Coalition. He is a shadow of his former self, showing little sign of the sparkling wit that brought forth the cruellest jibes against Gordon Brown when he was the Lib Dems' stand-in leader. But today, in criticising David Cameron's knee-jerk approach to immigration as 'very unwise', he has redeemed himself a little. The coalition's ludicrous immigration quotas are a threat to British business.

Labour had, rather more sensibly, developed a points system which meant that skilled people could be recruited where they were needed. But by substituting a quota system, the Government has tied itself in complete knots.

Universities are a good example. Higher education is big business for the UK, worth almost £5bn a year in fees and spending by overseas students. While there are bogus private colleges that operate above chip shops, there are also hundreds of thousands of legitimate degree-level students who can choose to study in Australia, Canada, New Zealand or Malaysia rather than Britain. Labour rightly expanded their numbers and actively recruited in countries like China and India. Instead of focusing its clampdown on the bogus colleges, the coalition is using a blunt axe as part of its migration policy to make recruitment, including in private degree providers that might provide real competition (alongside FE colleges) to keep fees down. And it is reducing incentives for overseas students, denying them the chance to use their skills in the UK after graduation (something Sir James Dyson has criticised).

The truth is that immigration made and makes a real contribution to economic growth, so long as migrants pay taxes and contribute their skills. Both are surely useful attributes to a government with no obvious growth strategy. Of course we need to improve the skills of British youngsters, but to pretend that having more skilled or paying migrants is bad for Britain is simply bad economics. Any business secretary who didn't recognise these facts wouldn't be worthy of the title.

Why I'm backing AV

I will be voting in favour of the Alternative Vote on May 5th for one very simple reason: it is far better to have an MP who has got the support of 50% of their electorate rather than one who may represent just a third of them. That's it. It isn't complex. Sun readers should surely be able to grasp even if the newspaper's editors find it too difficult.

But instead of a straightforward argument about whether or not this is a good principle, we have been subjected to an awful lot of rubbish on both sides. Perhaps this is always the case with referendums - in Ireland, where they are almost an annual event thanks to the strictures of the Constitution, one divorce referendum was lost over the supposed threat to family farms. Even so,  the sheer fatuousness of the current AV debate would give the Irish a run for their money.

The cost of AV was said to be depriving us of nurses (no, that'll be down to Lansley's new bureaucracy and his 'efficiency savings') while AV was apparently going to get rid of nasty crooked MPs (only if a majority of people vote against them). The broadcasts by both sides must rank as among the worst ever shown in recent times. Yet, in truth, this is a modest measure that will make our voting system a little fairer. Nothing more, nothing less. And I'll be voting Yes.

Changing the NHS changes

Readers of this blog will not be surprised that David Cameron and Nick Clegg are being forced into full-scale rescue mode for Andrew Lansley's health 'reforms' this week. The attempt to force GPs to become NHS managers was always bonkers, however good the more entrepreneurial GPs may be at managing local healthcare budgets. While Cameron clearly should have known this, he was clearly adversely affected by Francis Maude's decision to deny him a reasonable level of politically-savvy advice within No. 10. The removal of the quasi-accountable role of the Primary Care Trust clearly ran directly counter to Liberal Democrat policy (even if the latter sought to bring local authorities into the picture). It was also inevitable that their initial attempt to create a market based on price rather than quality would have to be reversed, given all the Cameron guff about the 'NHS safe with us' before the election. And the removal of waiting time targets (despite 'guarantees' in the NHS constitution) was always going to affect patients adversely - and it has started to do so.

So, the conjoined coalition twins have a chance to reverse Lansley's mess before the legislation is torn apart in the Lords. But they should not pretend that all they are doing is minor tinkering if they are making the more significant changes that are required. If they really want to win back public support, they need first to apologise for the changes, which were a clear breach not just of the coalition agreement but also of the solemn promises (there were a lot of those, weren't there?) made by Cameron and Clegg before the election. They then need to spell out what they will do and what they will not do, as a result of their U-turn. That should mean at the very least voluntary participation in the fundholding scheme, a residual role either for PCTs or local authorities and competition based firmly on quality. They need also to be rather more honest about the extent of improvement since 2000 - which is pretty obvious to anyone who has experienced the system before and after - as well as the extent to which it still needs to improve. And finally, they need to restore the maximum waiting times until such time as they genuinely are no longer needed, with any Tory who says that they 'distort clinical priorities' being forced to wait on a trolley in A&E on a Saturday night without being seen for a minimum of 10 hours. Only then will they start to convince the public. Anything less is (not very good) spin.

University challenges

I really don’t understand the logic of the Government’s higher education policy. I have supported the need for increased fees, and recognise the good sense of having more bursaries at the same time. Having a higher repayment threshold for graduates also makes tactical sense coupled with higher interest rates on the loans. I can also the merit in encouraging access schemes from summer schools to places guaranteed to the ablest students in particular schools (though not some of the madder quotas suggested by Simon Hughes). However, it is the economics of the policy – and the approach of other government departments – that just doesn’t add up.

The first problem is that the Government has cut the teaching budget by far too much at the same time as allowing higher fees. Of course, universities might have been expected to bear a 15or 20% cut, but an 80% cut is absurd, and it makes it inevitable that most will seek to compensate by increasing fees as far as they have.

The second major problem is with overseas students. The clampdown  on bogus colleges may focus on the right targets, but there is a danger that differential practices in consulates overseas sees many overseas students taking their studies - and their money - to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Europe or the new Asian universities instead. More importantly, as James Dyson has said this week, the decision to limit work opportunities for recent overseas graduates is wholly self-defeating. Once again, the ideological self-certainty of the coalition - this time on the Conservative side - has been allowed to triumph over a more nuanced position that was much more clearly in Britain's economic interests. This could cost us all £2 billion a year, with nothing to show in return.

And lastly, the government has let the universities off the hook on loans. It is the same with the decision to lift fees to a £9000 maximum but not properly to cost the likely effect of scrapping a large swathe of teaching grants: of course, most universities will try to charge the top rate. It is wholly bizarre that the Government didn't simply require them to develop their own loans schemes for fees above £6000. After all, that is what many vice-chancellors had been expecting.

The government is right to want to encourage colleges and other lower cost providers to enter the market - and bidding for funded places seems a reasonable mechanism, so long as a quality threshold is met - but it needs to think through rather more carefully how its higher education policies will interact with each other. If it doesn't, not only will it fail to improve social mobility, it will greatly
reduce the competitive capacity of English higher education.

So, as it rewrites its long-delayed Higher Education white paper, it needs a fundamental rethink of its model. Given that it is unlikely to restore teaching grants – and if it did so, it would probably raid FE budgets to pay for it – there are three things it could and should do.

On access, it should actively encourage merit-based access programmes, including those that offer places conditional on slightly lower grades to the ablest students in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The focus needs to be on access for the poorest, not state school students who don’t need an extra leg up. On overseas students, while continuing to clamp down on bogus colleges, it needs to craft an attractive package for genuine students that tells them they are welcome rather than tolerated – and that includes access to skilled jobs in the two years after graduation. The Home Office should not be allowed to kill this vital export industry.

And finally, the Government should require universities that wish to charge £9000 a year to bear some of the liability for the loans that this will lead to, rather than trying to micromanage the market any further. By all means, auction some funded places to the lowest bidder and encourage FE and private alternatives, but do so by allowing more rather than less of a competitive environment to develop, where students can make informed choices. Getting this right is vital for students and universities.

Protest politics

Ed Miliband has been criticised for speaking to Saturday's TUC rally against the coalition's cuts, not least because of the fairly predictable efforts by anarchists to discredit the march with their mindless vandalism. But Ed was right to speak to a march attended by 250,000 people, though he is wrong in the message he is putting across. The 250,000+ people who marched on Saturday were not the usual suspects. They came from across the UK, and included many who rarely march. Contrary to the received wisdom of the London pundits, there are lots of Middle Englanders working in local government, schools and hospitals facing cuts and job losses over the next three years who are far from being traditional Labour voters. They include Mail readers and people who voted for the coalition last time, and Cameron and Clegg will need to find ways to talk to them as much as Miliband.

But Ed's problem lies not just in his message to the marchers, but in his and his shadow chancellor's wider approach both to the cuts and domestic reform. Labour learnt the hard way over 18 years in opposition after 1979 that effective opposition is selective opposition. That means being prepared to say much more clearly which broad areas Labour would cut - nobody wants a shadow budget - and which would be protected as a result of a slower repayment of the debt. It is not good enough, as Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, does too often, to pass over this as quickly as possible. The truth is that the voters may not like the cuts, and may particularly dislike certain cuts, but they don't yet feel that Labour has re-earned economic credibility because they see it as being responsible for some of the deficit even if they recognise the role of global banking too.

This is not just a problem with the cuts. It applies to domestic policy too, where Labour should welcome where the coalition has adopted and extended the party's approach - on academies, high speed rail or welfare reform - and be much more focused on opposing policies that go in another direction, such as forced GP fundholding or cutting frontline policing. In both cases, a clearer
honest message would be far more effective and have lasting benefits for Labour's image in the tough years ahead. After all, a three point poll lead in the midst of all these cuts is hardly the stuff of 2015 landslides.

A budget chance to promote social mobility

George Osborne's Budget tomorrow has variously been presented as an opportunity to scrap air duty, national insurance and VAT on petrol. But for thousands of young people from less well off families, its most important feature will be what it does about the Education Maintenance Allowance. Until this year, 16-18 year-olds in full time education with family incomes below £30k a year have had a conditional allowance of up to £30 a week, payable provided they attend school or college and intended to enable them to continue studying after GCSEs. The government has announced that there will no further payments, not even for those young people who started two year courses last September. There will instead be a small discretionary fund expected to be worth around £70m (though this is likely to increase after Simon Hughes's review) to replace the £490m distributed by EMA, of which most goes to young people in the poorest families. And while higher education fees have been the main media focus of student protest, the greatest injustice and potential hinderance to student mobility is the abolition of the EMA.

The irony is that its abolition was only made necessary because the Liberal Democrats insisted that their pupil premium should not lead to a reduction in overall school funding, and the Treasury insisted that the Dept for Education must fund it from within its wider budget. But the EMA is far better targeted than a pupil premium that is likely merely to provide sticking plaster for wider school cuts, and which lacks the same degree of conditionality on the recipient. Truanting or tardy EMA recipients can lose their allowance; there is no sanction as yet proposed for schools that show little to justify their premium.

So, tomorrow's Budget offers Osborne an opportunity on two fronts. The first is to restore the EMA for those students with a reasonable expectation of receiving it for 2011-12, those in the second year of A-level courses for example. If Osborne doesn't make this change, the courts almost certainly will. And I would be astonished if DFE lawyers haven't already reached this conclusion: after all, they made clear that university tuition fees could not apply to existing students when they were first introduced in 1998. The second is to introduce a much more comprehensive replacement to the EMA for new statements. Simon Hughes has certainly been arguing for this, as have many FE colleges. There needs to be enough money to cover the costs of transport, books and learning materials for all students with family incomes below the £20k where the full £30 EMA was currently paid.

Ministers make the argument that the EMA did not significantly increase participation, and that with compulsory staying on coming in from 2013 for 17 year-olds and 2015 for 18 year-olds, the scheme has substantial deadweight costs. But EMA has increased participation, especially among 17 year-olds, as the IFS has shown. More importantly, it has a conditionality that is absent from child benefit for young people over 16. And it creates a sense of responsibility in the young person that is crucial in today's mollycoddled times. Looking at the two benefits in the round together with an increased apprenticeship offer could offer a way out of the funding dilemma, but not without some additional resource for the poorest students. After all, what exactly is the point of introducing a pupil premium for under-16s only to remove an important ladder of opportunity when they reach 16. George Osborne has the chance to put things right in his Budget.

Educating the health secretary

While the battle to protect Libyans from Gaddafi continues, domestic news - bar, perhaps, this week's Budget - is unlikely to get much of a look in. But the weekend saw two further dents in the credibility of Andrew Lansley's grand plans for the NHS. First, the Observer revealed that recent polling showed record levels of satisfaction with the health service, after the reforms and investment of Labour. This information had been suppressed by the Government, which talks a lot about publishing facts but tends only to do so when the facts suit their case. In this case, Lansley apparently preferred 2006 data to more recent figures. The figures bore out the findings of earlier concerns about the government deliberately ignoring an improving trend in health outcomes. Both are shamefully promoted by Lansley. But we need to know the baseline, and trend, so we can judge his changes in the same light.

The second dent came in an article by the independent-minded GP and Tory MP Sarah Wollaston, in the Sunday Telegraph. She is particularly concerned about the impact that stripping out Primary Care Trusts and handing £80 billion of public money to GPs will have on the NHS. There should be as much concern about the premature removal of floor standards over waiting times, which are likely as budget cuts bite to lead to longer waits for treatment and a return to the trolley patients of the late 90s. As I have argued before, the issue is not whether reform is needed or even whether GPs can be entrusted with primary care budgets, but the utterly mad way in which these reforms are being introduced. There is no evidence they will work: it is all based on a hunch, which might be OK with a £5 bet at Cheltenham but not with an £80bn wager on the NHS. There is no distinction made between enthusiastic GP fundholders and unwilling conscripts. There is no proper transition with targets and primary care trusts. The whole thing has failure written all over it in large letters, and it is astonishing that neither David Cameron nor Nick Clegg can see it.

The absence of any proper No 10 policy scrutiny is evident in the way these changes are being introduced. And if the new policy wonks drafted in to the PM's Policy Unit have any sense they will immediately propose several changes to the Lansley lunacy. If they want a better model of reform, they could ask Michael Gove at education who has adopted this approach with academies and free schools. First, make fundholding a gradual process available to those who want it and have the skills to deliver it. Second, retain PCTs as a smaller but important strategic oversight until there is universal fundholding. Third, keep some floor standards - maximum waiting times for treatment and A&E - and use them as part of the accountability package. Fourth, be absolutely clear that competition will be on quality with fixed prices for treatment. That is the model that Gove has adopted in education - pace but choice on academies and free schools, residual local authorities, GCSE and Key Stage 2 floor targets and fixed per student funding (still linked to area) with adjustments for poverty and special needs (albeit with spending cuts). Lansley could do worse than learn from his education colleague. The rest of us could do a lot better if he did.

Another valiant effort to address special educational needs...but is the money there?

Back in 1997, David Blunkett published a Green Paper on special educational needs. Though it has subsequently been presented as being about a 'presumption towards inclusion', it was much more about trying to address the frustrations of statementing, and to introduce alternative less bureaucratic ways of meeting the needs of those with less severe SEN. Blunkett certainly wanted disabled youngsters to have access to mainstream schools, but always recognised the need for special schools for those with severe learning disabilities or emotional and behavioural difficulties, to use the accepted jargon in the SEN world. The changes did at least allow for School Action Plus, where extra help short of a statement is needed. It too wanted more early identification of needs through baseline assessments and greater co-ordination between agencies. And it led to a significant new role for many special schools as hubs of specialist help linked with mainstream schools, a role extended as they formally became specialist schools.

Forward thirteen years to today's coalition Green Paper on SEN. There is plenty in here with which one could hardly disagree. Early identification of special needs needs to be improved. Better local information would be useful. Stronger aspirations for those with SEN is essential, and too many pupils are mis-diagnosed often being placed on School Action. Joint assessments and single personal budgets make sense too. As does mediation if people are ready for it, rather than tribunals. But while there may be some savings to be made through extending programmes like Achievement for All, the danger of this paper is that it falsely raises expectations in some of its promises. In particular, there may well be a demand for new SEN free schools, but will they have the funds needed for complex needs? Will there really be parental choice, when the Treasury has made it subject to the 'efficient use of resources'? And will there really be the great levels of local information and support when local authorities are implementing huge cuts, and schools are losing funds too? These are not mere details: they lie at the heart of delivering the ambitions of the Green Paper.

Striking the vocational balance

I am something of a fan of Prof Alison Wolf's acerbic and polemic approach to education and the labour market, which is why I invited her to contribute to two volumes of essays that I edited for think tanks in the past. And there is much that is good in her eminently readable report (pdf) on vocational education today, even if it may not all be welcomed in the exam industry. Some vocational qualifications are not good enough; quality needs to be improved. Good work-based apprenticeships need to be more widely available. A better league table balance needs to be struck. Ministers should be explicit about which qualifications will be accredited. Colleges should be able to admit young people full-time from 14, freed to respond to local labour market demand and college lecturers freer to teach in schools. All young people should be expected to work towards GCSE grade Cs - or genuine equivalent- in English and Maths if they don't get them at 16. She is also absolutely right to argue that institutions should be funded per student rather than per course (though the extra costs of some high-tech courses may need consideration).


But there is one significantly misguided asssumption in her overall prescription, and the Government will be making a mistake if it adopts her ideas unquestioningly. As was obvious from Lord Baker's dismissal of her report this morning on Today, the notion of just 20% of the curriculum for 14-16 year-olds being available for practical education runs directly counter to the need from strong vocational or practical routes available from the age of 14, including through Baker's planned university technical colleges. If we leave it until 16 before enabling young people to take a significant number of useful practical courses, they will simply disengage from education. And that disengagement could be for 4 years as compulsory participation extends to 18, not just 2 as now. Of course, they should learn English and Maths, and science - though a good applied GCSE standard qualification is needed for the latter - and there should be a strong emphasis on communication, written and oral, in English.

I have long argued in favour of pre-apprenticeships from 14 as a way of achieving this, something the Labour government started but lost interest in as the Diploma was developed. Of course, we also need a better weeding out of poor qualifications - Ofqual should be ruthless on this score - as well as a kitemarking of those that are good. But there are good BTECs and Diplomas and it would be unfair if all were tarred with the same brush (even if, to be fair, the detail of Wolf's report rather than its reporting doesn't do so, particularly at level 3). And we need to find ways to involve employers in providing worthwhile work experience that makes those on such courses job ready.


But there is a second significant misunderstanding in the Wolf analysis. Many academies and other schools use vocational qualifications not only to engage otherwise disaffected young people or even improve league table rankings, but also to encourage them to gain good GCCEs in English and Maths. (Incidentally, by using 2005 rather than 2010 data, she claims that less than 50% of pupils achieve English and Maths GCSEs by the end of Key Stage 4: in fact the latest DFE statistics show that 53.4% do so, with 57% gaining GCSE or equivalent in both subjects. This is the result of an explicit change to the league tables made by Labour in 2005. I do hope her other statistics are more robust.) They would do so regardless of the league table rankings, though there should be appropriate recognition of kitemarked vocational qualifications in the tables. By discouraging any pre-16 vocational qualifications, Prof Wolf is making it harder to achieve her entirely laudable goal of every young person achieving GCSE English and Maths. Moreover, Level 1 and Level 2 qualifications may not in themselves lead to jobs, but they can lead young people onto further qualifications that do. Progression matters too, and any kitemarking should be linked to this.


And while it is true that other countries that offer vocational education also require an academic core - including English where it is not the first language - they are also much more successful in striking the right balance, often from the age of 15. The danger in the message from today's report is that it will tilt the education system so far away from pre-16 vocational or practical education that it not only creates a large new cohort of truants but that it makes it much harder to avoid them from becoming NEETs.


So, while the Government should certainly embrace Prof Wolf's demands for higher quality qualifications and more apprenticeships, it must not lose sight of the need to provide an offer that is attractive and useful for those that would otherwise truant and those who have a more practical aptitude than others. It was good to hear Wolf lauding hairdressing as well as engineering and constuction courses on Today this morning; but we also need to find ways of preparing young people for the wide range of jobs in the leisure and tourism industries. If the qualifications there are not strong enough, they should be improved not abandoned. And there should also be a place for rigorous practical courses in subjects like languages, showing their relevance to jobs in tourism and business, as Baker's UTCs propose. None of this is to downplay the importance of academic rigour for the majority. But it is to recognise that a genuine choice of strong academic and vocational qualifications should be available to every young person - with the right independent careers advice - from 14.

Yes, Prime Minister

One of the most delicious moments in my time working in government was when David Blunkett played the episode of Yes Prime Minister where abolition of the Department for Education is proposed, to senior officials in the department after an away day dinner. The episode may have been based in the early 80s, but it resonated far too close for their comfort in the late 90s. The series set such a high standard that the new stage version clearly had a lot to live up to. It was with that in mind that I finally caught the Chichester Theatre production at Bath last night. And while it lacked the presence of Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne, it retained enough of the wit of the original, cleverly updated to today's fiscal crises and global warming obsessions, to entertain for the best part of two hours.

Simon Williams was a creditable Sir Humphrey and Richard McCabe a blokeish Jim Hacker for our times, as they sought to reconcile the sordid requests of a foreign minister from one of the ex-Soviet 'stans with the need for a vast oil-fuelled bailout. With the threat of a civil service act designed to remove many civil servants' perks, Sir Humphrey is persuaded to do the PM's bidding. Parts of the script simply didn't ring true, not least the conversations with the BBC, but Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn ensured that it retained enough fresh and knowing humour to remind us how much we miss such genuinely good and well-observed political comedy. The play has been on the go for a year, but the writing felt sufficiently fresh and relevant to engage the Bath audience last night. Perhaps we could have a short TV series revival for the coalition age?

A brave and sensible move on admissions

Today's Daily Telegraph reports that Michael Gove is planning to give academies and free schools the right to prioritise pupils entitled to free school meals for admissions, where it can help give them a more balanced intake. I'm not sure why a school wishing to achieve this would do so rather than going for banding or random allocation, but it is nevertheless a brave and sensible move that could help social mobility particularly if the pupil premium becomes anything more than a few hundred quid of sticking plaster for the cuts.

The Telegraph, needless to say, regards the whole thing as 'social engineering', which one supposes is not the same as buying a house in the catchment of a good school in order to gain admittance. I remember when Tony Blair was considering extending the Admissions Code to allow more banding, as well as extending choice for those entitled to free transport and the introduction of choice advisers, the Telegraph was equally sniffy. But those changes were right and necessary, especially as academies expanded, and many do use banding or lotteries. Ironically, it was a Times report on banding - where pupils are tested so they can be placed in different ability bands to achieve a comprehensive intake - that caused some very senior Labour figures to imagine that the 2005 White Paper was about increased selection. It didn't help that the Times placed an 11-plus paper on their front page to illustrate the news.

The simple fact is that good schools need objective measures to avoid becoming socially selective. It is extraordinary that some so-called comprehensive campaigners equate easy access to one's nearest school with fair admissions. With a heavily oversubscribed school, it is nothing of the sort, though it is sensible to have a balance between a neighbourhood catchment and one that is wider and more accessible. Equally, it is not enough to open school admissions up in this way. Choice advisers need to be developed in the way they were originally intended, as advocates from communities where people are reluctant to travel to good schools rather than local authority employees (though some of the latter do some good work, to be fair). Parents need active encouragement to apply.

The Telegraph report suggests that the new measure will be permissive, which is also probably sensible, though schools are required to prioritise children in care in their admissions policies. However, it is to be hoped that there is a degree of positive encouragement to good schools in urban areas in particular either to adopt this preference or to use banding or random allocation for at least a proportion of their intake. With some academies having 11 applicants for every place, it is the only fair way to ensure a more equal intake. That is not about social engineering. It is about enabling genuine opportunities for social mobility.

Not quite heirs to Blair

I have a column in the March edition of Public Finance, explaining why the coalition's public service reforms are not as much in the Blair tradition as they imagine.

David Cameron’s closest coalition colleagues are said to follow a ‘cult of Blair’ on domestic reforms. They proceed with pace, avoiding Tony Blair’s lament that he acted too slowly. They proudly display the scars on their backs from opposition to their changes. And they are extending some New Labour initiatives in health and education. But they have parted company with its ‘investment and reform’ approach in important ways - and that might be their downfall.

You can read the full column here.

The definitive death of Dev's doleful legacy

Ireland's election result is no less groundbreaking for having been largely predictable. Fine Gael is likely to form a strong government with Labour, between them holding 113 seats out of 166 in the Dail. They will seek better terms than the crippling 5.8% interest rates that they have to pay on their European bailout loans. But essentially they will preside over a continuity of the austerity that had been begun under Fianna Fail in the years that saw its demise. But the real importance of the election is the collapse of DeValera's party, an event that with the liberal reforms that were symbolised by the 1990 election of Mary Robinson as President, the neutralisation of Northern Ireland as an issue and the collapse of Catholic church authority under a welter of child abuse scandals has finally brought to an end the stifling insularity that characterised Ireland from the 20s to the 70s.

Of course, some things haven't gone away. The economic collapse has brought back the spectre of emigration, though it lacks the permanence or distance of earlier years and there remains a strong and growing private sector thanks to the low corporation taxes so hated by Germany and France. Fianna Fail, with just 20 seats, has partly lost ground to a stronger Sinn Fein party which has obscured its past to secure 14 seats. But as importantly, the Irish Labour Party, despite a haltingly confused election campaign, is now Ireland's second party, with 37 seats and has done better than its previous best result in 1992. It is the predominant party in Dublin, and the opposition benches also have several hard left TDs who may form an informal alliance with Sinn Fein to challenge the next coalition with Fine Gael on around 75 seats, from the left.

That Fianna Fail has fallen so low doesn't, of course, mean that it will permanently be stuck in the doldrums. Its new leader, Micheal Martin has at least halted what could have been an even worse slide. The Canadian Conservatives showed that parties can recover from such a drubbing. But what it does mean is that the old assumptions are finally dead and buried. To some extent, the Celtic Tiger boom was the catalyst for much of that change already. But it was presided over by Fianna Fail, which had managed to adapt in many ways to those winds of change, though never convincingly to embrace them. So, the transition could never be complete while the party of Dev continued to dominate Irish politics.

Now that party will need to face up to a future that it had sidestepped while Bertie was in charge as the money flowed in. Ireland needs to show that it can be modern and efficient with more realistic and soundly based growth. Whatever happens, there is no doubt that the election of 2011 will come to be seen as just as seismic an event in Irish political history as the 1918 poll that saw the demise of the Irish national party in favour of a Sinn Fein that gave birth to the two parties that dominated independent Ireland's politics for 90 years.

This post also appears at Public Finance.

Ireland's call, Kenny's choice

There is a peculiar air of unreality around the Irish election campaign. The big issue seems to be whether one-time teachers like Enda Kenny, the man likely to be Taoiseach by the weekend, should continue to access teachers' pensions (which he has decided not to take while in office). However, the real issue is whether it is good for Ireland to face a Fine Gael minority government rather than the long anticipated coalition with Labour.

To be fair, Kenny has fought a pretty good campaign, though he started it with a reputation for leadership so low that the only way was up, and as predicted here, Labour has provided a spectacular object lesson in how not to win elections, schizophrenically tacking left on tax and spend policy while running ads intended to undermine Fine Gael's appeal to middle class, fiscally conservative voters. The party leader, Eamon Gilmore, who had a brief moment not so long ago when he could credibly talk of himself as a future Taoiseach, has lost his personal lead as potential Taoiseach to the new kid on the block, Micheal Martin, who has rescued Fianna Fail from oblivion if not a pretty crushing defeat with as few as 30 seats. More seriously, his strategy of talking of higher taxes for those earning over €100k (£85k) a year could have cost him a swathe of Dublin seats, as Fine Gael is now leading the capital's polls.

Even so, Labour is still likely to achieve a result that will come close to Dick Spring's 33 seats (from a 166-member Dail) in 1992, and Fine Gael seems certain to exceeed 70 seats. (The Guardian will be disappointed that Sinn Fein will probably have to settle for a dozen seats at most, though Gerry Adams will probably take a seat). But with a swathe of independents, including assorted Trotskyists, likely to win seats, the temptation for Kenny could be to ignore Labour and cobble together a coalition with the independents. However, Garret Fitzgerald, a former Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader, has struck a timely note of caution in this respect in a speech, as the Irish Times reported:

Dr FitzGerald said such a coalition would be “much more solid” than seeking support from Independents, which he described as “disastrous”. “With Independents you have no idea. They can blackmail you for something in their constituency,” he warned. Dr FitzGerald believes the two parties can sort out their differences. “If they sort those out and stick together for five years, you have the kind of majority needed to do all the unpopular things that need to be done.”

Kenny has sought to increase his international standing during the campaign with visits to Chancellor Merkel and EU President Jose Manuel Barroso, intended to suggest that he could re-negotiate the stiff interest rates demanded for the Irish bailout. Even if he does, he faces a pretty tough time as Taoiseach. It would be crazy to go into it without a strong partner in government, and Labour is still the only serious option. Gilmore has started to remind people of this and to rein in the more damaging rhetoric. Kenny needs to show he means business, by urging vote transfers to Labour on Friday, if he wants the chance to lead as Taoiseach rather than forever having to buy off the whims of unreliable independents.

Time for a few more U-turns

I'm afraid I hadn't got around to stirring myself into a righteous rage about the management of the forests before David Cameron ruthlessly hung the hapless Caroline Spelman out to dry over the ill-communicated and poorly considered proposals. He badly needs to get a grip from No 10. But I am sure that its impact would have been far less damaging than two other government plans that remain a core part of the coalition project: forcing GPs to take over most of the NHS budget and the scrapping of the EMA. Both require swift retreats or they will lead to future problems when it is too late.

As I have said here before, there is nothing wrong with GP fundholding, where GPs actually want to hold the funds and where certain services that they will have no interest in commissioning are provided elsewhere. There is a lot wrong with simply handing over £80 billion of our money to consortia on the hunch that it might be a bit less bureaucratic or a bit more efficient. After all, the King's Fund has shown decisively that the Government's rationale for change is wholly bogus. Some GPs may have a natural aptitude for strategic decision-making. But just as some are lousy at diagnosing diseases, some will be hopeless budget-holders, at least when it comes to dealing with such large sums. This policy has disaster written all over it. Like the forest sell-off, it has no real support except from a few keen fundholders (and if they are keen, let them do it). In his heart, the PM must know this. Since he's in u-turn mode, here's what he should do. First, slow the reform timetable and the abolition of primary care trusts to allow reluctant fundholders to join as volunteers rather than conscripts, as with academies. Second, make the policy permissive, so that those with good business plans get the right to commission and those without must go back to the drawing board. Third, introduce a quality threshold alongside price into the value-for-money criteria, so that the policy doesn't end up replacing good provision with weaker but cheaper alternatives. Oh, and give Andrew Lansley another job where he can be less destructive.

On EMAs, it is a little different. This is a policy driven not by ideology but by funding. Ironically, the determination to pretend that school budgets were not being cut to fund the pupil premium led to the destruction of a proven, targeted measure to encourage ambition and achievement for poorer pupils to fund an untried, untargeted pot of money that will merely be used to plug funding gaps in schools that receive it. Michael Gove told school leaders six months ago that he wanted to persuade the Treasury that EMAs should stay. He clearly didn't succeed. But now that we are seeing the combined impact of government policies on young people, he needs to try again. Not least because without it, in the absence of compulsion when the participation age is raised, there will be nothing to persuade poorer young people who should do so to stay in further education when that is a better long-term option than a badly paid job with statutory part-time training tacked on. I know poorly paid young people lack the voting power of weekend forest-goers, but if the government cares about social mobility, it will make important changes.

Here's what Gove should do. First, all students who received an EMA in Year 12 should get one for Year 13 or the college equivalent. Scrapping an EMA mid-course is unforgivable: have university students been asked to pay a higher fee mid course? This will also avert another court defeat if a legal challenge takes place. Second, savings are needed, so the EMA should in future be made available to all students entitled to free school meals while at school whose family income remains low. This would encourage students to claim FSM at school, helping schools in areas where there is a stigma about FSM to claim the pupil premium. But it would still save money by confining eligibility to the poorest students. Third, the EMA's requirements for study and attendance should be strengthened, with rewards for those gaining good qualifications. Fourth, there should be a differential transport element depending on where students go to college or school. Such a scheme could be introduced at lower cost than the existing EMA but it would make a direct link with the pupil premium and bridge the gap between school and university, where poorer students receive significant support.

A wise education secretary would make the change before a beefed up Number 10 policy and strategy function works out what a disaster EMA abolition will prove to be - and before he loses another court case.

Will Fine Gael govern alone in Ireland?

Enda Kenny has not exactly had a good press in his years as leader of Fine Gael. Last year, I joined RTE discussion shows where his leadership was being compared with that of Gordon Brown. Last week, he was much criticised for failing to join a TV debate with the new Fianna Fail leader Micheál Martin and Labour leader Eamonn Gilmore. And Gilmore had until recently been expected to be in a position to dictate the terms of a new coalition government, if not demand the post of Taoiseach as his more ambitious election posters optimistically declare across Ireland.

Yet today all the talk is of Enda for Taoiseach at the head of a Fine Gael government propped up by some of the 15 or so independents expected to triumph as Fianna Fail gets a deserved drubbing from the voters. The Taoiseach-in-waiting has even headed off to Germany for a photocall with his Christian Democrat colleague, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to discuss possible changes to the economic bailout. Meanwhile, Labour's hopes of exceeding the 33 seats that Dick Spring won in 1992 are starting to fade, especially if the constituency polls are to be believed.

As it happens, I'm not sure all the polls are right. Fianna Fail's 15% showing seems too low, and Martin has had an impressive performance suggesting he is a leader who had nothing to do with the government in which he sat as a permanent fixture at the cabinet table. And the vagaries of Ireland's PR system could deliver transfers from left-wing parties to those on Gilmore's slate. it would also be a big risk for Kenny to try to govern with fickle independents in some sort of minority government rather than having Labour in a stable coalition which could have 105 seats between them.

Yet, there is also a sense in which a fundamental tactical error by Gilmore has blown his expected gale - talk of Labour taking 40+ seats was commonplace - off course. Winning two seats in most Dublin constituencies requires the votes and transfers of middle class voters who have been badly affected by the country's economic crisis as much as those of traditional Labour voters or transfers from the likes of Sinn Fein. Yet when Gilmore should have been reassuring those voters, he fell into the classic trap of tacking left by promoting higher taxes for people earning over €100k (£85k) which has been effectively attacked by Fine Gael. This has seen Labour's vote starting to fall back - as low as 20% in one poll yesterday (and lower in aggregate constituency polls), where the party was scoring in the high 20s and low 30s not so long ago. If Fianna Fail's vote is understated, Labour could fall further.

Of course, there is much to play for in the next 12 days, and the public may respond to Kenny's go-it-alone declarations by giving Labour a stronger mandate. Labour still seems likely to have a big increase in vote and seats, and Fianna Fail to face unprecedented losses. But it is just starting to feel that far from being the great breakthrough election that many had predicted, this will be the one where the baton simply passes to Fine Gael minus any of the reforming instincts that Labour could bring to the table.

Good governance in Ireland requires a strong Labour showing on Friday week. Gilmore should take a few lessons from his veteran colleague and former finance minister Ruairi Quinn on how to play the economy ahead of tonight's five-leader debate. He has no time to lose.

How to make Big Society more than just BS

David Cameron is having another relaunch of his Big Society today. Always a bad sign in government, this one is boosted by his slightly implausible declaration that this half-formed policy is his great mission in life. Desperation suggests itself, not least as the policy has suffered its share of knocks in recent weeks.

The thinking behind the Big Society is perfectly reasonable. At least it would be if it didn't rely on stale caricatures of Labour's approach. When I worked with David Blunkett, he regularly spoke of citizenship and volunteering, which translated into curriculum changes and the promotion of programmes like Millennium Volunteers (since renamed) which is not much different from Cameron's citizens' service. Blunkett also belonged to a Labour tradition that owed much to the pre-war mutualism of the co-operative and trade union movements, which promoted credit unions and penny libraries in Victorian England. Tony Blair regularly promoted 'Big Society' themes such as mutualism in the delivery of public services through trust schools, for example. Gordon Brown was obsessive about encouraging volunteering.

Their enthusiasm produced valuable measures, but no-one would pretend they amounted to a great breakthrough. And there is even less reason to believe that Cameron will be any more successful however much he puts the policy up in lights.

For a start, there is already a certain amount of 'Big Society' activity going on - Cameron highlighted Balsall Heath in his Observer article yesterday, just as Blunkett did a decade ago - but its existence is not proof that it can rapidly be extended, especially if it is simply seen as a substitute for local authority cuts that ministers crassly pretend either are not happening or are nothing to do with them. As Will Straw points out in a great piece on Left Foot Forward today, citing comparisons between poor US states and Sweden, cutting public spending actually tends to reduce volunteering. Changing the culture requires more than words.

Then there is the lack of enthusiasm not just about those who are not already volunteers, or among those who volunteer, as I do as a school and college governor, to become more actively engaged. This is not just because they don't understand what the Big Society is all about, though they don't, but because their lives are filled with work and family commitments. Most people don't want to run their local school or park unless they think the system is failing them. And most people are happy with their local services. One survey today suggests a similar lack of enthusiasm among the coalition's MPs.

And there is also the matter of education. A cultural change will require a shift in what young people learn. Citizenship is patchy in schools, but instead of being revitalised it could be axed in Michael Gove's curriculum review. The International Baccaureate requires a degree of volunteering from young people, but Gove's English Bac gives credit for nothing beyond the narrowly academic. If the Big Society is to resonate, it must start with young people, many of whom already raise money for charity and would happily volunteer in their communities with the right encouragement. There needs to be space for them to try establishing social enterprises in schools and the translation of citizenship on the curriculum into citizens' service for all. Doing so could develop valuable personal skills that would stand them in good stead at work or in university.

But there is little such understanding in Cameron's 'here today, gone tomorrow' speech. Commercial loans for social enterprises will hardly encourage a flurry of activity, and seem yet another example of how the banks have hoodwinked the coalition. Of course, the civil service will rebrand lots of initiatives as Big Society to please their masters, just as they did with theThird Way when it was the phrase of the moment, and as they have rebranded plenty of fairly ordinary school proposals as 'Free Schools' to beef up the numbers in the DFE. But if Cameron genuinely wants to realise what he says is his great mission, he needs to start with young people, be honest about the cuts, recognise the true potential of mutual and social enterprises, and find ways to support those who give of their time as volunteers. Unless he does so, the Big Society really will be so much BS.

This post also appears at Public Finance.

A little honesty on the cuts, please

The complaints by 90 leading Liberal Democrat councillors about the impact of the local government cuts give the lie to claims by the unpleasant Eric Pickles and his team of local government ministers that councils could achieve all the necessary savings painlessly (at least for 'frontline services'). It is impossible for coalition ministers to treat these claims in the same way as they airily dismissed announcements from Manchester City Council about its cuts.

Of course, there are some savings to be made by small London councils merging services like education (it used to happen in something called the ILEA) and schools may be able to merge administrative functions. But the blunt reality is that there will still be job losses - often at the front line - and cuts in everything from Sure Start to libraries. It is as fatuous for Pickles and others to claim that everything would be all right if only council chief execs cut their pay or their middle managers were named and shamed in local papers for earning £60k a year, as it is to imagine that a bit of ritual stake-burning for bank bosses will restore our national fortunes.

What we require is a little honesty here. Of course that applies to the opposition too. In truth, local government would have been a prime target for cuts by Labour if it was in power, though one might have hoped that the stealth cuts to schools - £250k on a £6m budget is typical - might have been avoided with a less frenzied frontloading of the savings, especially the short-sighted axing of most formula capital.

However, the coalition cuts are made all the worse at the frontline by the pretence that that they either aren't happening or aren't needed. Such duplicity can only cause real outrage when the reality hits home. The coalition's austerity drive would have far more credibility if they stopped playing the silly game they tried in opposition of suggesting that the biggest cuts in nearly a century could be achieved painlessly. If the government want us 'all to be in this together' in sharing the pain, they need to be honest about where it will hurt. And they should stop blaming those they have forced to implement the cuts for getting on with their job.

A little honesty might work wonders for the government's rapidly dwindling reputation.

Slow progress on free schools

Michael Gove put a brave face on it over the weekend as he sought to talk up interest in free schools. Yet for all the rhetorical enthusiasm, the fact is that just eight primary free schools are likely to be ready to open in the next two years, with perhaps another 27 in some sense advanced. We should not scorn these projects: each represents the vision of their promoters and can offer extra diversity in their communities. But one can question the importance of their development to wider school reform. The TES in an editorial last Friday argued that free schools are an irrelevant sideshow, arguing that the system is only likely to take off if for-profit providers are allowed, something politically untenable at least before the next election.

And a closer inspection of the eight free schools announced on Friday suggests little that could not have been established under existing programmes.

* There is a Suffolk school becoming 'free' to avert local authority closure by becoming a secondary school
* Jewish, Hindu and Anglican religious schools of the sort that expanded significantly under Labour
* A Montessori school that will surely eschew ministerial phonics edicts
* Two schools that actually call themselves academies, one established by Ark, one of the strongest academy chains and the other by a next door primary academy in Enfield.
* There is only one school that suggests a genuine desire by parents and teachers to introduce something wholly new: The Free School, Norwich

Essentially they are eight new academies - albeit mainly in the primary sector where Labour unwisely declined to expand academies. They differ little from existing academies or religious schools, and the pattern seems little different with most of the other 27 (aside, perhaps, from the planned Mahirishi school in Lancashire.

All of which makes one wonder why Andy Burnham, Labour's education spokesman, has set himself so against free schools. His opposition is as ridiculous as the elaborate claims being made by their enthusiasts on the other side. Free schools may offer a useful addition to the educational landscape, they may provide a little extra competition (and a few planning headaches for some councils). And they may give their pupils and parents a sense that state education can meet their needs.

But they seem pretty unlikely to transform the system in the way that the original secondary academies (and, legally, free schools are simply academies) - particularly those established in disadvantaged areas with strong sponsors - already have. That is because, unlike Sweden or America, where free and charter schools have thrived, Britain already has a strong tradition of diversity and independence in the state sector. That said, no Labour government is going to reverse what has already been set up: so our spokespeople should stop pretending otherwise. Instead, let's welcome those free schools that see the light of day, but focus our energies on ensuring that academies - whatever they are called - continue to advance the lifechances of children in the poorest areas of the country.