Labour’s education team seems to be set on reprising the New Labour mantra of “standards not structures”. Sadly, they haven’t taken on board Tony Blair’s own conclusion about how meaningful this slogan was. He writes in his memoirs:

“This was fine as a piece of rhetoric; and positively beneficial as a piece of politics. Unfortunately, it was a bunkum as a piece of policy. The whole point is that structures beget standards. How services are configured affects outcomes.”

It isn’t necessary to agree with the policy direction Blair followed to recognise that his basic insight remains true.

Labour has failed since 2010 (with the exception of a brief flurry in 2018) to come up with a convincing response to the Tory restructuring of the school system. The pretence that how schooling is organised doesn’t matter is becoming ever harder to sustain as even the government recognises in its White Paper that the system is a mess.

The essential point is that structures drive thinking and behaviour. So, to take the obvious example, if you set up a system that gives central importance to competition, you will get predictable results – a narrowing of the curriculum to focus on what is being measured and attempts to manipulate a favourable intake in order to achieve an apparent competitive edge. When careers are on the line, the pressure is even greater.

Since the 1990’s, this competitive system has consistently downplayed the different challenges faced by schools in different places. This is seen in the simplistic use of data and in the clear bias in inspection outcomes. How the school system is structured very largely explains how and why pupil intakes vary so much – not recognising that has led to bad policy choices and disappointing outcomes.

A key structural feature is around selection and admissions. Selection is not just about grammar schools but arises right across the country as a result of the interplay between admission criteria set by schools and the competitive environment. Schools are incentivised to game the system to their own advantage and to that of families with the knowledge and resources to benefit. Structures drive behaviour.

The systems now being imposed on the school system have, as their fundamental principle, centralised decision making. The days of autonomy and innovation are gone. Ministers like to talk of “families of schools” but what we’re seeing is the Victorian family model where obedience is all.  MAT boards rule schools and the DfE through the new Schools Bill rules MATs. When things go wrong, the answer is to centralise even more.

This matters because everyone is now looking upwards to get the approval of MAT boards, DfE and Ofsted. There is much less countervailing pressure to look outwards to parents and local communities. In the name of reducing workload, there is an increasing expectation that there will be centralised curriculum, even lesson, planning and a range of cross trust policies on behaviour, assessment and even dress codes. The point here is not whether these things are good or bad – but they are driven by structures and if we want to change how people behave, we need to change  structures.

A fundamental point that should run through every strand of Labour policy is that place matters. Schools are key local institutions and need to be integrated into local systems. People need to feel that, in some sense, their schools are their property. Not something imposed on them by some alien and distant body. And crucially neighbouring schools need to work and share together – something that academy structures positively obstruct.

The pandemic showed up the weaknesses of a system which has never been particularly coherent but is now totally fragmented. The DfE’s default position was to launch big national programmes – providing laptops, school meals, tutoring and so on. Predictably they fell over spectacularly. The confusion of maintained schools, single academies and MATs made any coherent middle tier response far more challenging than it should have been.

We are replacing the monitoring and regulatory role of 150 local authorities with 9 Regional Commissioners and central government. This matters because the capacity in the system is becoming wholly inadequate. So, the financial scandals keep coming. No one really knows what’s happening in the hundreds of tiny academy trusts. As Kenneth Baker said in the House of Lords recently:

suppose that a school in Darlington gets into trouble and the Secretary of State says, “I’m going to cancel your governing board.” How can they know the people in Darlington to appoint as governors? They cannot.

If Labour does not think through issues of structure, they will come back to bite them in government. There will continue to be confusion, duplication and waste. Communities will be more and more distanced from their schools. Potential heads, with their authority diminished by MATs, will think the job is less and less worthwhile. Ministers will launch grand initiatives but will find that there is not the consistent infrastructure to implement them.

Or to put it even more basically “anyone who has spent any time in Labour Party politics should know, questions about rules are questions about power” (Jake Richards and George Peretz in Labourlist). Power – and therefore rules – are something Labour needs to seriously plan for.

 

The Fabian Educational Policy Group  School Structures Working group

 

All  blogs represent the views solely of the named author(s) and not those of the Fabian Education Policy Group or the wider Fabian Society