Labour wanted the Services involved in schools in 2012 and I wasn't worried then either

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When I heard that Gavin "Stupid Boy" Williamson had proposed giving the military a role in some schools, the idea seemed familiar.

Sure enough, a search of this blog reveals that the idea was proposed by two Labour shadow cabinet members, Stephen Twigg and Jim Murphy, back in 2012.

The same people who were outraged at the idea of teenagers having Saturday jobs a few days ago were also outraged by Williamson.

But as I wrote in 2012:

There are many children who will hate the idea (I would have been one) but there are others who would jump at the idea of "specialist Service Schools," so why shouldn’t they be able to attend them?

One of the problems with the left in education is their assumption that there is an objectively best system that must be imposed everywhere all at once. The truth is more complicated than that.

And it is hard to resist the thought that an early encounter with the military would have done Williamson good.

Labour's foolish opposition to private schools entering the state sector

Last summer I spent a few days in Tynemouth and shortly afterwards blogged about the plans of The King's School, Tynemouth, to enter the state sector:

Such moves ... are to be welcomed, but the left is always deeply suspicious of them. 

Sure enough, the area's Labour MP is quoted on the Evening Chronicle website expressing concerns about the move.

Sebastian Payne has more about this story in this week's Spectator and about the Labour council's opposition to the school's plan:

The Labour-run North Tyneside council is a bastion of resistance to the Baker/Blair/Gove reforms, and seems to be primarily interested in protecting its own territory. Allowing the King’s School to open to state pupils would, they say, upset the ‘feeder’ system that shepherds pupils in primaries into designated secondaries. Giving parents a choice upsets this careful plan. 

The opposition is being led by Ian Grayson, a National Union of Teachers official who doubles as the North Tyneside council member responsible for education. He believes that removing the Priory school from council control could ‘destabilise’ the entire education system in the borough. Giving parents choice, he told me, could ‘see a significant drop in numbers elsewhere in the borough and we have to plan for that’. A third of pupils might choose schools other than the ones the council has designated for them. To Mr Grayson, this is not something to celebrate, but a problem. 

Councillor Grayson has been trying to thwart King’s School by demanding a formal investigation into the effect the new academy would have on the borough. This is how school wars are fought in England: the opponents demand a bureaucratic assessment, hoping that a judicial review will delay the process long enough to stop the new school opening — in this case in September. 

Even taken at face value, Grayson’s arguments make no sense. North Tyneside council is building three new secondary schools and one new primary, so his ‘balance’ will be upset anyway. It appears Grayson and his comrades loathe the idea of not being in control. The real issue is that the unreformed left don’t want any new schools while places in old, inadequate schools remain unfilled.

Payne goes on to sat that the pro-reform left - people like Andrew Adonis - are almost as angry as the Tories about this, while Stephen Twigg, Labour's shadow education secretary, is on the fence but leaning towards the anti-reform side.

The kindest thing you can say about people like Councillor Grayson is that they display a typical Labour weakness: they are interested in a the overall system but far less interested in individual schools.

I shall leave you with the wise words of George Walden in his 1996 book We Should Know Better:

In no other European country do the moneyed and professional classes - lawyers, surgeons, businessmen, accountants, diplomats, newspaper and TV editors, judges, directors, archbishops, air chief marshalls, senior academics, Tory ministers, artists, authors, top civil servants - in addition to the statistically insignificant but eye-catching cohort of aristocracy and royalty - reject the system of education used by the overwhelming majority pretty well out of hand, as an inferior product.

In no modern democracy except Britain is tribalism in education so entrenched that the two main political parties send their children to different schools.

That is why we should welcome private schools entering the state system.

Stephen Twigg's faulty thinking on free schools

Stephen Twigg made an effort to move on Labour's policy on free schools in his speech this week, but he is not there yet.

Take his complaint that:

Under Michael Gove’s policy, millions have been spent opening schools in areas with a surplus of places, while children elsewhere face a shortage of places.

I pointed out the flaw in this argument when Labour was still in power:

Surplus capacity will tend to exist in areas where the schools are bad, because parents there are more likely to pay to send their children to independent schools or to make more effort to work the state system to get them into schools further away.

And I concluded:

As things stand, the government will allow new schools only in areas where parents are perfectly happy with the existing provision.

Somewhere at the root of this faulty reasoning is Labour tractor-production approach to social problems: all children are the same and all schools are the same and what matters is the total numbers. There is no sense that children and their parents are individuals and a dynamic force with goals and wishes of their own.

The same faulty thinking lay behind this complaint from the same speech:

Under Michael Gove’s policy, increasing numbers of schools are able to employ unqualified teachers. When we know the key to standards is the quality of teaching, this is the wrong approach.

That sounded great until it was revealed that the Labour MP Tristram Hunt is in the habit of teaching the off primary school class on the Spanish Armada.

It's not just that this is a neat ad hominem argument against Labour: it's that I cannot imagine anyone more likely to inspire a class than Hunt.

If free schools use their freedoms to bring in people to the classroom from outside the teaching profession, then I am all in favour of it.

Despite Twigg's efforts, Labour still gives the impression that it is speaking for the teaching profession rather than children and their parents.

More school sport: A solution in search of a problem

Photo: Jusben from MorgueFile

The enormous success of the London Olympics has led our politicians into trying to outbid one another in their enthusiasm for physical education in schools. Boris Johnson, with his demand for two hours of sport a day, is currently in the lead.

Quite what all this sport is intended to achieve is not clear. Is it mean to make children happier or fitter or better behaved or more community minded?

Back in 2006, when school sport was being promoted as the answer to the obesity crisis, I wrote this:

Children were not thinner 20 or 40 years ago because of school sport. Organised games dominated the lives of boys in public schools and, to a lesser extent, grammar schools - even if many of them spent their time shivering on the wing and hoping the ball did not come near them. But for most children school sport was not that important. 

Children were thinner because they burnt energy in free play out of doors. What politicians should do is look at the forces which militate against their doing so today. Among them I would list the dominance of the motor car, the removal of authority figures from public space, the panic over child abduction and a culture that has left adults afraid to exert any sort of authority over children. 

The car can be tamed by home zones, with their planting and very low speed limits. We might begin to repopulate the public world by campaigning for a new generation of Routemasters with conductors in the next London Mayoral election. The panic over stranger danger is harder to tackle, but as a first step politicians could avoid stoking public anxiety. 

And adult authority? Perhaps children's freedom to play in the street was always balanced by an adult's right to tell them to play somewhere else if they became to irritating. The collapse of this sort of authority has not resulted in an age of freedom for children: instead they see their lives ever more closely policed by the state and its agents.

I did write a longer piece on this theme for Graham Watson's collection Liberalism - Something to Shout About. I must post it here one day - David Boyle once called it "brilliant" (hem, hem). At least I anticipated Boris Johnson's new Routemasters.

As to the current arms race amongst our politicians, I am sure there are children who would thrive on two hours of two hours of sport (just as some would love Stephen Twigg's schools run by the military) and the state system should be able to provide it for them. If they have the passion and drive that makes Olympic champions, the problem may be getting them to do anything else.

But for most children, an increase in school sport looks like a solution in search of a problem.

Labour, schools and the Forces

I find myself oddly unconcerned by the call for the armed forces to be more involved in education made by Stephen Twigg and Jim Murphy in the Daily Telegraph yesterday.

There are many children who will hate the idea (I would have been one) but there are others who would jump at the idea of “specialist Service Schools,” so why shouldn’t they be able to attend them?

Liberal and radicals should be keen to leaven the state system with more variety, choice and outright eccentricity. I also like the argument of Sean Davey on Liberal Democrat Voice that ssuch moves would be good for the Forces.

This sudden enthusiasm for the armed forces from two herbivorous Labour politicians, however, may tell us something about the Labour mind-set.

Because only a few days ago Stephen Twigg responded to research from the Sutton Trust suggesting that teenagers in England are half as likely as those in the average developed nation to reach higher levels in maths with the claim:

"Results for all pupils, including the brightest, improved under Labour. While there are always improvements that could be made, gifted and talented pupils were stretched through a National Academy, targeted scholarships and a new A* grade at A-level.”

It seems that in the Labour universe all is well with education or you have to call in the Army. My own radical case for children standing up when a teacher enters the room probably sounded laughably old-fashioned to most Labour bloggers, but look what their party is advocating now.

This lack of a middle position is somehow typical of Labour. I am reminded of a post about teenagers and swearing that I wrote in the early years of this blog where I note the assumption of a Guardian (inevitably) writer that the only alternative to his lax approach was something absurdly repressive.