Looking back on more than a decade of New Labour educational reform from so promising a vantage point as we are presently afforded, Ed Balls remarks’ about the sterility of the standards debate are all the more galling now than they were to me at the time. That the then Education Secretary and his colleagues at the DCSF could have been so unashamedly dismissive of this most important of all debates was nothing short of outrageous. Why, I wonder, did we put up with this insolence for so long?

Did we really buy the official party line that the steady improvement in the performance of students in examinations was ‘a reflection of improving standards of teaching and learning’? There were certainly grumblings, but very few parents actually spoke up in protest. Last month The Times Dr Richard Pike, Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), one of too few high profile critics that have consistently sought to expose this politicisation of the debate, spelled out his answer. The status quo was, he said, just too comfortable. Politicians were simply unwilling to upset middle class parents’ expectations that their children should ‘make the grade’ – the only grade, that is, that matters. When it’s your child getting the As they deserve, when it’s your school that’s doing so well in the tables, they turn don’t they? Who wants to raise the voice of dissent when all are busy unwrapping their prizes? The result is that at the end of more than a decade of New Labour educational reform the belief that all should Achieve is more entrenched than ever. A is for Achievement: nothing else will do.

Of course it did not help matters that those who did speak up were pilloried as cynics, liars, or worse. Talk of grade inflation, as Balls and Adonis would splutter indignantly, was both ‘demoralising for teachers and insulting to students’. ‘Quashing question marks against ever-increasing performance’ however ‘by equating them with question marks against whether pupils deserve their grades’, as Anastasia de Waal, of the think-tank Civitas, has argued, was, to put it mildly ‘a great disservice to us all’, and most especially to the school leavers of that period themselves. In terms of the unemployability of so many apparently qualified school leavers, in terms of the cost to universities of having to administer tests to separate the best from the rest, in terms of our declining international competitiveness, we are now paying the price.

Unfortunately, up until fairly recently, there was very little objective published research into grade inflation that could be drawn upon to move what has been for many a wearyingly circular debate forward. For too long, as Francis O’Gorman pointed out at think-tank Reform’s annual conference this July, there has been too heavy a reliance (on all sides) on anecdote and intuition, coloured inevitably by ill-informed presuppositions of one kind or another. But in 2008 Robert Coe and Peter Tymms, of the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM), published (to not enough publicity) the results of a 20 year monitoring exercise involving comparison of A level results with YELLIS, a standardised aptitude test taken in year 11. Across most subjects tested, a student with a particular score on the aptitude test would have received a C grade in 1988; in 2008 a student with the same score would have gained an A. The discrepancy was widest in Maths, involving a leap from a U grade to a low B by 2008. CEM’s research findings have been further substantiated this year by a joint study undertaken by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the University of Coventry, and lent further weight by a useful survey undertaken last year by Civitas and A new level, from the think tank Reform.

Of a number of factors that have contributed to grade inflation, chief among these, and least in dispute, is that we now have a much more efficient and well-oiled examinations process than was the case a decade ago. Civitas’s survey of 150 sixth-form college senior teaching staff, investigating reasons for the trend found that half of all respondents felt that it was due in the main to ‘students being better informed about what will be examined’.

Behind this statement lie a number of related developments in teaching and learning – all of which have contributed to making the examination process more efficient. What were once more general ‘syllabuses’ have been replaced by much more tightly defined ‘specifications’. Both questions and marking are more directed, reducing the margin of error, or divergence, from the marking standard. Much more is required in the way of planning than was once the case. The process of developing schemes of work from outline learning plans, and then fleshing these out further into detailed individual lesson plans, has been standardised. Examinations boards now publish reams of ‘teacher support materials’ to accompany their own textbooks. Learning generally takes place within much more clearly articulate frameworks, with the end in view in perspicuous focus at all times. Students get more exams practice. Teachers are accountable for their ‘delivery’ of the specified curriculum, and expectations on all sides (not just from parents), when it comes to results, are much higher than they were thirty years ago.

While no one wants to question the effort that has gone in to securing good grades, and proper credit should be given to exam boards for their efforts to improve process, if the overall achievement of the system boils down to the fact that we have got better at exams then there is clearly something wrong. The really important question is surely whether and how well young people’s educational experience has served to prepare them for further/higher education and the workplace. In A new level, the aforementioned report published by Reform last year, academic analysis of A level exams from 1951 to 2008 found that the combined effects of these developments, depressingly, have ‘allowed candidates [increasingly] less scope for using their own mind, thinking through problems and expressing originality’. It hardly needs to be said that on any gauge of present or future workforce requirements this is the exact reverse of the profile of the average school or college leaver that we want. We have a system in which exams, and good grades for that matter, are increasingly ‘accessible’ but correspondingly less meaningful. To the degree to which the purpose of exams is to assess students’ mastery of subject content, their ability to think, and ultimately their preparedness for further/higher education and the workplace, they simply aren’t serving the purpose.

An A grade needs to mean something. In 1994, when examining boards were forced to introduce A*s at GCSE to distinguish the best from the rest, it was with the clear implication that an A was not what it once was. How much more so 16 years on? This year A levels will go the same way. When universities complain of the difficulties of distinguishing between applicants and are forced to introduce their own tests to evaluate the relative achievement of top A level students, the argument is not ‘academic’ anymore: we have a real and relevant problem. A 2009 Supporting Professionalism in Admissions (SPA) survey revealed that across Britain’s universities 84 different subject-specific tests had been introduced by admissions departments to supplement the A level, with one in five universities setting their own tests. This year Imperial College introduce their own institution-wide aptitude test as a requirement for entry. At what cost, I wonder, to a sector already in financial crisis?

Of course exams are not just about determining students’ preparedness for academic study at university; they are also about assessing the competency of those preparing for entry into the workplace. To Labour’s acute embarrassment, Sir Stuart Rose, who runs Marks & Spencer, complained last year that British education is producing people who are ‘not fit for work’ and said of some school leavers that: ‘They cannot do reading. They cannot do arithmetic. They cannot do writing.’ His comments were echoed by Tesco chief executive Terry Leahy, and they were not alone in their criticism. In spite of all the banner waving, successive Institute of Directors (IoD) surveys show that the experience of leading employers has been that young people’s proficiency in a range of skills has weakened over the last decade, highlighting the emergence of a ‘credibility gap’ between the rhetoric of examinations success and perceptions in the workplace. A recent CBI report found that a quarter of all employers recruiting school leavers had to invest in remedial literacy and numeracy training. While employers need school leavers to be able to think and reason beyond basic literacy and numeracy, in 2005 basic ‘functional skills’ requirements for English and Maths were set which in fact lowered the standard below those required of the GCSEs.  

Neither have accelerated attempts to enhance employability through the addition of vocational qualifications helped matters. It is a popular fallacy that demand for vocational qualifications has come from employers. A CBI study in 2007 confirmed that businesses overwhelmingly value solid academic grounding and the ability to think over specific vocational training, which can be developed on the job. In response to a recent survey of Federation of Small Business (FSB) members, 78 per cent indicated a preference for apprenticeships over other vocational routes.

Rather, as is persuasively argued in the Reform policy paper A new level, the development of vocational qualifications has been the result of a deliberate strategy for widening participation in education that has focused on ‘accessibility’ at the expense of rigor. This began with the replacement of O levels by GCSEs and the rebranding of polytechnics as universities in the 1980s. Successive governments sought to promote new qualifications like the NVQ, the BTEC and the new Diploma, steadily blurring the boundary between academic and vocational education. The National Qualifications Framework (NQF), introduced in 1998 to formalise the comparison of different qualifications, completed the process, allowing the value of vocational qualifications to be quantified relative to ‘equivalent’ academic qualifications.

From September 2010 the NQF will be replaced by the Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF), according to which the new ‘Higher’ Diploma will be worth the equivalent of 7 GCSEs at A*–C, and the Level 2 BTEC Diploma will be worth 4. Given that these vocational qualifications are assessed entirely through coursework and are expressly designed to make it nigh on impossible to fail, there is a strong incentive for schools to prefer these over GCSEs – not least because they ‘count disproportionately towards league table success’. A full 70 per cent of Teach First graduates believe that such considerations are influencing teachers’ course recommendations to their students. The result is that take-up of non-academic courses is increasing, while the percentage of students taking traditional academic courses is in decline. This serves no one: not teaching professionals, certainly not their would-be employers; above all else, not young people themselves.

How then is Britain measuring up internationally? Not well, in short. Both in terms of the narrowness of the required curriculum and the expected level of attainment at 16 England ranks among the lowest of OECD countries, and compares equally poorly with Japan, the US and Canada too. Reform’s study Core business found that our Science and Maths exams in particular are markedly less rigorous than their international counterparts.

On all the indicators that really matter then, our current examinations system is not fit for purpose. What can be done? This year, at a conference organised by Cambridge Assessment, leading examiners debated the issue of declining standards in public for the first time. The only way to maintain standards, Chief Executive Simon Lebus offered, is ‘to let higher education, employers and subject specialists talk directly to exam boards once again’. Acting on this advice, and on policy recommendations from Reform, the re-focused Department for Education (DfE), taking over from the abolished QCDA, has begun consultations with universities and professional bodies like the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (ACME), whom ministers intend to charge with restoring and maintaining the academic rigor of the A level qualification. In a promising early indicator of the direction of things to come, Michael Gove announced in early July that consensus has been reached that an alternative A level to be released into the market next year would do without the interim step of the AS level, reversing a decade-long pursuit of modularity. Under plans for the further reform of the A level qualification, exam boards will be expected to work much more closely with university academics too, competing with other boards to raise academic attainment. AQA’s admission in 2008 that it had ‘under pressure’ from Ofqual been forced to lower grade boundaries across its GCSE science examinations to bring them into line with competing boards, should be the regulator’s last such embarrassment.

Correspondingly, in a move which led to the resignation of its first chairman, Kathleen Tattersall, the exam regulator Ofqual’s brief has been redefined to give bite to what Chris Woodhead always said under the last government could not be anything other than ‘yet another toothless quango’. Going forward Ofqual will be making past papers from examinations boards, including those now defunct, available to the public for online comparison. The regulator will also report on how British exams compare with those in other countries, so we will be able to measure the questions young people are expected to answer against those set by contemporaries in India, China, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The market will be opened up to alternative, reputedly more rigorous, academic examinations, including the pre-U and International Baccalaureate, interest in which has surged in recent years. State schools will be allowed to offer the IGCSE as a more academically challenging alternative to able key stage 4 students. The government is reportedly looking at how take-up of academic courses may be incentivised and the QCF adjusted to redress the imbalance in favour of these qualifications. The practice of inflating league table results by precipitously encouraging students along vocational pathways looks set to end with the recent announcement that academies (apparently the worst offenders) will be required to make details of which examinations students were entered for available to the public under freedom of information laws.

Welcome developments all, but for all the new government’s laudable plain-speaking commitment to tackling the problem, will these reforms be enough to restore rigor to our examinations system? I don’t think they will and certainly not overnight. Why? Because after 12 years of ‘things can only get better’, most recent opinion polls, like that undertaken by Ipsos MORI to investigate perceptions of A levels and GCSEs, indicate that the majority continue to have ‘a high level of confidence’ in the qualifications. Teachers, parents and students remain largely confident in the quality and accuracy of marking, believing that students get the grades their performance deserves. We simply don’t recognise, or aren’t prepared to accept, the reality of the problems I have been describing. The thinking and the pattern is so well established that a dip in the pass rate – surely the logical outcome of the reforms proposed, and the true test of their bite – let alone a reversal of the trend, is barely conceivable. The electorate’s unwillingness to face these issues will present a powerful driver towards compromise: for all the reforms planned, the system may yet bottle out of the necessary strictures of grade deflation.

It is not reform that is required of our A level and GCSE examinations, but ground up reconstruction, and if the rebuilding is to be successful then a complete change of mindset will be required. This is because the roots of the problem in exams and assessment theory lie in what has been a steady undervaluing of the importance of ‘competency’ relative to the priority of building young people’s confidence. So long as we all remain committed to building confidence before all else, and insist that maximising A*–C grade outcomes is necessary to achieving that end, we will not see genuine rigor return to the system. There is a balance to be struck, of course but confidence that is built on imagined, rather than real, achievement is of no help to anyone.

At present, in delicate service to young people’s ‘fragile’ sense of self-esteem, the approach taken to the marking of GCSE exams, ‘positive awarding’, overlooks all manner of confusion and factual error, believing structure, spelling, punctuation and grammar (coherence, that is) to be an irrelevance in its enthusiasm to credit achievement. If candidates let slip enough facts in what is otherwise an incoherent stream of consciousness, they nevertheless deserve to succeed. Candidates may answer question ‘a’ in their answer to ‘b’, question ‘b’ in their answer to ‘c’, and question ‘c’ in their answer to ‘a’ and still receive full marks. At A level, ‘responses’ are assessed using inclusive ‘level descriptors’ detailing the characteristics of an A, B, C (etc.) grade candidate, a fuzzy approach that consistently gives the benefit of the doubt to answers that straddle the criteria of more than one band. If university academics at the DfE do not penetrate to address the issues at this level then they will have failed. No degree of help from those inputting later in the process, consulting for the examinations boards, or even from Ofqual, will be able to change that.

We may get there in the end, but not I don’t believe without sustained and unrelenting independent pressure from universities and employers. What is needed to drive both standards and expectations up above all is for a third party organisation, entirely independent of the process, to subject the combined efforts of the DfE, exam boards, Ofqual and their academic advisors to annual scrutiny and to present their findings in a way that is accessible to all, but most especially to parents. Real change comes from the ground up; only demand from parents will ultimately provide the drive that the examinations market needs to justify (in business terms, and to their own occupational interests) raising the bar. The brief for such a review, sponsored and undertaken by universities, professional bodies and leading industry practitioners and employers, would be shaped by the same real-world requirements as those informing the work of academics working with the DfE and the exam boards, to be sure. But reviewers would be in a better position to judge, fairly and even-handedly, the relative merits and demerits of different exam offerings. Such judgments would be made according to explicit and clear criteria, taking into account the content of different syllabuses, grading methodologies and criteria, as well as the requirements of the test questions themselves. Summary reports, written to Plain English standards, covering all available offerings in a range of subjects could be made widely available online. This would stimulate demand from parents, and teachers, universities and employers for the most rigorous qualifications on offer and, in the case of the latter stakeholders, provide them with the information they need to interpret the grades listed on the CVs of course and job applicants.

There’s certainly an opening in the market; it may even be that without such a review, progress towards higher standards will falter as the political fallout becomes clear. As with schools, so with examinations, it is parent power that provides the real keys to lasting reform.

Last week saw the passage of Michael Gove’s ambitious Academies Bill , opening the way for potentially thousands of schools to opt out of local authority control and enjoy a new, more independent, management framework from September. Perhaps more importantly, the Act also clears the path for a host of new school initiatives, which the new government hopes will transform the future landscape of British schooling in the coming decades. The Conservatives’ free schools policy has received a great deal of attention over the past year and a half – more than other, potentially as impactful, education proposals (such as those related to examinations reform) at any rate. It has also polarised the main political parties, cutting as it does right to the heart of the central contemporary debate about the role and scope of the state in our national life. In this post I examine the arguments against free schools and their prospects of success, and then try to articulate what I think are the most pressing challenges going forward.

The thrust of criticism centres on the assertion that a free schools market will lead to a drain on existing school resources and a further deepening of the class divide. Critics argue first that their inevitable withdrawal to more auspicious learning environments will deprive existing local schools of critical leadership resources. Leaving aside the glaring assumptions first that educational aspiration could only ever be the preserve of middle classes parents, and second that all the new schools will be parent-led (in fact likely only half), this is plausible enough – until, that is, you stop to examine the profile of parents inclined to set up new schools. Parents who are interested in starting new schools have different priorities to those that sustain mainstream schools. They are rarely the same parents who serve as governors, or in other key leadership capacities, at the main local school.

It is precisely for their ability to think outside the box, their interest, that is, in alternative ways of doing things, that their efforts should be supported. As Heath Monk of Future Leaders (now also an Advisor to the New Schools Network) commented to me in a recent interview for Professional Development Today , there has been a standardisation of form in this country that has come to constrain innovation. The shape of mainstream school, and ultimately the educational experience of pupils, has increasingly come to be dictated by the size and scope of the required curriculum, with resource efficiency the overriding concern. For the system as a whole to develop, we need to find new ways of doing school. Many of the groups consulting with the NSN project an optimum size of between 150 and 200 pupils, making, ironically ‘a much greater degree of personalisation possible’, Monk points out. ‘Schools may now appear,’ he says, ‘that differentiate by stage rather than age’, and others too which ‘offer alternative approaches to timetabling that take fuller account of adolescent development’ for example.

Most significantly of all perhaps, starting a new school offers a particular profile of parent the attractive prospect of a truly shaping role, and real ownership, from the outset. Not all parents will want this degree of involvement, but for those that do the new schools will have one of the most critical factors in terms of attainment working in their favour. As Monk underscored in our interview, ‘Studies consistently show that the support of aspiring parents is crucial. Such schools are also likely to do a far better job of fostering both a sense of shared identity, and of belonging, than many of the much larger schools that presently dominate the secondary school landscape.’

So much then for the charge that the new schools will lead to an exodus of talent that otherwise would have been brought into the service of existing state-maintained schools. What of concerns over funding following parental choice leading to a further drain on existing local school resources? Fiona Millar is insistent that this will lead to significant impoverishment and potentially school closures, though the evidence from Sweden and the United States, which have supplied the two dominant models that have informed the Tory proposals, shows that in fact new schools on the block do not pose a significant drain on resources, and very few have in fact closed as a direct result of competition. Rather, existing schools are forced to become more efficient and to engage more seriously with the issues at a local level that gave rise to the new school development in the first place. The argument here is really about degrees of economies of scale – maximising the number of pupils relative to capital and maintenance expenditure. Worries that start-up and infrastructural costs would in the final analysis be met by money that would have gone to existing state-maintained schools proved justified to a degree when it was announced this month that the DfE would allocate £50 million from the Harnessing Technology Fund, which made resources available to schools to upgrade their ICT network infrastructure or invest in other technologies such as whiteboards. But the pot is only worth £50 million this year and around £100 million next year. The government has made clear from the outset that new schools, taking advantage of redundant office space for example, will be expected largely to make their own provisions in this regard and be responsible for raising their own finances.

As new schools get underway the most that can be said, as far as the immediate term goes, is that the existing state-maintained school will be marginally less cost-effective for the loss of a few pupils. Over the medium to long term there will be ample time for schools losing pupils to address the underlying issues, answer their local critics, and ensure that they develop in ways that will not only ensure their survival, but their future success as going educational concerns. Given that many of these new schools will be situated in growing urban communities, with overall shortfalls in terms of places, it is expected that pupil loss at any one school will be compensated for by increased overall demand.

This latter point is important. The government, and its ‘partner’, the NSN, clearly intend that impoverished urban communities ought to be the main beneficiaries of the policy. They do not, as they have been routinely accused, naively suppose that this will happen in an unregulated schools market or without stimulus. The evidence-base shows quite clearly that overall outcomes depend on the profile of the school leadership teams and school locations/catchments (more on this below). Furthermore, NSN founder Rachel Wolf, has consistently emphasised that proper accountability is key to schools’ success: probably the most comprehensive and authoritative comparative study of pupil progress at US charter schools to date, from Stanford University in California, found that (excepting the ‘bright lights’ of New York and Chicago) nationwide only 17 per cent of charter schools saw pupils making greater progress than their peers at regular public schools. In 37 per cent of cases charter school pupils did worse.

For their part, the Conservatives insist that the free schools policy should be seen in the context of a wider array of measures to address the challenges of our failing urban schools. Additional resources have been pledged to enable the outstanding Teach First, Teaching Leaders, and Future Leaders programmes to continue their efforts to affect cultural change in the profession at large. Outstanding schools opting for academy status will be required to share expertise and resources with nearby failing schools. The worst performing schools will be taken out of local authority control, while charities and businesses with proven track records in turning around failing schools are being invited to tender for the provision of education services to these schools. The Lib Dems ‘pupil premium’ has been added to provide further incentive.

Given the political and media argument to the contrary, the Network’s forthright commitment to improving educational attainment for all, ‘particularly the most deprived’, is striking. For the organisation’s founder, Rachel Wolf, the measure of its success will be the impact that the new schools have on pupil outcomes in the most challenging urban environments. ‘The wealthy can buy a good education – paying for private schools or by buying a house in the right neighborhood. Others are denied those options,’ she says. ‘We want to redress that imbalance and transform the achievements of poorer children. That for me is what it is all about.’ (See the Independent interview of November 2009.)

In service to this end, Wolf has enlisted the help of Amanda Spielman (Director of R&D at ARK), Sir Bruce Liddington (Director General of EACT, formerly of the Academies Directorate), Heath Monk (Future Leaders), James Merriman (CEO of the New York City Charter School Center and former director of the Charter Schools Institute at SUNY) and Paul Marshall (co-founder of ARK and of the charity Every Child a Chance) among others. These advisors come from across the political spectrum and are united above all in their McKinseyan commitment to ‘what works’ – i.e. to evidence-based education reform. For all the charges of cronyism and aspersions cast on whether the organization has benefited from business interests lobbying for an expanded role for the private sector in the provision of education services, even Tom Clark was forced to admit in his Guardian report in early July that it was clear that Wolf herself was not committed to any particular party line or ideology.

Sincere, bi-partisan, centrist – Blairite even. There is reason for optimism on all sides (!). But is the evidence-base really as secure as advocates of free schools have claimed it to be? A research paper appearing in the June issue of the journal Research in Public Policy by Rebecca Allen of the Institute of Education (IoE), based on a review of the literature on the Swedish experience, was presented in much of the media as sceptical of the correlation between free schools and improved test performance among the underprivileged. A fortnight later the Economist had done its homework and found that only one of the seven studies that Allen had examined in fact cast doubt on the relationship, and that for her part she had put it down in the main to the location of the new schools in affluent areas. While the Swedish free school movement may have been driven by the middle classes, this appears to be unlikely to be the case in Britain, where half of the 700 groups registering interest are likely to be led by teachers (notably from Teach First graduates) keen to work with the urban poor. (Hence the importance of Conservatives’ support for Teach First and associated enterprises.) To provide a contrasting example to that of Sweden (also the focus of the more recent report, raising the same concerns, by Susanne Wiborg) in the United States, where Teach America (the organisation that inspired Teach First) has had a significant role to play in the expansion of inner city charter schools, real inroads have been made into closing the attainment gap.

The evidence base then, appears resilient to scrutiny. Two challenges remain however, as I see it. The first is the development of articulate criteria for evaluating applications, by which those that look unlikely to succeed will be declined, together with a clear regulatory framework for monitoring effectiveness in the future. Pinning this down is going to be extremely difficult.

Little detail has yet emerged on the question of ongoing accountability. The stress has been laid very much on the independence of the new schools, which will function as academies, free to make their own decisions in respect of teaching and curriculum. But the free school start-up is a different beast surely, and one that will require its own performance evaluation criteria.

Applications, say the DfE, will be assessed on a case by case basis – scrutinised according to ‘criteria relating to educational aims and objectives, evidence of demand, potential premises, and the suitability of the provider’. The NSN’s advice and guidance notes place strong emphasis on the importance of evidence of Big Society commitment: demonstrable voluntary, business and inter-agency local community support for the new school’s vision.

Worryingly, this comes before considerations of financial and ongoing economic viability: a business plan is not required until the next stage. In an ideal world this may be as it should be: it was the government’s idea; let the government worry about the money. But we all know that is not the framework here. There will be real limitations on any resources that are likely to be made available. Given that this is the case, it would be more helpful to all to engage in the process with a more businesslike approach. This ought not to be a two stage process. Any entrepreneur will tell you that the development of a coherent business plan needs to go hand in hand with the development of overall vision and objectives. It demonstrates that the stakeholders have counted the cost, projected cash flows forward in consideration of sustainability, and that the thinking behind the whole is joined up in the ways it needs to be. This is all the more important where small schools are concerned. Given that over half of the new schools opening over the next two years are likely to be schools of no more than 50 pupils, considerations of long-term sustainability are key. Economically unworkable village schools of this size are closing across the Welsh countryside; what is to stop these new free schools going the same way? In uncertain economic times, can such schools afford heavy reliance on volunteer support to be written into the plan? What happens if lots of very small schools are approved, struggle for a year or two, and then fail? One hopes that the chaos will at least be creative. …

Both in terms of the political short-term and the ultimate long-term impact of the free schools, it’s important that the DfE pick winners. The criteria that the government impose in the applications process will determine to a large degree the shape of the schools that will emerge. Will those criteria accommodate a genuine diversity, or will the priority prove to be the complex and challenging urban environments that appear to be the primary policy goal? There is a tension written into the policy here and the government cannot afford to underwrite both – at least not to the same degree. Clear priority in terms of what little funding there is should be given to new schools that can demonstrate demand, in areas where the challenges of urban schooling are such that new impetus and ideas in the mix can have maximum impact.

These questions lead naturally to what I see is the second significant remaining area of challenge. Will the new schools truly have the scale of impact that the attention that this greatly celebrated Tory policy would suggest we should expect? Again, the Tories are stuck in a trap of their own making here in my view. On the one hand the integrity of the effort towards greater diversity in the schools market depends on its genuine openness to all potential school leaders. This needs to embrace the small school. On the other, it cannot achieve the results it hopes for without, as Wolf has put it, putting enquirers ‘in touch’ with established operators. But if these scattered initiatives are to become a movement and make a real and substantive difference to the landscape of education in this country, a much more proactive line will need to be taken to secure the required level of charitable trust and corporate business involvement. Talks are ongoing, but the lack of any really bold commercial proposition from the market has been the free school movement’s most obvious non-event. The trustee run model perfected by ARK is as far as things have come. Under present arrangements, education service providers must be engaged by academy trustees, contracting out service provision on behalf of the school. Businesses themselves cannot open new academies. Likewise, expressions of interest from Mr Gove in hearing proposals from the independent sector have fallen foul of his insistence that new schools may not charge the top-up fees they deem will be necessary to deliver to the standard to which they have become accustomed.

The single most bold proposal for an extension of the funding model proposed by Gove – which will see funding allocated per pupil head according to where parents choose to enrol their children – has been the extension of this ‘voucher system’ proposed by Chris Woodhead in Standpoint (10^thJuly). Why should parents given the choice to set up their own schools not be given the broader choice of being able to cash in their voucher and enrol their child at an independent school? If controls were relaxed on businesses starting their own schools, then we might see scores of new schools opening up and down the country to cater for parents wishing to opt out of state schooling. Some schools would choose to charge top up fees were they permitted to do so – most I suspect, consistent with the demands of this new market, would find the economies and make it work within the prescribed budget, or at little additional cost. With or without incentive, offerings would doubtless develop to suit particular niches: small schools focusing in special education needs of one kind or another; specialised models designed to tackle the particular challenges of urban contexts; etc. This is the way things eventually went in Sweden; if Gove has any sense he will open the market up to a real supply-side revolution and then we may all reap the benefit.

I shall enjoy hearing what Rachel Wolf has to say on these and other questions when we meet for our interview, the transcript of which will be published in SecEd in September.

In my first post ‘What should investment in education look like?’ I questioned whether the achievements of Labour’s academies justify the initiative’s massive budget allocation (via the ambitious Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, approaching almost £2.5 billion in the coming year, and roughly £25 million for each new build). I concluded that they do not. Attainment levels are roughly on a par with the national average; though there have been some dramatic turnarounds, there have also been some spectacular failures: the difference between success and failure, you can be sure, lies with the quality of leadership and teaching staff, not the inherent genius of the programme itself nor the structures it yields.

Which is precisely why Gove’s proposed extension of academy privileges (minus the over-ambitious building plan) to top-performing schools ought to be supported, and why, indeed, according to a recent TES survey, hundreds, possibly thousands, will take up the offer should the Conservatives find themselves in a position to make good on their pledge. Their acceptance, should it come to it, will not be driven by ideology, but by pragmatism: Gove’s proposals will free schools from further pointless OfSTED inspections, from local authority interference, from conformity with the national curriculum, and from the restrictions of the national pay scale, while freeing up the proportion of the budget previously allocated to the local authority. They offer the welcome prospect of ‘earned autonomy’ to headteachers for whom a restoration of professional independence is long overdue (see Gerard Kelly’s Editorial in the TES, 23^rd April).

The teaching unions oppose, naturally. Their opposition will not be any surprise for Gove, however, for I submit that it is precisely his intention, in the process of ensuring these freedoms, to curb their disproportionate influence in our education system. The unions opposed the academy development from the start because of the freedoms granted to these new schools on teacher pay and conditions. Under the Conservatives, headteachers would be given the freedom to reward teaching excellence, and the corollary of this, freeze the pay of those performing poorly. Scaling up would, almost certainly, eventually make the national pay scale inoperable. Gove hopes that the benefits of opting for this ‘out’ will in headteachers’ final analyses, outweigh union concerns.

Given that the unions oppose just about every other aspect of the Conservative proposals, it behoves Gove to be circumspect. Keen to avoid a potential showdown in his first week of office, the SATS issue was sidestepped some time ago with the pledge of deferring the test, the form of which would also be reviewed, until the first year of secondary, on the proviso that the results would be traceable to the primary feeder school. Such a move would free up the timetable for attention to the broader curriculum, avoid unnecessary test duplication (as most secondaries issue their own benchmarking assessments upon entry anyway), and would maintain objectivity of primary teaching assessment, while doing away with the need for external assessors. It’s a good example of Gove’s clear-sighted thinking about what the priorities need to be, and of his effectiveness in finding the most politically expedient path to follow without compromising those priorities. (See the BBC coverage of last June.) Sidestepping was the best course of action to follow with the unions on this issue; if Gove had forced a confrontation, a climbdown would have set a worrying precedent, encouraging them to further boycotts on matters beyond their remit in future. (Note that prior to the SATS debacle the NAHT have not conducted a ballot in a quarter of a century.) Gove needs to bide his time for when a showdown is unavoidable.

In the meantime Chris Woodhead has plenty of suggestions for how Gove can prepare the ground by further undermining union membership – including requiring schools to take out insurance policies against the possibility of accidents on school trips or false allegations of misconduct. Remove this worry and you take away probably the main reason that most teachers join a union. Break the ability of the unions to thwart reform and you open up the way to tackling the most determinative, and trenchant, factor influencing educational outcomes for our children and young people: the stubborn presence of 15,000?, 24,000? incompetent teachers, only 57 of which have been legally ruled to be such, with enforceable consequences. (See table ‘Competency Hearing Outcomes, General Teaching Council for England, TESmagazine, 08.01.10.)

Investment in successful private-charitable partnership initiatives like Teach First, financially incentivising top graduates in core curriculum subjects from approved universities, and barring the 5% of applicants with third class degrees from entering the profession are all good policies, but without giving headteachers the leverage to dismiss poorly perfoming teachers from their posts, any government intent on implementing quality-first policy in respect of teaching standards will only be doing half the job.

One of the great absurdities of the situation in the classroom, mentioned in passing in my first post, is that in the pursuit of greater accountability, in an effort to raise teaching standards and ensure more effective assessment, teachers have come to need more and more out of class time for lesson planning and monitoring pupil assessment. Together with (in fact, in large degree driven by) worries about whether learning has been ‘personalised’ to an adequate enough degree, the proliferating requirements of the audit trail have led to a bureaucratisation of learning, and in turn an ever-greater dependency on learning assistants to cover classes while teachers prepare and administrate. Indeed, as the burden became increasingly unmanageable, provision for such had to be guaranteed in the 2003 national workforce agreement and subsequent ‘rarely cover’ arrangements to ensure that teachers covered for colleagues’ absences only rarely.

The ASCL, NUT and NAHT all supported these measures as necessary coping mechanisms, while expressing deepening resentment at the wider problem of what is regarded as the ongoing ‘initiative overload’ from the DCSF. In the estimate of Ken Bullock, headteacher of top-performing Fordham Primary School, Ely, 30,000 new edicts and regulations (many of which began life as ‘guidelines’) have been added since Chris Woodhead was in charge of the inspectorate. Compliance has become, in Woodhead’s words, ‘a useless, cover-my-backside exercise’ – the result, he explains, of a deliberate move out of the classroom by his successor Mike Tomlinson in favour of discussion of data supplied by schools in support of their own performance assessments. In an ironic twist, even over-worked Ofsted have lately joined the chorus of disapproval, welcoming the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee on School Accountability report published in January, which warned of the danger of its becoming ‘unwieldy’ and ‘unco-ordinated’ if the present frenzy of DCSF initiatives continued.

Intriguingly though, the inspectors do not appear to be connecting up the dots: the point is that you cannot have independent learning without investing a great deal of time and effort into lesson planning and ongoing formative assessment. For the sake of the inspectors, schemes of work now need to be cross-referenced to a range of guidance documents to show that different ‘learning styles’ and ‘social and emotional aspects of learning’ have been considered and catered for, and opportunities given to pupils for the development of ‘personal, learning and thinking skills’ and ‘functional skills’. To keep up with the marking, schools have had to devise their own shorthands, using stamps and stickers and pre-formed bullet points to get to nub of what pupils need to do and cut down on marginal conversation. (See Richard Bird’s piece on what personalisation means for teaching practice at teachingexpertise.com.) The result of personalisation is that the relationship between teacher and pupil becomes less personal.

That, of course, is the reverse of what is intended. Personalised learning intends to recognise and accommodate for the particular needs of each child and to tailor both curriculum and teaching methods accordingly. As a result diagnostic testing and ongoing, formative assessment is accented because of its importance for helping children identify their unique potential and nurturing it to fruition. The aim is to give pupils a greater degree of ‘ownership’ over their own learning – at its baldest, transferring responsibility for education from teachers (representing the state) to pupils and parents (its citizens). But, paradoxically, the transfer of power cannot be affected without a concurrent increase in bureaucracy in an effort to produce an audit trail that will satisfy those citizens (safeguarded by Ofsted) that their rights have been fully respected, providing the assurance that they have been properly equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to gain the qualifications that are their entitlement (See Michele Ledda’s insightful critique of personalisation and how its pursuit has devalued our young people’s education and Chris Woodhead’s also in ‘The Thought World’, Chapter 6 of A Desolation of Learning).

Personalisation leads inexorably to bureauctratisation precisely because of its limitless horizons. When, according to its nebulous expectations, can a teacher be said to have ‘perfomed’? The result, the Select Committee on School Accountability found, has been that methods of assessing teacher performance have proliferated over the decade to the point that they have become ‘overly complex’. There is a pressing need for greater flexibility for schools to be able to adopt their own, more manageable, methods of ongoing self-evaluation, including allowance for ‘alternative forms of evidence’ to those currently required for Ofsted inspection.

The report needs to followed now by a determined effort by educationists to deconstruct and expose the fallacies of the personalisation agenda and a focused commitment by the next government to unburden teachers of the administrative load that has accompanied its implementation. Some, such as Dale Bassett, Chris Woodhead, and Robin Alexander, feel that if the job is to be done properly, this may entail the systematic dismantling of the machinery also: including the TDA, by which the hegemony of ‘pedagogic knowledge’, to the neglect of subject knowledge, is maintained; the National College of School Leadership (NCSL), by which would-be headteachers are indoctrinated into the personalised learning agenda; the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT), which makes makes the paths level and the highways straight, by which that agenda is implemented in the specialist schools of the future.  Michael Gove, who was cautious and ambivalent  as late as February, and David Cameron himself, as the interests of economy and the need to re-focus have become increasingly clear, have been increasingly vocal in their support for the abolition of this quangocracy.

As Ledda argues in his critique, in their reconception of teachers as ‘facilitators’, partners in learning, together with parents and pupils, whose task it is to assist children in the discovery of new worlds of co-created significance, and thus to fulfil their unique potential, these architects of personalisation have fundamentally departed from the traditional concept of the teacher as educator. If such is to be recovered, then the next education secretary will need to be a man of no less than Luddite enthusiasm.

Above all, we are in desperate need of a new, common sense, relational narrative for teaching and assessment – and policy that respects teachers’ professionalism and judgement and allows headteachers to be the masters of their own schools. Headteachers, in consultation with teachers and support staff, need to be able to determine sensible parameters for monitoring pupil progress and how teachers should respond to their evolving needs. They need to be given the freedom to shape learning frameworks that nurture relationship and trust between teachers and their pupils, and for evaluating their perfomance according to their own priorities.