Ken Jones catalogues the counter-revolution in education and asks how far a Labour government will challenge it.

For more than 40 years, schooling in England has experienced a long counter-revolution. Since 2010, that process has speeded up.

Its central features are well known – a punitive inspection system, a curriculum shaped by preparation for tests and exams. Less often noticed is a thread of policy which supplies the counter-revolution with much of its coherence. In a host of ways, the constitution of schooling – the laws, regulations and government practices on which it is grounded – has been redesigned so as minimise the space available for ideas and actions which might question or challenge a new orthodoxy. This is a system which has insulated itself against the wrong kind of change.

As in many other countries, the counter-revolution rests on the suppression of forces and institutions which were central to an earlier period of progressive reform. Elected local authorities are a shadow of their former selves. Unions lack negotiating rights and if the government has its way are about to be deprived of their effective right to strike. Teachers, whose energies were once recognised as an essential resource for educational change, are assigned the role of deliverers of a curriculum designed by the multi-academy trusts for which they work and shaped at crucial points by the political preferences of government.

At stake here are issues of democracy, understood in a broad sense. For school-workers as trade unionists, they centre on freedom to organise. For school workers as educationalists, they involve the right to voice individual and collective opinion, to be recognised as legitimate social actors, possessing knowledge and expertise.

For students and parents, questions of voice and representation are in play. In each case, democratic practice is confronted by tendencies towards increased central control, by managements which seek to extend the frontiers of their control of teachers’ practice – or by a combination of both.  The effect is to create a dense infrastructure of practice, shot through with restrictions, sometimes in the form of legislation, sometimes of guidance and sometimes of preferred forms of provision.

An example of the latter is the Oak National Academy, set up with £43 million of funding as an ‘arm’s length’ agency of government to provide schools with curriculum materials and programmes. Oak is presented as an answer to the problem of teacher workload and an alternative to what the Department for Education claims to be teachers’ habit of planning the curriculum ‘from scratch’. Strongly pushed by Ofsted, and adopted by the managements of some school trusts, Oak is a means of transferring curriculum initiative from school to government, from local context to central authority.  Ministers will appoint its chair and its non-executive directors. Its budget, business plan, objectives and Key Performance Indicators must be agreed by Ministers.

Oak is another piece in a jigsaw of control. It belongs alongside numerous other initiatives.  The Phonics programme imposes on primary schools ministers’ preferred – and not particularly effective – methods of teaching reading. ‘Reforms’ to teacher education have diminished the role of universities, and thus of educational research, in favour of new creations like the National Institute of Teaching and the Ambition Institute for the professional development of teachers. Ofsted has set itself up as an authority on educational research, producing a series of reviews of curriculum research which either ignore or disparage educational traditions which run counter to current models.

The jigsaw of control has other, more overtly authoritarian elements. Every school has a statutory commitment to implement the Prevent strategy, described by Amnesty International as an activity akin to that of a thought police. Local Authorities, in one of the few growth areas, employ Prevent officers, in regular touch with schools. The government funds a large collection of curriculum materials, devoted to the fight against radicalisation and extremism.

Prevent’s deterrent effect on student and parent voice is by now a well-established fact. The threat to refer parents and students to Prevent has been deployed by some school managements to control responses to what is happening in Gaza.

Alongside Prevent sits government guidance on ‘political impartiality in schools’, a document which names Black Lives Matter as a movement that ‘goes beyond the basic shared principle that racism is unacceptable’.  Classroom discussion of ‘potential solutions for climate change’ is likewise a problematic area.

One test of a Labour government’s democratic credentials will be whether it possesses the understanding and determination to undo the system elaborated since 2010. This would mean taking a hard look at Labour’s own past. The habit of regarding teachers as a policy problem and the years of progressive reform as an educational disaster were solidly established in the Blair years, even if it took a Michael Gove to turbo-charge them.

Unless the achievements of the counter-revolution are challenged and reversed, the promise which the labour movement has always seen in education – one of individual fulfilment and social emancipation – will continue  to be denied.

Ken Jones is Head of Policy, Education, Equality and Social Justice, National Education Union, writing in a personal capacity.

Image: Creator: Photographer: Bruce Matsunaga. Copyright: Bruce Matsunaga. CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported