Schools and the state by James Leggett

Last week, I was lucky enough to attend an audience with Sir Michael Barber, hosted by the CMRE. The premise was that ‘Schools Cannot Do Without Politicians’. Coming from a former politician, this argument could of course be compromised. However, I shall use this series of blogs to discuss some of the reasons behind Sir Michael’s thesis.

The first is that, in an environment of austerity, the public need convincing as to why investment needs increasing in the education system. Why invest in schools? Until the early 90s, it was assumed that just pumping money into the system was enough. Government funded local authorities who funded schools, and no one was accountable. In order to improve a coasting education system and to encourage the public to ‘buy into’ the education system, standards needed to improve. In order to achieve this, a micro-managing ‘command and control’ culture implemented by central government to improve the level of reading and writing in primary schools.

This led to the question – is the state the best way to drive the increase in standards? Should it not be professionals in the industry driving this? The difficulty is here is that ever-increasing regulation by OFSTED and its box-ticking exercises encourages conformity and discourages creativity.
Independent schools, however, have still have an element of this freedom. What if teachers became responsible for their own destiny? Could a ‘John Lewis’ model for schools really work? The problem with this in my experience is that teachers find it difficult to accept the concept of education as a commodity. However, in an independent school (and increasingly maintained schools, but we’ll come on to that later) it is. How that model is managed and controlled, including how staff performance is ‘managed’, is a matter for debate, but is any one brave enough to give teachers a vested interest and see what happens?

Another area touched on was whether a school has to ‘own’ its teaching staff, or whether there was a model where subject teaching was outsourced. I’m not necessarily saying I agree with all of these ideas, but somewhere along the way the concept of try altruism has disappeared and commercialism has taken a hold.