education

Dear Gavin Williamson, I hope you’re not thinking of using education as a way of recreating a Victorian society | Michael Rosen

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Dear Gavin Williamson,

I am delighted that a new secretary of state for education was not just educated within the state system but attended a comprehensive school. I hope this will give you insight and empathy in your dealings with students, teachers, teaching assistants, school-workers and parents involved in this sector. You will have heard by now of problems concerning cuts, in particular in the area of special needs provision, and when you compare the situation now with what was available in your time at school, it must horrify you.

As you are a great example of the success of the comprehensive system, I hope you will champion it and do what you can to reverse the expansion of overt selection through grammar schools and covert selection through exclusions, off-rolling and non-admission of pupils with special needs. You will be able to step forward and offer yourself as a fine example of how comprehensives can and do succeed.

I confess I was concerned that you’ve taken on a job in an area that up until now hasn’t interested you. Looking through your Wikipedia entry, you seem to have focused so far on fireplaces, chinaware, Northern Ireland, car boot sales and aircraft carriers. These are all fascinating areas but for the moment I don’t see a direct link to education. Do you think it would be a good idea if the person in charge of education had expertise in such matters as how young people learn, or what it actually means to assess what a student knows, or which education systems in the world deliver the fairest outcomes for all?

In your political career, you’ve worked as the chair of Conservative students, and deputy chair of Conservative party districts; you’ve been a parliamentary private secretary in the field of transport or working directly to the prime minister, you’ve served as chief whip and, famously, as defence secretary. This is all good ladder-climbing stuff in the adult world and, it has to be said, it’s an effort you’ve made at some distance from schools themselves.

On one occasion you were able to win a £30,000 donation to the Conservative party after an evening out with Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of one of Putin’s ex-ministers – well done for that – and you were chosen to help your party come to an agreement to govern with the DUP. Perhaps the wiliness you needed at these moments will help you in your work with the Department for Education.

In your maiden speech to parliament, you said: “We will have a truly vibrant economy only when we recreate the Victorian spirit of ingenuity and inventiveness that made Britain such a vibrant country.” Perhaps you and I went to different history lessons but I learned that it may well have been vibrant for those with the resources to be vibrant but for millions in Britain it was a life of crippling hard work, poverty, foul living conditions, high infant mortality, low life expectancy, very limited education for most, and a lack of democratic representation. For those under the yoke of the British empire, there was racism, exploitation, lack of freedom, and summary justice. I hope you’re not thinking of using education as a way of recreating this kind of society.

However, as you look at the expanding landscape of academies, with their glaring lack of accountability, you could do worse than to compare their governance with how the Victorians ran public education. Their system was balanced between national and local representation – one thing they did that worked rather well.

I look forward to more of your speeches.

Yours, Michael Rosen

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