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It is almost 30 years since I first became a school governor. Since then I have been involved with schools that have been failing and outstanding, spent two decades as a chair, and now reluctantly decided that this year will probably be my last.
I first stood for election because my career was demanding, and I feared I wouldn’t get to know much about my children’s new primary school. It turned out that being a governor wasn’t much help.
Meetings ran long into the night, but we emerged none the wiser about the school’s effectiveness. All that was (rightly) about to change with the arrival of Ofsted and league tables and for most of the intervening period, while some individual policies were questionable, it was usually possible to say that things were improving. Even the Tory education secretaries of the 1990s were genuinely decent people. One of the better ones, Gillian Shephard, was actually married to a progressive local comprehensive school head.
Now schools have to look for leadership to a secretary of state who poses for pictures with a whip on his desk and a prime minister who doesn’t know, or won’t say, how many children he has, and takes responsibility for nothing. Hence the ease with which he personally sacked his top education official last week, in response to the Covid exam debacle, on the pretence that he wants “fresh leadership” in education.
But leadership to do what? For the first time in 30 years, I really have no idea where we are heading. In the past six months Boris Johnson has made five significant U-turns on schools policy, spent most of the pandemic using education as a political football to position himself in relation to Labour, and can’t even make his mind up about whether wearing a mask is right or wrong.
New research suggests that after 10 years of a Conservative government the attainment gap between the best and worst of children may NEVER close. Meanwhile, the two ugly sisters of the education world, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, lurk in the background with their bogus self-styled radicalism, dreaming up vacuous slogans like “levelling up” while presumably hoping people will forget how their previous reign at the Department for Education ended.
They keep a lower profile now, but does anyone really doubt their role in the exam debacle? Gav the Whip may be a sneaky operator who keeps a black book of secrets on his colleagues. But Gove and Cummings sit at the heart of a government command structure that awarded their closest allies a PR contract to work with Ofqual in June. Is it really conceivable that they weren’t involved in the decision to prioritise a phoney war on grade inflation (in exams that didn’t take place), over fairness to young people? Gove has form on this, having presided over a lesser version of this year’s shambles in 2012.
One of the more positive features of the last few weeks is that education has been propelled back into the headlines, obliging politicians and commentators to look under the bonnet at how some of the most contentious aspects of our school system really work.
And everyone also now has ideas about what might change. Excellent. Personally, I hope that my pet favourite – abolition of GCSEs in favour of a real baccalaureate qualification at 18 – gets some airtime. These sorts of diplomas, such as the International Baccalaureate, can embrace a wider range of assessment, personal development, creative and sporting success as well as vocational and technical achievement. Just imagine how transformative that could be.
But ideas are one thing. The real question is who is going to lead us out of this mess? At pivotal moments in the past it has been a political leader of substance, not a mandarin in Whitehall, who has driven through change. Think Rab Butler in 1944, Ken Baker in 1987, David Blunkett 10 years later. Now we barely have a plan B for a winter resurgence of Covid-19 that could leave not just the exam system, but the entire accountability apparatus that surrounds it, in tatters.
I would like to say that the answer lies with Labour, but I suspect I am not the only person who looks in vain for signs of life beyond kneejerk opposition that neither lands a clear blow on Johnson personally, nor conveys any sense of what could change.
Let’s be clear. We are being led, if you can call it that, by a bunch of charlatans who view politics as a game, a clash of narratives and cultures designed not to make society better but to draw future electoral dividing lines.
The real heroes of this period are the heads, teachers, support staff (and governors) who have to put up with this nonsense and still get up every morning, put one foot in front of the other and ensure education continues as best it can in the interests of all our young people.
I always imagined that, largely due to the commitment of the professionals I have worked with, I would stand down as a governor leaving schools in a better place than when I started. In spite of all their hard work, and because of a failure of politics, I am now not so sure.
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