Douglas Carswell & Edward Leigh debate state school independence with the government
In a 90-minute Debate led by Douglas Carswell, based on Edward Leigh’s pamphlet “Set the Schools Free” [published May 8 on the Cornerstone website www.cornerstonegroup.org.uk], Douglas Carswell and Edward Leigh gave the proposals set forth in the pamphlet a parliamentary airing. From the outset, Mr Carswell stressed that he had not called the debate in order “to score party political points”, but “to find some consensus.” He began by acknowledging that “not all schools with independence are good”. He said he wanted to make a broader point about the centralist system that had been in place for the last twenty or thirty years.
Opening with a list of statistics familiar to anyone who has looked into the current system’s failings, he reminded his audience that: a quarter of 11-year-olds cannot read or write well enough to tackle the secondary school curriculum; that one in five school-leavers are functionally illiterate and innumerate; that many school-leavers are unable to string a proper sentence together on paper when they get to university, and that in the ten years from 1992 to 2002 the proportion failed at A-level had fallen from 20% to 5% and the proportion passed at ‘A’ grade had risen from 13% to 21%. The main reason for this failure? According to Carswell, it was “the quango state.” This “absorbs an enormous amount of the money that ought to be going to schools”.
But a revival of grant-maintained schools was not the answer. The gains in independence from LEAs made by these were offset, Carswell argued, by greater centralisation. This experience showed “how not to set schools free.” Instead, a “bold new approach” was needed. Control over schools should be directly devolved to people. Many of his constituents were frustrated by the fact that catchment areas they lived in did not offer them the choice of a decent school.
In giving schools the capability to manage their own admissions, there should, he conceded in response to a Labour intervention, be safeguards in rare instances “to ensure no child is left behind” – as could happen in a remote rural village, but “in most cases” giving schools freedom to set their own admissions criteria would not result in unfairness.
Mr Carswell then proposed the abolition of the national curriculum. Its “nationalisation”, he said, “has not imposed greater rigour, but the opposite of what its architects intended.” He was also happy to see certain aspects of LEAs “wither away.” IT problems above all dissuaded him from proposing a voucher scheme; neither did he want a “new funding quango allowing either right or left to attach further conditions.” In response to a Labour intervention asking about his attitude to grammar schools, he said that, given there were only 167 of them in the country he was “much more interested in improving education for all children” - “the interests of the many, not the few.” Any policy, he asserted, should be assessed in the light of its impact on the “most vulnerable.” The government policy of inclusion of special needs children in normal state schools, and the closure of special needs schools was “immoral”, and “an example of surrendering independence to experts”. Special needs children should have a “specific financial entitlement.”
Those opposed to the idea of parent power and of setting schools free were “stuck in the 1950s mindset”, whereas “We are the real progressives now.” Following him, Edward Leigh claimed no credit for the ideas in his pamphlet, which he said were not new; what was new was a “determination to question all existing orthodoxies and to be prepared to look at what’s going on in other parts of the world.” In this vein, he instanced Sweden, with its well-established “universal voucher scheme”, which had led to “an explosion of new privately run schools”, and Holland with its “long tradition” of independent schools being funded by the state.
“A lot of modern teaching”, he claimed, had “corrupted the profession.”
Nick Gibb, the Shadow Minister for Schools said he was “totally against” abolishing the national curriculum, arguing that a future Conservative government could reform it; too many documents emanate from the DfES that are not in line with the government; “ministers can determine the content of documents which emanate from the DfES”, he said. Mr Leigh said he agreed in principle but that one must be “realistic about the views of those in charge.” Mockingly, he quoted one professor of education: “The great challenge for education in the 21st century is the discovery of a holistic, problematised pedagogy” - and the Commissioner for London Schools: “In the light of research into the brain and theories of learning, teachers’ questioning techniques will have moved (by 2050 [sic]) beyond traditional methods.”
The problem with grant-maintained schools was that only a few had taken up the option; what should have been done was to make all schools grant-maintained. This would have been “a revolution in choice and freedom”.
He then urged Labour to “have faith in head teachers”. In response to questions about selection, he said there was “a lot of disguised selection at the moment”, through “many forms of cheating by comprehensives” (e.g. on SATs). He asked the minister, Jim Knight, if he was worried by the NAO report showing that 1m children were in “failing or coasting schools”. The minister replied that that statistic could be misleading; only 100,000 were in failing schools; the rest were in “coasting” schools.
Mr Leigh’s last point was the “most controversial”: “Some of us are trying to convince the front bench that there should be a right for parents to opt out of the state system into the private system.” They should be allowed to say: “I have a right to this £6,000 [six thousand]; I can take it where I want.”
The minister then asked about the “deadweight cost” of the scheme – the cost of funding all those currently at private schools. Mr Leigh then introduced his incremental approach whereby the credits would be provided in the first year only for pupils in year R; then those in year R and year 1, and so on over the fourteen years of schooling. There was thus “effectively no deadweight cost.” He hoped Nick Gibb would agree it was an idea that could be “quite popular.”
In summing up, the minister said he recognised the need for “greater autonomy”, but thought the proposals made by Messrs Carswell and Leigh “extreme”. The percentage of “direct-funded schools” had increased by 76 per cent, and excellent progress had been made by city academies. He concluded by saying both sides agreed they wanted to get away from “one size fits all” approach.
