A Lesson from History
|
Demo at Hove Town Hall |
click the photo to see
a map of the catchment areas |
Back in the 1980s the Tory government of the day introduced
three major changes to state education: a National Curriculum, Local
Management of Schools (LMS) and 'parental choice' in school admissions
along with Ofsted and school league tables.
The National Curriculum was intended to set down a national
framework for what is taught in the nation's schools, a matter previously
and largely left to the initiative of local education authorities (LEAs)
and the teaching profession. It needs to be remembered that while the
Tories were winning general elections and sustaining their tenure of
office at Westminister, they were year on year losing local elections
to Labour. Local democracy was increasingly seen as the enemy within,
most notably in the case of the Greater London Council,
Red Ken Livington's power base. (Eventually it was abolished, leaving
London, Europe's largest capital city without a city government.)
As a work of reference for teachers, the national curriculum
was a reasonable achievement, but as a blunt instrument for dragooning
teachers in the classroom, and for 'tick boxing' pupils, it was stupidity
incarnate. I well remember various attempts of educationists
to devise workable methods to record little Johnny's progress through
the jungle of 'attainment targets' and 'statements of attainment' through
the years and across the disciplines that were deigned important enough
to be included in the national curriculum. It was a Gradgrindian system
of nightmarish proportions, and in 1993 the then Secretary of State,
John Patten, appeared at the dispatch box in the Commons to declare: "I
have asked Sir Ron Dearing to review the national curriculum and assessment
framework with the aim of simplifying it while retaining the key features
of clear teaching objectives, regular tests and high standards." And
so began, and continues, the permanent revolution of central government
direction of the classroom, and the mountains of educational bureaucracy
which that entails at great financial cost to the taxpayer, and to the
real cost of actual teaching in the classroom and to pupil-teacher relationships.
Local Management of Schools (LMS)
The ideological bedrock of Thatcherism was a belief in
the primacy of the market in all human relationships that have an economic
dimension. The guiding hand of the market was also the guiding hand of
policy direction during the 18 years of Conservative rule. LMS was championed
as a blow to the dead hand of town hall bureaucracy, handing financial
responsibility for school budgets to head teachers and school governors.
The result was a transfer of school management bureaucracy from town hall
education departments (LEAs) to a myriad of schools, and the pitting of
one school against another in the scramble for resources.
The result was that head teachers spent less and less
of their time on curriculum leadership and more and more on running a pseudo
business in a pseudo marketplace. It comes as no surprise to discover that
the New Labour government, which has continued the Tory policy with endless
tinkering year on year, has recenly commissioned consultants, PricewaterhouseCoopers
(sic), to advise it that schools should be run by business leaders
and head teachers left with the minor role of managing education in the
school (see BBC report - click
here). Soon, I expect, our schools will be run
by PricewaterhouseCoopers (sic) education subsidiary.
