Politics matters

Andrew Collinge

• Increase image
• View all images

Grandstanding won't lift schools, says LGIU's Andrew Collinge.

The National Challenge for schools recently emerged with some fanfare from the Department for Children, Schools & Families ('Academies must do better', LGC, 11 June). It oozes aspiration and trumpets the progress since 1997 when over 1,600 schools were apparently selling their pupils short.

Renewed ambition is focused on a floor target of 30% of pupils in every school, without exception, gaining five A* to C-grade GCSEs by 2011.

Bold indeed, but with the naming of underperformers, you cannot help but wonder how much of this policy initiative is simply 'tough on failure' national political grandstanding. Recent publicity over the widening child poverty gap is only just abating, so why another public commitment to hit an alarmingly time-bound target for a service so close to the electorate's heart? A week may be a long time in politics; three years in education is probably shorter.

There are 638 schools in the 'must try harder' camp. Hardly surprising is that deprivation casts a long and stubborn shadow. A cause of derision for some, but perhaps missing the point, the bottom set includes some of the very academies set up to raise standards.

This is only half of a contradictory story. Education secretary Ed Balls emphasises that many are strongly led and improving. Over half have an Ofsted rating of 'good' or 'outstanding' and a third score above average on contextual value added — the measure of how much a school punches above its weight.

Of course, a straightforward measure of success is useful to provide focus for those charged with delivery. League tables are readily understood, but they are prone to misinterpretation in complex areas such as education. The difference between 29% in one set of circumstances and 31% elsewhere under different leadership is marginal to the point of being meaningless. As with the most damning of Ofsted inspections, the table's danger is that it demoralises staff, governors, pupils and the community on the wrong side of a thin line. Not publishing a league table would avoid the inevitable 'schools hit list' reporting in the local media, which often pitches national against local.

The National Union of Teachers points to counterproductive workforce disruption. How can teaching in a National Challenge school be career enhancing when a year later the institution could be in a rather euphemistically sounding state of 'transformational structural change', on the way to academy status or closure? Is this the way to attract and keep talent? Consider also how an ageing cohort of heads — the National College for School Leadership reported that over half could retire by 2012 — could compromise the goal.

We need to flip the psychology, and quickly. A meaningful move towards reward, not potential punishment, for local commitment is required. Teaching talent has to follow need, and not just be the preserve of academies or spread thinly across federated schools. At the top, we must strike the right balance between performance regimes which only seem to make sense at the national level but which fail to understand the complexities of local circumstance, and genuine assistance.

This government struggles with gaps, be it in wealth or across outcomes in the Every Child Matters framework. So in one way it is right that the National Challenge document feels emphatically local. Through tools as diverse as housing policy, youth services and back to commissioning and strategies to improve the balance of intakes in areas of acute disadvantage, 'underperformance' is a problem best tackled by councils and partners. The document is presented as a toolkit. But in these early stages the enabling element seems to have been drowned out by criticism of academies (not always justified), league tables and central imposition.

Haven't we been here before?

Andrew Collinge,

Director of policy and public affairs, Local Government Information Unit.