Schools bill risks harming decades of progress in England

Good morning. Today we will see an important vote in the House of Commons, over Labour’s plans to change how education in England operates. I’m not going to pretend that this vote in the second reading of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill will get the most attention.

I anticipate that I will once again be writing about the Conservative party’s calls for a further nationwide inquiry into child sexual abuse tomorrow, Kemi Badenoch having belatedly decided that the inquiry her government oversaw in 2022 was inadequate. The Tory party has set out its proposed terms of reference for such a probe in an email to supporters and will bring a vote later today.

However, given that the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill is more important because it will actually happen, I am keen to write about that today. As it stands, it represents a significant breach from the approach that has improved schools in England.

I will tackle the ongoing row between government and opposition tomorrow.

A Pisa the puzzle

What has underpinned the improvement in schools in England over the past 35 years? The first plank was the introduction of the national curriculum and the creation of GCSEs under Ken Baker, setting out a national framework and expectations for what should be taught in schools. Second, the modernisation of schools inspection. The third was giving greater powers to school leaders — but also greater responsibility if their schools did badly in Ofsted.

The fourth, and often the most neglected in political debates, was improving the standard of teachers. New Labour was able to recruit higher quality teachers and retain them by increasing their pay and introducing Teach First on the Teach for America model. It also benefited from the happy accident of a weak Australian dollar compared with the pound, which made England an attractive destination for recruits.

New Labour created academy schools, which have more freedom from local authority control, from the national curriculum and from national pay structures. Since then the main way we turn around failing schools has been by converting them into academies.

This approach isn’t perfect. About 2 per cent of schools in England are so-called “stuck schools”, which have had a bad Ofsted report and essentially gone through successive academy chains without improvement. The weakening of local authorities has meant there is no part of the system that can effectively plan for the required number of school places.

This is going to become a big problem because the number of children in the UK is shrinking, so some schools are going to close, and it is not wholly clear who is going to manage that process. In some parts of the country, local authorities — responsible for ensuring there are enough school places — are already closing schools not because they perform poorly or are under-subscribed, but because the lever they can reach for is to close their own schools.

Since 2010, more and more children with special educational needs have been taught outside of mainstream schools. SEN funding is a complete disaster: we spend more money than we used to, we get worse outcomes, and costs continue to rise. The Institute for Fiscal Studies warned today that the government was likely to “come under huge pressure” to increase spending to meet SEN demands, with reforms requiring costs “probably in the billions rather than hundreds of millions”.

The long public sector pay freeze has had implications for teacher quality. Lack of flexibility, too, has played a role: as the New Britain Project’s terrific “Missing Mothers” report sets out, women in their thirties, particularly mothers, are leaving teaching at ever rising rates.

Elsewhere, as Sam Freedman, who played a key role in the improvement of schools in England in the 2010s, wrote two years ago in an excellent report for the Institute for Government, the accountability regime for schools doesn’t really extend properly to academy chains.

So yes, I concede that there are aspects of how schools are run in England that could be improved and tweaked. But the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) scores don’t lie: state schools in England are now among the best in the world and therefore any changes need to be made with great care and attention and should build on current measures, rather than tear them up.

My concern is that the new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools bill does very little about any of the above problems and does much to undermine them. The government has already abolished the academy conversion grant (money provided to switch schools to academy status) and the trust capacity fund (which supports academy trusts to help them expand and take over underperforming academies). The bill will go further, ending the automatic presumption that underperforming schools will become academies, and leaving it to the gift of the secretary of state.

The bill also limits the ability of academy schools to set teacher salaries. This is where that fourth, neglected part of school improvement — teacher quality — comes into play. Giving academy trusts the ability to vary their salaries has allowed them to retain teachers. It has also allowed them to conduct experiments, such as giving new teachers the option of reducing the size of their future pension for a greater salary in the present (on the grounds many teachers will leave the profession long before they gain the benefit of a larger pension contribution).

Essentially, since the creation of what were then called “city academies” in the 2000 Learning and Skills Act, successive governments’ answer to “how do you turn around a failing school?” has been “turn it into an academy”.

Looking at schools policy under our newish Labour government, is that they don’t seem to have an answer to “how do you turn around a failing school?” other than perhaps “turn it into an academy, slowly, depending on the mood of whoever is secretary of state at the time, and without any money”. A major cross-party achievement of recent decades may be in some danger. Vote here to let me know what you think.

Now try this

I saw We Live In Time. It’s one of those very well constructed, emotionally manipulative movies in which two people fall in love and one of them dies. Like Puccini’s operas, I admired what it was doing, felt that I was being manipulated, and still cried anyway.

If it has a big flaw, I would say it is very much the kind of film about marriage that will most appeal to people who are just falling in love — it’s very much in the “conception will be easy! One of you will get cancer but you’ll still be hot, you’ll just have a cute buzz cut!” mode. It’s very well-executed, though. Danny Leigh’s review is here.

Top stories today

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• Hold the baby | Mothers in London are more likely to have children later on in life than elsewhere in England and Wales, as more people delay parenthood to establish careers while navigating high housing costs, say analysts. Birth rates have been falling faster in London than in the rest of the country since the 2000s. This has contributed to the capital ageing between 2011 and 2023, in contrast with the trend in other cities, according to an analysis published by the Resolution Foundation.