Michael Gove is vindicated: the quiet state school revolution is bearing fruit
Take a moment to salute a heroine. Five years ago, a teacher called Katharine Birbalsingh overcame the local bureaucracy to start a free school named Michaela in a Wembley office block.
Birbalsingh wanted kids from ordinary homes to have the sort of education that private schools offered. Not in terms of resources, but in terms of discipline, ethos and ambition. She had no time for the idea that children might underperform because they were poor or black or had tough home lives. She expected the highest standards and, by heaven, she got them.
Last week, her first cohort got its GCSE results, and they were among the best in Britain. It turns out that a measure of strictness – her pupils are
not allowed to run in corridors or turn around in lessons, for example – makes for better grades. Who knew, eh?
Michaela is an apt symbol of the quiet revolution in British state education since 2010. Michael Gove was the first education secretary to understand that he could not thrust his hand into every classroom. Instead, he made schools answerable to local parents and left it to those parents to invigilate their performance.
We see the consequences in the latest GCSE figures: more kids are sitting more demanding exams in more serious subjects and doing better. Boys and girls are focusing on academic disciplines, especially maths and science, and rising to the challenge of a tougher marking system.
For decades, it was only the grades that kept rising; now, it is the standards. State schools are finally closing the gap with private schools.
The standard cliché is to say that schools have had enough upheaval and need a period of stability. The National Union of Teachers has, as far as I can make out, opposed every reform proposed by successive Labour and Conservative governments.
It is, after all, in the nature of bureaucracies to resent challenges to the status quo. The job of an elected minister is therefore to encourage officials to work for the general population, rather than for themselves.
A successful minister will necessarily be unpopular with producer groups. Gove was resented by those who feared that his new schools would show up the failure of existing producers – as, indeed, they have.
What opponents dislike about schools like Michaela, or the Harris academies, is not that they are failing but that they are succeeding. Neighbouring schools can no longer use deprivation as a catch-all excuse.
What might the next reforms involve? We will all have our ideas of what schools ought to be teaching. I’d like them to include behavioural economics, evolutionary psychology and a bit of public speaking.
How would I free up space for those things? Perhaps we might recognise that, in an age when English is global and interpretation software is improving exponentially, the study of foreign languages should largely be a minority pursuit for those interested in their literature. Or perhaps we might simply extend the school day.
The point is, mine is only one opinion. Other people will have better ideas. The trick is to let the best suggestions emerge through competition. Allow parents and children to choose their subjects and they will generally make better choices than any politician or educationist. (There has been, for example, a big rise in technical qualifications.)
Let different kinds of schools compete and, over time, the successful ones will end up taking over the premises of the unsuccessful. As with economic policy, so with education policy. Trust to the wisdom of crowds.