A DAMNING LESSON FOR LABOUR

For decades, Left-wing dogma has been ruinous for school children. Now an ex-Labour minister has the courage to condemn its insidious legacy

Like so many parents, i am obsessed by schools. So when i discovered former Labour minister, Alan Johnson, had a new BBC radio series, The Secret History Of A School, i made a mental note to tune in.

The first episode went out yesterday on Radio 4. And having listened to previews of the other episodes, i have come to two conclusions.

One, which will be no surprise, is that Mr Johnson, a working- class London boy who was orphaned at 13, attended grammar school, worked as a postman and went on to become a Home Secretary and education Secretary of conspicuous decency, is a great loss to British politics. He ought really to be leading the Labour Party.

The second will probably come as little surprise either, except to educationalists, self-styled progressives and columnists at the Guardian. it is that, for all the changes in British life over the last century, the basis of a good school is very simple.

What matters are the Victorian virtues of order, discipline, ambition and hard work. And when you lose sight of them, as so many state schools did in the Sixties, the result is disaster.

All this will probably strike many readers as obvious. But rarely has any series, especially on the often hand-wringingly liberal Radio 4, made the point so honestly.

At the heart of Mr Johnson’s series is one school in Camberwell, South London, now occupied by the Ark All Saints Academy.

The first school on that site, however, was St Michael’s and All Angels. Opened in 1884, it was an overtly charitable endeavour, designed to educate the very poorest children in the capital.

Struggle

Like many of today’s faith schools, which are heavily oversubscribed by parents desperate to find an ambitious environment for their children, St Michael’s was an unashamedly religious enterprise, backed by the National Society for Promoting the education of the Poor in the Principles of the established Church.

in many ways it faced an uphill struggle. Then as now to some degree, Camberwell was one of London’s most deprived neighbourhoods.

Many children had no shoes; most could barely read and write. Yet St Michael’s prospered. Discipline was strict, with beatings with the cane and the slipper common. But children were given medals if they did well, and many remembered their school days very fondly.

So far, so good, then. But in World War ii the Nazis dropped a bomb on St Michael’s, and by the time it reopened in 1956, the educational ethos had begun to change.

Although the Fifties were the heyday of grammar schools, St Michael’s was an early example of that increasingly fashionable phenomenon, the giant mixed-ability comprehensive.

At this point, Alan Johnson’s series takes a depressing turn. To use his own words, a culture of ‘low expectations’ had seeped into British education, fuelled by a misconceived ethos of liberal, utopian egalitarianism.

By the Sixties, authority was crumbling. As a new generation of Left- wing teachers arrived, ‘standards’ were seen as taboo.

By the early Seventies, the school had been rebranded as Archbishop Michael Ramsey comprehensive, with new buildings and a new ethos of experimental, ‘ progressive’ informality. it is clear from Johnson’s account that some teachers were undoubtedly talented. But discipline was worse than ever.

Some teachers smoked with their pupils. Clever children felt isolated and intimidated; one interviewee describes the school’s ethos as ‘the survival of the fittest’.

it is, of course, a depressingly familiar story. indeed, some London schools in the Sixties and Seventies were worse.

Notorious

The most notorious example was William Tyndale Primary School in islington, where a small cabal of ultra-trendy hard-Left teachers allowed the children to play table tennis instead of attending lessons, and used games of Monopoly to teach them ‘how to undermine capitalism’.

Since, even today, Jeremy Corbyn’s cult never cease to inveigh against grammar schools, faith schools, academies, old- fashioned discipline and high expectations, the series is a salutary reminder of what went desperately wrong.

And it is also a reminder that the people who suffered were the poorest children. The pupils at Archbishop Michael Ramsey were a case in point. Many were the children of Caribbean immigrants, who wanted them to have a traditional education. instead, they were abandoned to sink. Attendance was awful; racial tensions ran high. Gang violence in the surrounding streets seeped into the school corridors. Some teenagers took drugs in the toilets. Others became embroiled in brawls at the bus stop. And in 2007 the life of the school reached a dreadful nadir with the murder of young Michael Dosunmu.

But the series ends on a high note. For in a telling lesson for today’s politicians, the school was saved by a return to its original principles.

The old establishment was shut down, and in 2014 a new establishment, Ark All Saints, opened on the site. And in an irony of which Johnson is clearly well aware, Ark All Saints has returned to the Victorians’ Christian ethos.

it is part of the Ark Network, a chain of Christian academies educating 26,000 teenagers in some of the most deprived areas in the country.

With its firm religious principles, smart uniforms and high expectations ethos, it is a temple to the old-fashioned values of the academy movement.

The walls are decorated with inspirational quotations, many from the Bible. The children wear old-fashioned uniforms. The teachers enforce strict discipline, and expect high standards.

Of course some things have changed. Ark All Saints places a greater emphasis on pastoral care than on punishment, for example. But Johnson’s series is a reminder that the principles underpinning a decent education have never changed. Children need a degree of discipline, leavened with kindness. There is no doubt our state schools have made great strides in recent years, thanks not least to reformers such as Michael Gove and Mr Johnson himself. But the battle is far from over.

Threat

For what Mr Johnson does not mention is that academies like Ark All Saints are facing a deadly threat. Jeremy Corbyn has promised that if Labour win power, he will ban future academies, scrap free schools and grammar schools, and take all existing academies back into full state control.

in effect, Mr Corbyn wants to turn back the clock to the state-mandated ‘progressive’ chaos of the Seventies. And as so often, he and his friends do not care whom they hurt, and how many children’s lives they blight, in pursuit of their perverted ideological ambitions.

No wonder, then, that in an interview yesterday, Alan Johnson admitted that he does not want Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister.

For as his radio series shows, the casualties would not merely include Britain’s wealth creators, savers, homeowners and taxpayers. They would also include the children betrayed by Mr Corbyn’s dogmatic hatred of authority, order and high achievement.

We have been down that road before. We should know better than to do it again.