Ruth Kelly exits right and Alan Johnson becomes minister of state for education in Blair’s springtime shuffle. He inherits a system that is increasingly fragmented, chaotic and privatised. The Labour government makes serious claims for its ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda but still the best guarantee of doing well in school is to be born wealthy. Recent research shows that only 5% of pupils in the country’s top 200 schools are from poor homes compared with a national average of 15%. Currently 59% of better-off children gain five good GCSEs compared with 30% of poor pupils.
In the ‘in’ tray
Immediate business for Alan Johnson includes the following.
1. To steer an education bill through parliament that has more support from Tory than Labour MPs.
2. To make sense of the aforementioned bill and its contradictions. Schools must be independent, yet collaborate; local authorities must provide children’s services but through privately-run institutions; parents must be empowered but are not allowed to be school governors.
3. He must get the sponsors to hand over the cash. Only four out of 27 schools in the flagship programme have so far received the full £2 million payment from the new ‘owners’ of the schools.
4. To get head teachers to apply for Trust School status. At present only 26 out of 26,000 schools have shown an interest in breaking away from local education authorities to be-
come independent, autonomous state schools.
Head teachers in interesting times
How exciting to be a head teacher at this moment. Des Smith was arrested in the early hours of Thursday 12 April on suspicion of being in breach of the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act. Smith, head teacher and adviser to the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) had boasted to an undercover reporter (see FRFI 189) that a £10 million sponsorship of a Trust or Academy school could result in a seat in the House of Lords. Others have been fingered: Sir Cyril Osborne the wealthy businessman chair of SSAT, Andrew Adonis, schools minister and David Miliband, previous schools minister. We are informed that police visits have been made to 10 Downing Street and investigations continue.
Meanwhile there were fireworks at the annual conference of the National Association of Head Teachers in April. No government ministers or civil servants attended so the heads sent out the message, ‘Please inform the chief puppet master our strings are no longer for the pulling’. They pledged to end league tables for 11-year-olds by guerrilla action, namely asking parents to keep the kids at home on the day of the SATS exam. They took a stand on learning methods, ‘Cohorts of clones reciting synthetic phonics ignores the different ways children learn’. Watch out, Alan Johnson, the head teachers are really fed up.
FRFI 191 June / July 2006
