For three days running, from 14-16 September, The Guardian newspaper gave over front-page space and more inside to a special report by Nick Davies on the British schooling system. Nick Davies, 1998 British Reporter of the Year, specialises in writing on social issues and crime and recently published Dark Heart: a journey into the hidden society of crime and poverty in the UK which comes with a recommendation from Jack Straw as ‘required reading…it will shock many to the quick that all this could be happening under their noses’. SUSAN DAVIDSON reviews Nick Davies’ report.
What is happening in British schools is also happening under peoples’ noses, is in fact happening to millions of people, children, their parents, teachers and others. The shock is that the Guardian newspaper decided to give the articles so much space and the writer so much of a chance to tell it like it is.
The fatal flaw at the heart of our education system
Nick Davies concludes that the ‘fatal flaw’ responsible for failing schools is poverty. ‘Every teacher knows it’, he says and there was a time ‘when every government minister admitted it’. The main thrust of his articles is to explain how the ‘banal reality’ that ‘the single factor which more than any other determines a school’s performance is its intake’ has been covered up, ignored and denied. Nick Davies shows that poverty is officially rejected as an explanation of different educational performances. He also traces the battery of bureaucratic and ideological attacks on the school system that have actually made it more difficult to provide a decent schooling system for the poorest children. Indeed, it was exactly at the moment when child poverty was rising dramatically that legislation was introduced to make conditions at school worse for poor children. This confirms what we have consistently argued in this paper, that capitalism is unable to offer a decent education for all children and that, increasingly, quality education for middle-class children can only be achieved at the expense of working-class children.
Nick Davies interviews former Conservative Minister of Education Kenneth Baker, who worked closely with Mrs Thatcher to introduce the 1987 Education Act. This act would reverse a series of developments that had taken place during the postwar boom and expansion of education. By introducing the National Curriculum and Local Management of Schools, he had two weapons with which to discipline teachers and local education authorities. Schools would have to conform to national standards or fail, and schools would have to ‘market’ themselves to gain funding because the money would go with the children. By these two means the national move towards comprehensive secondary schools was unwound. Today most are only ‘comprehensive’ in name. Schools with a ‘balanced’ intake of pupils are rare and secondary schools have been rapidly polarised into poor ‘failing’ schools and middle class or better-off ‘successful’ schools.
Under the cloak of ‘parental choice’, Thatcher/Baker set up city technical colleges (CTCs), not because they were proven educationally sound but in order to create the illusion of a wider ‘market’ for the consumer (parents). The creation of extra attractive schools led to a downward spiral for schools in working class areas which were ‘named and shamed’ in published league tables of exam results. Middle-class parents chose more successful schools which grew ever richer in facilities and resources, thereby increasing academic performance even further.
Kenneth Baker tells Nick Davies that he and Thatcher knew perfectly well what would be the result of their education ‘reforms’ of the 1980s. He says ‘I hoped it would lead to poorer schools literally having to close’. Baker and Thatcher deliberately set out to isolate schools in solidly poor working class areas, starve them of funds, shrink their numbers and create ‘sink’ schools. All blame would be put on ‘progressive’ inner-city teachers, the teaching unions, inadequate parents and lack of discipline. The only measure of a successful school would be academic results, and those who argued that school should offer more were dismissed as ‘trendy’. The only explanation for educational failure would be the same: lazy parents, children and teachers. Poverty, inadequate resources, large classes, overworked teachers, English as a second language, poor transport, bad environment, overcrowded homes, lack of sports facilities, high unemployment among school leavers – all these were to be dismissed as ‘excuses for failure’. It is this view that New Labour, under Education Minister David Blunkett, took on board lock, stock and barrel after the election that brought it to government after 18 years of Tory rule.
Readers will have noticed something significant missing from the Baker/Thatcher/Blair/Blunkett plan. If poor schools are to close, where will the children go? The answer of course is that most schools do not close and that the specially-created poor schools for children of the poor make up the 40% of secondary schools which are said by Ofsted to fall below the required standard.
The number of children living in poverty in Britain has trebled since 1979 to a point where a third of children — more than 4 million — now live below the poverty line. British levels of pupil failure are higher than in most of the rest of the developed world and levels of child poverty are also higher than in most of the rest of the developed world. According to official Treasury figures Britain has higher child poverty levels than even Greece or Portugal. The correlation between GCSE examination results and indices of poverty as measured by free meals etc is almost 100%. The poorer the child, the worse the results; the better off, the more successful. This is shown to have been proved by Nick Davies from research in Sheffield and many other sources have come to the same conclusion as regular readers of Education Notes in this newspaper will know. Yet ‘Poverty is no excuse’ is still the official line of the labour government.
It is the denial of the effects of poverty on the family and the institution of school that gives so much power to the Office of Inspection and to Chris Woodhead the Chief inspector of Ofsted. Inspectors walk in and make judgements. They use notions of progress and attainment in a total vacuum. Eton School passes its Ofsted with a good report, Grim Street Secondary fails. No allowance is made for the ‘single factor which more than any other determines a school’s performance — its intake’. Nick Davies’ articles show how this apparently empty and stupid inspection procedure — ‘the weird world of bogus facts’ — is a political strategy that has been designed to cover up the class-ridden nature of the state provision of schooling. The government has refused to fund a decent education system for all children. It adds to those children who are already economically advantaged by providing well-resourced schools, and denies necessary facilities to those disadvantaged children who are most in need. Poverty and working class hardship are ever more a feature of Britain, but despite talk of ‘social exclusion’ the Labour government is in denial about the effects of poverty on children.
Like the Tories, the Labour Party is taking benefits from the poor, including decent schooling, and lavishing them on its middle-class voters. At least Guardian readers cannot pretend they do not know what a shabby deal has been made as payment for the ever-increasing educational attainments of middle-class children.
Attacks on teachers continue
Of the many teachers I have spoken to about the article, all say ‘at last, someone is telling the truth about how it is’. Most of the massive correspondence that Nick Davies’ articles have generated in the Guardian newspaper are in agreement with what he says. Many add that the situation is much worse than he portrays in failing schools.
Most teachers add that they have been burdened with unnecessary and bureaucratic work which diverts their time and energies from actually teaching and helping the most disadvantaged children. Only a few, however, have conceded that teachers mostly agreed to adopt the new measures and were won over to view themselves with a new importance when the National Curriculum was introduced. That children are now tested at the ages of three, seven, 11, 14 and 16 years is only possible because teachers have accepted that it is the right thing to do. Those who now find themselves teaching in the poorest inner-city and deprived rural areas now regret bitterly that the comprehensive school has disappeared and they are left to impose a poor imitation of a middle class education on working class children.
There has been a lot of money in teaching in recent years. Special allowances of £2,000 have been on offer to teachers to implement all the new methods and teachers have aped being ‘managers’ and conformed to government and Ofsted initiatives willingly. As an inevitable result of this teachers now face the introduction of ‘payment by results’. This will add divisiveness to an already divided workforce and see the introduction of a permanent, ‘career’ layer of teachers and cheaper contracted teachers. There will be a significant struggle this autumn over ‘payment by results’ in the teachers’ unions. It can be seen as the last stage of the attack on the comprehensive school and could develop into an important fight against the New Labour government.
FRFI 151 October / November 1999
