When Tony Blair, on the cusp of power, told party conference that his three priorities were “education, education, education,” John Major quipped that he had the same three priorities but not necessarily in the same order. Fifteen years after Blair left office, some random remarks by Rishi Sunak about more students studying maths until 18 don’t amount to one dose of education, let alone three.
Sunak’s plea for compulsory lessons in the subject until 18 is a pipe dream because there is neither the curriculum structure in place nor the teachers to deliver it. There is a chronic shortage of maths teachers, with recruitment well below even the reduced targets put in place to disguise the extent of the shortfall.
As for structure, with youth apprenticeship numbers pitifully low, further education squeezed, an unreformed system of narrow choice of typically three or four A-levels for academic students, and the reform of vocational qualifications (to introduce so-called “T-levels”) a total fiasco, there would no prospect whatever of making Sunak’s compulsory maths policy a reality even if there were enough teachers. The failure of George Osborne’s apprenticeship levy to fund new youth apprenticeships is a deep scandal which has yet to be addressed.
Meanwhile, there are national teachers’ strikes of a kind not seen since the 1980s, and a new militancy in the mass teachers’ union—the National Education Union—which will bedevil school reform for years to come.
Underpinning the Blair revolution in education was a transformation in education funding levels, which doubled in real terms between 1997 and 2010. The academies and school management revolution of the Blair decade was built around “investment for reform”, and without the investment there wouldn’t have been the reform. Since 2010, the main concern of headteachers has been survival in a world of constant real-terms budget cuts—of which the largest is yet to come, when schools have to cope with an eventual teachers’ pay settlement far in excess of the capacity of schools to fund it.
There is little chance of this funding gap being filled. Sunak’s funding priority for young people is preschool childcare, not schools. Childcare and the continued “triple lock” on pension increases are the Tories’ sops to marginal Middle England, together with efforts to assuage an NHS funding crisis worsened by its own strikes, lengthening waiting lists and burgeoning pay settlements.
The Blair reform to introduce tuition fees for higher education—thereafter trebled to £9,000 by Cameron—has enabled universities to thrive despite a decade of underfunding for state education. As the originator of today’s tuition fees scheme, I envisaged private fees as the icing on the cake. Now they are the cake itself, but at least that particular cake continues to expand. Science funding has also fared better than school funding, which has helped universities.
The best bits of today’s education system are the legacy of Blairite “investment and reform”, particularly the expanded universities system and the new generation of school academies in deprived areas. Sunak has no credible policies to enhance the education and training system. Just some musings about maths teaching which don’t add up.
