Labour outlined some big ideas today—you might have heard them, in between all the shouting about pink buses and "dodgy" language choices. Ed Miliband went back to his old north London comprehensive to outline what a Labour government would do for your kids.
There were headline announcements, like the decision to protect schools spending in real terms and a new cap on some primary school class sizes. But another important aspect of Labour's plan is Miliband's pledge of a new "challenge" programme for each local area to get its schools working together and rapidly improve them.
As Miliband acknowledged in his speech, this is inspired by a programme called the London Challenge, which between 2003 and 2011 unleashed a series of policies targeted at raising standards in the capital's schools, particularly its worst-performing ones. I wrote about London's schools revolution in the last issue of Prospect: the city has seen an incredible turnaround in education over the past decade or so. That isn't totally thanks to the London Challenge, but it's widely acknowledged that the programme was a pretty good thing. For example a Centre for London report on London's success cites it as among the key factors in the city's educational improvement.
Miliband's is a pleasingly ambitious idea, and comes on the back of calls for local challenges in regions like Yorkshire. Education is a key battleground for politicians, with more voters naming it as a fairly important or very important subject in election news coverage than immigration in a recent BBC/Populus poll. But will Labour's challenge idea work?
Tim Brighouse, one of the architects of the London Challenge, told me last year that an important part of planning the programme was the extent to which it took into account specific local factors. For example, recruiting good teachers—and getting them to stay—was a particular problem for London at the start of the millennium, so the programme made that a priority. Each region of England and Wales will have its own difficulties—we might point to extremist infiltration scares in Birmingham as an example of a regional problem which doesn't exist in, say, Kent. Anyone setting up a challenge programme would need to study its region in detail and base their design on the problems they saw.
That might well be covered, you'd hope, by another part of Labour's plan—every school is to be held accountable to a new, local "director of standards." These will have a remit to drive improvement in all schools in their area. As parents will be able to call them in when they're worried about their child's school, they'll be kept up to date with specific regional issues. But, while they'll have the knowledge, the question is whether they'll have the talent to use it right. In academic studies into the success of the London Challenge, people who were involved in the programme cite the excellent leadership of Coles and Brighouse as a key reason for the success of the programme. When I was researching my piece, many senior educationalists also pointed to the talent and intelligence of Stephen Twigg, a schools minister in 2004 and 2005, as being crucial. It's not yet clear how many directors there will be, but if it's more than a few it will be very difficult to recruit really talented leaders for the role, especially those in the less-appealing areas which need them most.
Read more on education:
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The Department for Education needs to open up
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An important aspect of the challenge model is its emphasis on getting schools to work together. In the early stages of the London Challenge, particularly good or innovative teachers were sent to other schools to work with them and share their ideas. Top heads took on advisory roles at struggling schools. That's easy to arrange in a city, particularly one with good transport links. A half hour trip on London underground's central line will take you from the East End to the West—two totally different areas where teachers will have developed different ideas they're bursting to share. In some parts of England where improvement is most needed, poor infrastructure might make that a tricky tactic. In Yorkshire, for example, where Ofsted identified a "poverty of expectation and poverty of aspiration" in schools in 2013, it might be hard to coax top teachers onto creaking old pacer trains for a marathon trek around the county.
Britain's schools need this sort of boost. At the moment they're woefully uneven—according to an FT analysis, as of 2013 a child living in Westminster and attending state school could on average expect to do better in their GCSEs than a child from Hull by two grades in every subject. In the wake of Michael Gove's expansion of the academies programme, Ofsted have also expressed concern that schools are becoming increasingly isolated and under-observed. Encouraging schools to work together could help that.
But this idea will only work if there's a lot of allowance for independent thought, region-specific analysis and sheer hard graft. Given the track record of British politics, some people might not feel too hopeful about that. Miliband has today come closer to echoing Blair—who rode into office on the back of his "education, education, education" catch phrase—than possibly ever before, putting school standards at the heart of his election policy package. But, like Blair, he may find the full extent of his ambitions can't be realised.
