Politics

Why have London's schools got better?

A new study forces commentators to re-assess their view on the capital's success

September 30, 2015
Paddington Academy, London. © Photo By View Pictures/UIG via Getty Images
Paddington Academy, London. © Photo By View Pictures/UIG via Getty Images
Read my piece from January on the London Schools Revolution

Britain's capital is a fantastic place to go to school. Every day, teachers across London, and particularly inner London, work with some of Britain's most disadvantaged children and help them achieve results which are nothing short of remarkable. This year, a Department for Education analysis showed that Mossbourne Academy in Hackney and the Grey Coat Hospital in Westminster outperformed many of the country's leading private schools in terms of A level results. Experts talk excitedly of a "London effect:" the boost to results a child earns from studying in London compared to a contemporary elsewhere, all else being equal.

This wasn't always the case—London was once a byword (perhaps too much so) for poor standards and unsafe classrooms. Middle class parents wrung their hands at the thought of dispatching little Jeremy or Alicia to the crumbling old buildings down the road. Many poorer families had to abandon hope of a more prosperous or successful future for their children. The story of London's educational improvement stretches back—depending on who you ask—somewhere between about 20 and 15 years and has been obsessively analysed by educationalists, journalists and politicians keen to replicate this success elsewhere. Earlier this year, I published a long piece in the print magazine looking at the possible explanations for what happened.

Today, the London School of Economics (LSE) has put out a new piece of research which confounds many researchers' views. Most existing explanations for London's improvement fall into one of two camps. Many think some combination of the policies enacted on the city by Tony Blair's capital-obsessed administration got things going. Chief among these is the "London Challenge," a set of measures which sought to get schools and education authorities sharing their knowledge and improving leadership. Others think that London's vast ethnic minority population (children of relatively recent immigrants usually do better than those of white Britons) has driven the city's success. The new study reckons that's all wrong. So how much do we need to revise our opinion, and what can we learn?

The researchers acknowledge that London's disadvantaged pupils are much less likely to be white British than those elsewhere, and that this partly explains why the capital's poorest students are more likely to do well than similar kids around Britain. But, they say, this doesn't explain the fact that this "London effect" has got bigger over time: the composition of London's disadvantaged pupils has remained fairly consistent.

They also say that the credit can't be laid entirely at the door of the last Labour government. "The basic facts documented here show that the improvement in the performance of disadvantaged pupils in London stretches back to the mid-1990s," the report concludes—back in the days when Tony Blair was saying "education education education" but wasn't yet in a position to do anything about it. They paint a more complex picture of gradual, incremental improvement in primary and secondary schools stretching further back than Tony Blair's rise to power. In common with an IFS analysis released last year, the researchers also believe that improvements in attainment at primary school drove a lot of the improvement later on, despite much of the last government's policy being focused on secondary schools.

So what should we take from this? Is everything we know useless? Not entirely. The researchers speculate—though cannot yet prove—that part of the explanation for that complex improvement in schools was the abolition of the Inner London Education Authority, a body which used to run education in much of the capital, in 1990. This transferred control of education to London's boroughs, and gave them freedom to experiment and come up with solutions tailored to each area. Advocates for the London Challenge, including those involved in running it, have always insisted to me and others that the key to its success was in-depth local knowledge and encouraging teachers to innovate and then share the results of that innovation.

If today's study is correct then we need to look further back than we thought for the moment when London's improvement started. But it doesn't mean we should completely discount the work of the last government. In helping London schools to work together and encouraging them not to tolerate failure, they may have ensured that the surge of excellence in the capital grew and developed rather than dying out. The story of London's schools has always been complex, and driven by a desire for—and commitment to—change at every level of the schools system. Today's report makes that picture more nuanced, but the key lessons about the importance of collaboration, the role of accountable local government and how to work effectively with talented ethnically diverse pupils remain unchanged.