Ditch the dogmas, Ed

So children’s secretary Ed Balls wants to know why, despite putting unprecedented amounts of money into education, we still have failing schools and children who have been failed by our system.

I can tell him. And I can tell him what to do about it.

The government put in enough money. It could have solved the problem if spent wisely. But instead, the government tacked on a set of outdated political dogmas, requiring schools to jump through doctrinal hoops. The money still did some good, but not as much as it could have done.

So the trick is to uncouple the money from the dogmas, to retain the former, and throw the latter on the fire. Here are the three crucial dogmas that did the damage.

First, the dogma that ultimate control of schools must be wrested away from the parents, teachers and local council representatives who used to run governing bodies, and handed over to a company, church, or other external body, usually with no particular relationship to the area. Trust schools changed the balance on governing bodies to the detriment of local people, and academies went the whole hog, providing the sponsor with an inbuilt majority on every governing body (as shown in my book The Great City Academy Fraud.)

Now, it is simply not true that the local people who use the school are less able to make a success of it than a body like the United Learning Trust, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Church of England which is the biggest academy sponsor, or Sir Peter Vardy, the evangelical Christian car dealer who is in the top few academy sponsors. And the proof is in the result. Despite absorbing many times as much public money as other schools, academies do not do particularly well, often no better than the cash-starved schools they replace.

Second, the dogma – especially close to Lord Andrew Adonis – that we need to separate out brainy kids from thick ones at an early age. This is why many areas, like Kent, still have the eleven plus exam, and why trust schools and academies were given the power to select ten per cent of their intake.

This dogma is only sustained by a lordly disregard of the facts. We know that those who fail the eleven plus are overwhelmingly those from poor households, and that the schools they go to are known locally as schools for failures. And therefore, we know that selection embeds failure and makes it hereditary.

And third, the dogma that there is nothing the public sector can do which the private sector cannot do better. Therefore if we have a school in a poor area – say, for example, the Isle of Sheppey – then the way to improve it is to get a very expensive private school – Dulwich College, to pick an example at random - to come in and show them how it’s done. The fact that no one at Dulwich College has ever seen a class like the ones you get on the Isle of Sheppey has not previously occurred to policymakers.

Get rid of the dogmas, Ed, and watch things get better.